Correlation between tea use and personality

Correlation between tea use and personality Jaap Bierman, Berber de Vries, Alwin Zwets Media Technology programme, Leiden University Abstract
personalities of drinkers and non-drinkers, between tea and coffee users nor is there a correlation between tea use and the level of dubiousness. Agreeableness was measured using the Big Five Inventory and drinking of tea and coffee. This research clicks while making the questionnaire.
aims to compare personality traits of people that drink many cups of tea to that Keywords: Tea; Coffee; Personality; of those who drink few or none at all. The total amount of caffeine intake is not taken into account. Introduction
media, is that heavy tea users will be more agreeable and dubitable. The personality countries, drinking tea is a tradition that characteristics will be compared to those of Netherlands, tea is the second most drunk beverage on a yearly basis (CBS 1997). With its 100 liters of tea per person per year, it is second to coffee, which has a On a daily basis, most people prefer one backgrounds (mode = science education, n claims are made that people who drink tea = 42). The questionnaire consists of the big five personality test, questions on beverage use and cover questions to hide the In the past, several researches have been purpose of the test and to prevent socially done trying to find a correlation between drinking habits and personality. In these tests, tea and coffee were used in the same two or more cups of the certain beverage a category, that of caffeinated beverages. Richardson et al. (1995) compared caffeine To measure the personality traits of the that the first were more extroverted and Inventory (BFI) by Oliver P. John (1991).
had higher addiction scores. The addiction factor is also studies by Brice and Smith between personality and the use of caffeine drinks, alcoholic drinks and smoking. They dubiousness the number of clicks made in A Shapiro-Wilk test as well as a Skewness/ the questionnaire was recorded where the Kurtosis test was done to confirm that the Neither the first test (z = 0,24) nor the latter (chi2 = 0,10) did reject the Three participants were removed from the distributed. Finally, a variance-comparison tests showed that there is no significance clicks and one in the agreeableness factor, difference (c = 0,74) in the variances of the had to be discarded because the statistical two variables (1,05 and 0,99 respectively).
test used, a t-test, is not robust to outliers.
significant difference (
= 0,18) between the two groups. (μ1 = 3,35, μ2 = 3,25).
agreeableness of our often-tea drinking group (μ1) is higher than those who do not often drink tea (μ2).
The same testing is done for the amount of clicks, which could indicate more dubitability for tea drinkers.
needed be normalised in order to check if both data groups have a normal distribution and their variance is equally distributed.
Graph 2: Histogram of normalised clicks. AgreeablenessFor normality testing, first a histogram The analysis of the amount of click data revealed a huge positive skew, as can be seen in Graph 2. Also, both the Shapiro- Wilk test and the Skewness/Curtosis test rejected the normality assumption, which subsequently make a t-test invalid.
A variance-ratio test would be meaningless since the data is not normally distributed. This also holds for the t-test, which had an outcome of
= 0,08, with μ1 = 59,2 and μ2 = 57,8; thus the difference in clicks is non- Discussion
The results of this study reject the
hypothesis that heavy tea users are more consumers. Further research is required to determine whether there is no correlation between personality and tea at all, or that dubiousness. Also the correlation between coffee and personality can be investigated.
could be done concerning the ‘heavy use’ mark. While in this study this is stated as In following studies, a larger number of equal distribution in all social groups. This is to be sure that the investigated group is References
Brice, C. F., Smith, A. P. (2002) Factors associated with caffeine consumption. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition Vol. 53: p. 55-64 Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (1997), Nederlanders drinken minder koffie. http://bit.ly/a70FzK Last requested on Nov. 20th 2010 Digman, J.M. (1990), Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model. Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 41: p. 417-440 Hewlett, P., Smith, A. (2006) Correlates of daily caffeine consumption. Appetite Vol. 46: p. 97-99 John, O.P. (1991), The Big Five Personality Inventory. Eugene, University of Oregon.
Richardson, N. J., Rogers, Peter J., Elliman, N. A., O’Dell, R. J. (1995) Mood and performance effects of caffeine in relation to acute and chronic caffeine deprivation. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior Vol. 52: p. 313-320

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