• Posted August 13, 2026

Sweet Tooth? It Could Be Shaping Your Decisions, Study Says

A taste for sweets — ice cream, candy, chocolates, pastries — might provide a window into the way you make decisions, researchers say.

People with a sweet tooth are more apt to make impulsive choices — but not necessarily because they are impatient, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Psychology.

Instead, these folks appear to be more interested in managing risk, seizing a smaller quick reward rather than not knowing for sure if a delayed reward will pay off or not, researchers found.

'We are used to thinking of impulsivity as an inability to delay gratification. However, our findings point to a different mechanism: choosing a smaller immediate reward may stem from a desire to avoid uncertainty rather than from a desire to receive a reward as quickly as possible,” lead researcher Anna Davidovich said in a news release. She’s a research assistant at the Center for Cognition & Decision Making at HSE University in Moscow.

In experiments involving 149 young adults, researchers compared their preference for sweets to how they performed on tasks assessing impulsive behavior.

Those with a sweet tooth were more likely to choose a smaller but guaranteed reward, and tended to prefer a smaller immediate reward over a larger delayed one, results showed.

However, when both the smaller and larger rewards involved a delay, they were more willing to wait for the larger one, researchers found.

Overall, impulsivity among sweet likers largely went away after researchers accounted for each person’s level of risk aversion, the study said.

The desire to avoid uncertainty among people with a sweet tooth could be linked to the brain’s opioid system, researchers said.

A desire for sweets is linked to the activity of receptors involved with both experiencing pleasure and assessing threats and uncertainty, the team said. People who love sweets might not only derive greater pleasure from rewards, but also might more intensely perceive potential losses.

“This changes our understanding of the nature of impulsive behavior,” Davidovich said.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more about impulse control disorders.

SOURCE: HSE University, news release, Aug. 11, 2026