This is the weird reason you crave coffee without actually liking it

Jennifer Fabiano

In the United States alone, the coffee industry represents 1.6% of the total gross domestic product, according to the National Coffee Association USA. That means that the industry sees over $225 billion in revenue. Keep that in mind as we explain a new study that suggests that most coffee drinkers may not even like the coffee they reach for every day.

This new study suggests that those who drink three cups of coffee per day want the drink way more than they actually like their morning cup of Joe.

You may not even like coffee, even if you want it

The study, published in Journal of Psychopharmacology, suggests that your morning cup of coffee might actually be more addictive than you think. Paper author Nicolas Koranyi at the University of Jena, Germany and his colleagues found that most coffee drinkers have a want for coffee way more than they actually like the drink.

The difference between wanting and liking is that those who want it drink coffee to feed their addiction, while those who like coffee drink it for pleasure.

You can’t simply ask a person whether or not they want or like coffee because most people would not be able to accurately decipher between the two feelings. Instead, the research team designed a study that tapped into a participant’s implicitly held associations between wanting or liking coffee.

How do you measure how much someone likes coffee?

There was a total of 56 German students involved in the study. Half of the students consumed three or more cups of coffee per day and were considered “heavy” coffee drinkers. The remaining portion of the students either didn’t drink any coffee, or drank no more than one cup per day.

The participants were first asked to report on their levels of coffee withdrawal symptoms and then completed a computer-based assessment, which was split up into two sections: liking and wanting.

In the “liking” part of the assessment, the student saw a series of pictures of both coffee and juice, which were mixed in with other trials in which they saw positive or negative images, like a picture of puppies or a picture of a human skull, respectively. The students had to quickly identify whether a picture was of coffee or of juice or whether it was pleasant or unpleasant using two keys on the keyboard. For example, in one part of the study the right hand key was used to indicate that a picture was of coffee, but also to indicate that a picture was a pleasant one.

By comparing the speed of the participants’ responses when the coffee and pleasant pictures shared a key to the speed of response when the coffee and unpleasant pictures shared a key, the researchers were able to explore the extent to which the participant implicitly likes coffee.

On the other hand, during the “wanting” part of the assessment the participant again had to face a series of coffee and juice images. This time, the participant indicated whether the drink was “wanted” or “not wanted”. The pictures were again mixed with other images, this time of numbers or letters. The participants were asked to respond with “I want” key for numbers. If their response was correct, they would get a small amount of money. If they saw a letter on screen, they were asked to use the “not wanted” key. These trials were able to give an indication of how much a person implicitly wanted a cup of coffee.

Heavy coffee drinkers may not even like coffee

The results of the study revealed that heavy coffee drinkers have a strong wanting for coffee, one that is much stronger than light drinkers wanting for coffee.

“To our knowledge, the findings… provide the first demonstration of a dissociation between wanting and liking for coffee for heavy coffee drinkers,” the researchers wrote.

This dissociation between wanting and liking coffee suggests that there is an argument for caffeine to be placed in the same group as alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines when it comes to affecting the brain systems involved in motivational wanting processes.

“However, with regard to the underlying motivational and neurophysiological processes involved in dependence development, the main difference between highly addictive drugs (eg alcohol or cocaine) and substances with lower addictive strength (eg caffeine) may be mainly a quantitative than a qualitative one,” the researchers concluded.

Jennifer Fabiano is an SEO reporter at Ladders.

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