Distal and proximal predictors of food personality: An exploratory study on food neophilia

‘Food-related personality traits’, or simply ‘food personality’, is emerging as a new stream of research that investigates individual differences in terms of food preferences. There have already been some attempts within the literature to conceptualize the multidimensional construct of food personality, and some outcomes of food personality have also been studied. However, we have limited knowledge of the psychological antecedents of food personality. In this short communication, using survey data from 1006 Turkish consumers, we conduct an exploratory study of the distal and proximal predictors (i.e. psychological traits and other individual differences stemming from traits) of one dimension of food personality, namely food neophilia. Our findings suggest that promotion focus and materialism are proximal predictors of food neophilia, and openness to experience, extraversion, need for cognition and need for touch are distal predictors that have indirect effects on food neophilia through promotion focus and materialism.