Abstract: Taste is one of the indispensable feelings for human survival, and has substantially extended beyond the direct feeling of “tongue tip.” Taste affects individual perceptions and judgment of interpersonal relationship and ethics, and changes individual decision-making on risk-taking and consumption. Emotional intermediary, embodied metaphor, evolutionary, and social construction hypotheses are different perspectives used to explain the influence of taste on judgment and decision-making. The existing research has some limitations, such as individual differences in taste perception, difficulty in ensuring the validity of taste measurement, lack of unified research paradigm in taste experiment. Hence, future research should continue to verify the taste metaphor and apply it to the fields of sensory marketing and psychological therapy. The current study intensively analyzes taste from the aspects of physiology, psychology, and society, and discuses all facets of the mechanism and effects of taste on judgment and decision-making.

Key words: taste, judgment, decision-making, emotional intermediary hypotheses, embodied metaphor