People who love rugby eat lots of meat, love their country and worry about dying. Meanwhile, those who hate the national game are more likely to dabble with vegetarianism and think businesses should pay higher taxes.

These are just a few of the hundreds of intriguing discoveries made by Victoria University psychology professor Marc Wilson as he pored over responses from the 6000 New Zealanders who last month took part in the Sunday Star-Times BrainScan survey.

The online survey probed relationships between personality and politics, an area of social science where New Zealand punches well above its weight, says Wilson.

Questions covered everything from voting preferences to jelly-baby consumption habits and your opinions about how disgusting maggots are, and revealed all manner of things, including:

When asked to estimate the heights of John Key and Phil Goff, respondents let their politics sway them. National supporters guessed Key was taller; Labour voters guessed the opposite.

Act and National supporters are far keener on red meat, and less keen on their veges, than Green and Labour supporters.

On the thoroughly trivial matter of how you eat jelly-babies, the survey found that 5% of respondents ate them legs-first, 37% head-first, 30% all in one go, 26% never paid attention, and 1% wouldn't eat a lolly shaped like a person. Curiously, those 1% were likely to be socially conservative and had low incomes.

Analysing the results in full will keep Wilson busy for years, but in the meantime, it's curiously satisfying to learn that New Zealand First voters drink lots of tea and like country music, while Act voters are keener than average on smacking children and eating meat.

Click here for a more detailed analysis by Wilson.