Taste in an Age of Endless ChoiceBy This Book:
About the Author
Tom Vanderbilt is visiting scholar at NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space. He is also a contributing editor to Wired (UK), Outside and Artforum.
Summary
Accounting
for Taste
Liking
things and disliking other things are among people’s dominant preoccupations.
People have strong favorites in food, colors, art and entertainment. Everyone
is just as definite, if not more so, about what they don’t like.
But
no one really understands why people like or don’t like something.
Theorists
from the philosopher Immanuel Kant to the executives at Netflix have wrestled
with the question: Why do people like what they like? For Netflix or Amazon,
the subject leads to another question: Is it possible to accurately predict
what someone will like? If businesses can refine predictive algorithms
sufficiently, can they then show customers more things they will like enough to
buy?
However,
you might not have a definitive answer you could share with a retailer about
why you prefer Ravel to Radiohead. Liking is a complex activity involving how
the brain directs perception, the human proclivity for perceiving patterns, and
myriad internal and external influences, including other people’s opinions, the
group you are in and your own expectations.
“Without a grand theory, it is not hard to envision ‘favorites’ as easily understood, cheaply acquired tokens of identity, ways of
asserting yourself in the world and understanding others, of showing you are both like and unlike other people.”
“We often do not seem to know what we like or why we like what we do.”
“Liking
Is Learning”
Aside
from a predilection for sweetness and an aversion to bitterness, few tastes
seem innate. Even people who suffer a “biological sensitivity” to certain
foods, such as being allergic to dairy products, don’t necessarily dislike
those foods.
Most
tastes are “acquired.” You learn to like something through repeated exposure to
it. Your brain’s “default” setting is to dislike anything you don’t understand.
Arriving at this dismissal is quick work for your brain.
“In the 19th century, taste went from
philosopher’s rumination to social obsession.”
“We actually seem predisposed to be more
acutely aware of what we do not like than of what we like.”
“In an infinite realm of choice, our choices
often seem to cluster by default toward those we can see others making (or away
from those we sense too many are choosing).”
“Our preferences are riddled with unconscious
biases, easily swayed by contextual and social influences.”
Psychology
professor Paul Locher found that study subjects could glean the “gist” of a
painting after 50 milliseconds of exposure. During that brief moment, viewers
could discern the colors and describe the overall form of the composition. In
addition, it took only that fraction of a second for them to determine whether
they liked the picture. Yet, this “gut reaction” may not be a sound indicator
of how you will feel about the painting in the long term. You can grow to like
something you initially hate.
You
acquire a taste for something when, through repeated exposure, you gain
“fluency.” This refers to an acquired ability to process what you were unable
to make sense of on first viewing. Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine:
It rejects or sounds an alarm about things it can’t fit into a familiar
pattern. This happened when people first saw the unorthodox design of the
Sydney Opera House. Its singular shape didn’t fit the patterns they previously
associated with buildings. But with repeated viewings, people gained fluency
with the novel pattern and grew to like it.
You
Like What You Expect to Like
Your expectations about whether
you will like something are a reliable predictor of whether you will. Consider
the US Army’s efforts to make “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs) palatable to
soldiers in the field. There was no point packing nutrients into MREs if
soldiers wouldn’t eat them. The Army had to confront soldiers’ expectations
about the food, considering the history of horrible MREs that included such
items as “desiccated vegetables” – which soldiers habitually called “desecrated
vegetables.” Making food palatable involves more than taste. Other factors
include its appearance and the expectations it arouses. In one study, soldiers
liked the corn in MREs more when researchers served it in a Green Giant
package.
The
marketing of Crystal Pepsi in the early 1990s illustrates the hazards of
contravening expectations. Pepsi aimed to capitalize on a trend for clear
products – such as clear dishwashing detergent – but Crystal Pepsi flopped. Its
clear appearance created an expectation that conflicted with its cola-like
taste.
The
Need to Categorize
One
of the preconditions for liking something seems to be how easily people can
“categorize” it. Placing a work of art in a category provides a “way to think
about it.” With the proper classification, you can like something that you
believe is bad – just label it “camp.” When you call something “camp,” you look
at it with a different slant and judge it by different criteria than you’d
apply to a masterwork.
Context
The
brain requires a context in which to understand and judge what you see. Your
brain is not merely passive; it takes an active role in creating the images of
the world you perceive. Drawing on memory, the brain makes predictions about
what you can expect to see in a given context. Even the ability to recognize
art as art depends on context. Museums create a context around the objects you
view. By putting an object in their collection, they identify it as art worthy
of regard.
If
you hang a painting on the side of a busy city street, as a Belgian television
channel did as an experiment, passersby turn out to be unlikely to recognize it
as art. Because of the context, you may not even register that you’ve seen a
painting. On a city street, the brain does not seek art; it ignores as much of
the sensory assault of city life as seems safe. In a museum context, you look
with different eyes, ready to study the images you encounter. This cognitive
shift has led to instances where gallery patrons mistook
“Art, rather than responding to or reflecting
innate prefer-ences, may actually succeed by tweaking them.”
“A favorite color is like a chromatic record
of everything that has ever made you feel good.”
a
fixture, such as a fire extinguisher, for a piece of modern art. In this frame
of mind, you notice stimuli you’d ordinarily ignore.
Museums
find that where they hang a painting will affect people’s involvement. In one
experiment in Switzerland, a museum’s staff moved a painting from the middle of
the room to a corner. Visitors’ interest plummeted. The degree to which
visitors will like a painting also varies depending on whether they view it
alone or with others. In a group, their liking can rise or fall depending on
the expressions on the faces of other viewers.
Social
Signals
In
his 1979 book Distinction, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued
that taste had eclipsed wealth as a marker of status in society. The films,
music or art you like, and how you talk about them, are “cultural capital”
identifying the segment of society to which you belong. What he called the
“dominant classes” preferred music such as Ravel’s Concerto for the
Left Hand, while the “popular classes” preferred Strauss’s The Blue
Danube. He found that architects in Paris liked Kandinsky, but
dentists preferred Renoir. Taste, Bourdieu theorized, is a way of signaling
your membership in a group. Feeling accepted as part of a group, whether of
punk rockers or vegans, is important to the human psyche. Preferences offer
ways to bond with like-minded people.
Among
the most potent indicators of your place in society is your preference in
music. In the past, a love for music such as Ravel was a reliable indicator of
a high status and good education. Today, with virtually every genre available
with a mouse click, highbrow listeners have adopted a new signaling strategy.
Instead of becoming aficionados of jazz or classical music, they have become
“omnivores” with interests in the widest possible palette of genres, even
enjoying those that highbrows once typically derided.
People
with lower education levels often adopt a “univore” mind-set, focusing on one
musical genre, like metal, that highbrows dislike. This identification with a
style offers fans a bond with others who feel similarly excluded from
higher-status society. The Insane Clown Posse is one of the most reviled bands
in popular music, but its fans are among the most devoted. “Juggalos,” as they
call themselves, see themselves a kind of family that offers acceptance through
a shared love of a critically scorned music act.
Outside
Influences
Taste
is hard to pin down because it’s susceptible to outside influences. In a
restaurant, your enjoyment of the food can change depending on the decor, the
style of music, the tableware, the time of day, how long you wait and how many
people are with you.
On social media, users can
exhibit what MIT management professor Sinan Aral calls “social influence bias.”
In one experiment, his team found that if the first response to a comment on
social media was an up vote, the following votes would be positive. An
interesting twist ensued when the first response was a down vote. Initially,
the subsequent responses were negative, but eventually a wave of positive votes
arrived to counterbalance the negatives. According to Aral, the initial up
votes or down votes influenced subsequent voters in different ways because
people are more accepting of positive responses, and find it easy to conform to
the majority opinion, but they are skeptical of negative responses.
Recommended
for You
When you browse Amazon or
Netflix, these businesses collect data on your every move and choice. Netflix
doesn’t care that much what you say you like – it tracks what you actually watch.
People often give a high rating to a film like Hotel Rwanda because they
believe they should like it or because doing so burnishes their self-image.
But, even so, they may watch action-adventure flicks most of the time. Since
Netflix’s goal is to keep you watching, it cares more about your actual
behavior than your self-image.
The
start-up Hunch.com attempts to correlate behavior and taste by surveying
millions of people on their preferences, attitudes, values and behavior. So
far, some 55 million people have answered its sometimes quirky survey
questions, such as “Do you swat flies?” Or “Do you think it’s okay to train
dolphins to do tricks?” The company compiles the results in a “taste graph”
that maps how certain preferences correlate to a seemingly frivolous collection
of behaviors. For instance, people who slice their sandwiches diagonally are
more likely to buy men’s Ray-Ban sunglasses. If you eat fresh fruit daily, you
are more likely to be aching to own a Canon EOS 7D camera.
“People want to feel that their tastes are not unique, yet they feel an ‘anxiety’ when told they are exactly like another person.”
“Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cogni- tive mechanism for managing sensory overload?”
“If all we did was conform, there would be no taste; nor would there be taste if no one conformed.”
Changing
Tastes
Although people regard their likes and dislikes as definite
and as a key part of their identities, tastes are subject to change. For
example, in the 18th century, art aficionados highly esteemed the now-obscure
painter Edwin Longsden Long. In 1882, Long’s painting The Babylonian
Marriage Market fetched a record price for a work by a living artist. At
the same time, a group of painters working in the new Impressionist style
endured critical mockery and public indifference. Today, almost no one remembers
Long, while work by Impressionists such as Renoir and Monet are among the
world’s most valuable works of art.
The
relationship between taste and novelty is an important element in changing
tastes. Every follower of fashion knows that novelty is a driving force behind
liking. But a little novelty goes a long way, and it’s most acceptable when
something familiar flavors it. Better-known elements make it easier to gain
fluency in an item’s novel aspects. Gaining fluency in a novel pattern is
enjoyable – you like that feeling, and so you like the thing that evokes it.
This is why you can grow to like a design you hated at first sight. The process
of changing taste also involves how people utilize taste to conform to their
chosen group while at the same time trying to preserve a feeling of
individuality.
Human culture thrives because people engage in “social
learning.” Human beings spread knowledge and taste by imitating each other. But
people also have a contrasting impulse to assert their independence and stand
out from the group. People who embrace a taste outside prevailing genres, such
as punk rock, enjoy a balance: They bond with a group and conform to its
tastes, but at the same time they enjoy the distinction of being in opposition
to the mainstream. If too many people embrace that taste, it becomes part of
the mainstream rather than a way to flaunt being different. You reassert your
individuality by embracing a novel taste, or a novel subgenre, that most people
don’t yet like.
