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Taste in an Age of Endless Choice
                                                                                                                   By 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

  “The power of liking or disliking, or what psychologists call ‘affect,’ should not be underestimated: It not only informs what we feel about something like art but influences how we see it.”

  

 “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.”

  “Just as our liking for a scent varies wildly if we are told it is good cheese versus dirty socks, our aesthetic and liking judgments are influenced by the category under which something has been placed.”

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.