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by Tom Vanderbilt

  One problem, raised in earlier chapters with food or music, is that we often do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things themselves. We may instinctively realize we will tire of our favorite food if we eat too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we could like something—if only we ate it more often. Another issue, notes Loewenstein, is psychological “salience,” or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers a rebate, the rebate is hugely salient; it might even have influenced the purchase. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the rebate goes unclaimed. When I was ten, what was salient in a car to me was that it be “cool” and fast. Not salient to me were monthly payments, side-impact crash protection, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the appearance of being in a midlife crisis.

  Even when we look back and see how much our tastes have changed, the idea that we will change equally in the future seems to confound us. It is what keeps tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have called this the “end of history illusion,” the idea that the present is a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.”

  In one experiment, they found that people were willing to pay more money to see their favorite band perform ten years from now than they were willing to pay to see their favorite band from ten years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old photo album, when you see an earlier picture of yourself and exclaim something like “Oh my God, that hair!” Or “Those corduroy pants!” Just as pictures of ourselves can look jarring because we do not normally see ourselves as others see us, our previous tastes, viewed from “outside,” from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. And yet your hairstyle per se was probably not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary taste. We say, with condescension, “I can’t believe people actually dressed like that,” without realizing we ourselves are currently living in what will be considered bad taste in the future.

  The people in the auction room in 1882 in London, gathered before Long’s painting, might well have thought that they were gazing upon the pinnacle of artistic achievement—and financial outlay—one that would continue to speak to them, and their successors, throughout the years. An important, popular artist, painting in a familiar style, with an epic work that spoke to current obsessions. The Impressionists? They were social misfits with weird ideas and few discernible skills. They were going nowhere.

  This evokes what I call the High School Popularity Problem. We are all aware of the radiant prom king, who excels at various sports, an alpha surrounded by his retinue of friends and would-be romantic partners. He seems poised for big things but eventually settles into a life of quiet inconsequence. Meanwhile, there is the terminally shy geek, prone to be picked on or aggressively ignored, a seemingly unaccomplished sort who goes on to change the world.

  There is a salience issue here. The things that the majority may tend to pay attention to in high school, the qualities that constitute popularity (contrived contests, cruel conformity, a small and captive audience), turn out to be poor predictors of success in the future. Someone who could see through those contextual blinders—the blinders that told us high school was some “end of history” moment—might be able to spot the “underachievers,” often so dubbed because they did not meet the narrow normative standards of high school. Perhaps they could sense some nascent spark, which simply needed the right outlet and audience, much the way a few shrewd art dealers saw there might be something, if only financial gain, in the Impressionists’ work, something that did not speak to a wide current audience but might speak to an audience in the future.

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  One of the reasons we cannot often predict our future preferences is, curiously, one of the things that makes those very preferences change: novelty. In the science of taste and preferences, novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one hand, we crave novelty, which virtually defines a field like fashion (“a field of ugliness so absolutely unbearable,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “that we have to alter it every six months”). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the women’s designer floor of the flagship store, “The first thing the customer asks when they come into the store is, ‘What’s new?’ They don’t want to know what was; they want to know what is.” How strong is this impulse? “We will sell 60 percent of what we’re going to sell the first four weeks the goods are on the floor.”

  We also, as we have seen, adore familiarity. “We like what we are used to,” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And yet if this were strictly true, nothing would ever change. There would be no new art styles, no new musical genres, no new products. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism’s role was in teaching people to like (and buy) new things. Producers drive economic change, he wrote, and consumers “are taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using.”

  Or, as Steve Jobs put it, “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” And even then, they still might not want it. Apple’s ill-fated Newton PDA device, as quaint as it now looks in this age of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably too new at the time of its release, anticipating needs and behaviors that were not yet fully realized. As Wired described it, it was “a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language.”

  So, novelty or familiarity? As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway point of some optimal U-shaped curve plotting the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he termed the “MAYA stage,” for “most advanced, yet acceptable.” This was the moment in a product design cycle when, Loewy argued, “resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in.” We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.

  Anticipating how much our tastes will change is hard because we cannot see past this inherent resistance. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty can be. Think back to the discussion of how we come to like foods we did not initially like. When you had your first sip of beer (or whiskey), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, “Where has this been all my life?” It was, “People like this?”

  We come to like beer, but it is arguably wrong to call beer an “acquired taste,” as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. “If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer!” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: It tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect. In a New Yorker profile, the music producer Rick Rubin recounted that when he first heard Pretty Hate Machine, the album by Nine Inch Nails, he did not care for it. But it soon became his favorite. Faced with something discordantly novel, “we don’t always have the reference points to absorb and digest it,” Rubin said. “It’s a bit like learning a new language.” The album, like the beer, was not an acquired taste, because he was not hearing the same album.

  Looking back, we can find it hard to believe we did not like something we now do. Current popularity gets projected backward: We forget that a now ubiquitous song like the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” was never a hit or that recently in vogue “antique” baby names like Isabella or Chloe, which seem to speak to some once-flourishing tradition, were never popular (Mittie or Virgie were more consistently liked names of the early twentieth century).

  It now seems impossible to imagine, a few decades ago, the scandal provoked by the now widely cherished S
ydney Opera House. The Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, was practically driven from the country, his name went unuttered at the opening ceremony, the sense of national scandal was palpable toward this harborside monstrosity. Not only did the building not fit the traditional form of an opera house; it did not fit the traditional form of a building. It was most advanced and unacceptable. It was as foreign as its architect.

  The truth is, most people probably did not know what to make of it, and our default setting, faced with an insecure unknown, is disliking. Frank Gehry, talking about his iconic, widely admired Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, admitted that “it took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually.” The architect Mark Wigley suggests that “maybe we only ever learn something when some form we think of as foreign provokes us—and we resist. But sometimes, many times, in the middle of the resistance, we end up loving this thing that has provoked us”—even if it is no longer the same “thing” it was when it first provoked us.

  Fluency begets liking. When shown images of buildings, architects have rated them as “less complex” than laypersons did; in other words, they “read” them more fluently, and the buildings seem less “foreign.” The role of the architect, suggests Wigley, is not to “give the client exactly what he was asking for”—in other words, to cater to current taste—but to “change the idea of what one can ask for,” or to project future tastes no one knew they had. No one said an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. The world changed around the building, in response to it, which is why, in the curious words of one architecture critic, “Utzon’s breathtaking building looks better today than ever.”

  A few decades from now, someone will inevitably look with dread upon a new building and say, “The Sydney Opera House, now there’s a building. Why can’t we build things like that anymore?” This argument—for example, “Why isn’t music as good as it used to be?”—reflects a historical selection bias, one colorfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. “Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”

  The only guarantee we have of taste is that it will change. Now let us look a bit more closely at exactly how.

  CONFORMIST DISTINCTION: ON WANTING TO BE DIFFERENTLY ALIKE

  In a 2011 sketch on the show Portlandia, the obsessive satirical catalog of the hipster mores of the Oregon city, an exaggeratedly posturing character known as Spyke—replete with “chin beard,” lobe-stretching disk earrings, and a fixed-gear bike—is shown walking past a bar. He sees some people inside, equally adorned with the trappings of a certain kind of cool, and gives an affirming nod. A few days later, he spies a clean-shaven guy wearing khakis and a dress shirt at the bar. “Aw, c’mon!” he hollers. “Guy like that is hanging out here? That bar is so over!” It only gets worse: He sees his straight-man nemesis astride a fixed-gear bicycle, partaking in “shell art,” and wearing a chin beard—all of which, he churlishly admonishes, is “over.” A year later, we see Spyke, freshly shorn of beard, wearing business casual, and having a banal conversation, perched in the very same bar that led off the whole cycle. The nemesis? He loiters outside, scornfully declaring the bar to be “over.”

  The sketch wonderfully encapsulates the idea of taste as a kind of perpetual motion machine. This machine is driven in part by the oscillations of novelty and familiarity, of hunger and satiation, that curious internal psychophysical calculus that causes us to tire of food, music, the color orange. But it is also driven in part by the subtle movements of people trying to be like each other and people trying to be different from each other. There is a second-guessing kind of struggle here, not unknown to strategists of Cold War–era game theory (in which players are rarely acting on “perfect information”). Or, indeed, to readers familiar with Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches, the mythical star-adorned creatures who suddenly ditch their decorations when they discover their rival plain-bellied counterparts “have stars upon thars.”

  That taste might move in the kind of ouroboros-like cycle that Portlandia hypothesized is not so far-fetched. A French mathematician named Jonathan Touboul identified a “non-concerted emergent collective phenomenon of looking alike trying to look different,” or what he called the “hipster effect.” Unlike “cooperative systems,” in which everyone might agree in a coordinated fashion on what decisions to make, the hipster effect occurs, he suggests, when people try to make decisions in opposition to the majority.

  Because no one knows exactly what other people are going to do next, and information can be noisy or delayed, there can also be periods of brief “synchronization,” in which nonconformists fail to be “disaligned with the majority.” Spyke, in reality, might have had to see several people doing shell art—maybe it even suddenly appeared at a store in the mall—before quickly packing it in. And because there are varying degrees of hipness, one person may choose to wade into a trend later than another, that person is followed by another, and so on, until, like an astronomical explorer chasing a dead star, there is nothing really there anymore.*1 As another modeling analysis put it, “The quest for distinctiveness can also generate conformity.”

  The Portlandia sketch actually goes well beyond taste and illuminates two central, if seemingly contradictory, strands of human behavior. The first is that we want to be like other people. “The social being, in the degree that he is social, is essentially imitative,” wrote the rather overlooked French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in his 1890 book The Laws of Imitation. Imitating others, what is known as “social learning,” is an evolutionary adaptive strategy; that is, it helps you survive, even prosper. While it is seen in other species, there are no better social learners than humans, none that take that knowledge and continue to build upon it, through successive generations.

  The sum of this social learning—culture—is what makes humans so unique, and so uniquely successful in spreading throughout the globe. As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich notes, humans, despite being more genetically alike than other primates, have foraged in the Arctic, harvested crops in the tropics, and lived pastorally in deserts—a wider range than all the other primates put together. This is not because we were meant to but because we learned to.

  In their book Not by Genes Alone, the anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson use the example of a bitter plant that turns out to have medicinal value. Our sensory system would interpret the bitter as potentially harmful and thus inedible. Instinctively, there is no reason we should want to eat it. But someone eats it anyway and sees some curiously beneficial result. Someone else sees this and gives it a try. “We take our medicine in spite of its bitter taste,” they write, “not because our sensory psychology has evolved to make it less bitter, but because the idea that it has therapeutical value has spread through the population.” It is like the primordial “first sip of beer” for an entire culture.

  People imitate, and culture becomes adaptive, they argue, because learning from others is more efficient than trying everything out on your own through costly and time-consuming trial and error. The same is as true for people now reading Netflix or TripAdvisor reviews as it was for primitive foragers trying to figure out which foods were poisonous or where to find water. When there are too many choices, or the answer does not seem obvious, it seems better to go with the flow; after all, you might miss out on something good.

  My favorite example of this comes from a study of Ugandan chimpanzees conducted by a pair of Scottish researchers. One chimp, an adult male they named Tinka, had almost completely paralyzed hands after he was caught in a hunter’s snare. He also had a chronic skin condition. Because he was not a high-ranking chimp, he could not rely on others to scratch him. So Tinka improvise
d: He grasped a vine with his foot and pulled it across his back, the way one would dry oneself with a towel.

  Clever stuff. Apparently, some juvenile chimpanzees thought so too: They began scratching themselves in the Tinka way, even though they had no need to. One of the researchers, Richard Byrne, told me the suggestion had been made that the chimps were mocking Tinka in some way, which he discounts: “That seems to imply a lot more theory of mind than I’m inclined to grant chimpanzees.” More likely, they did it simply to see what the point of it was, to see what they were missing. “Of course, there was no point,” Byrne said, “so they gave up that way of scratching in time.” Curiously, even the most arbitrary, nonfunctional behavior can spread. One day in 2010, at a chimp refuge in Zambia, researchers at the Max Planck Institute observed that a chimp they’d named Julie had started putting a single blade of grass in her ear. Unlike Tinka’s scratching mechanism, this seemed to have no purpose, even to Julie. And yet, not long after, most of the chimps of the group were seen also sporting ear grass.

  This sort of imitative behavior has often been seen as crude and a bit slavish, hence the negative connotation in English of the verb “to ape.” But no ape likes to ape more than humans do. In one compelling study, the researchers Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten had a human subject demonstrate, to chimps, the proper way to open a box containing a food reward. In some conditions, the box was opaque; in others, transparent. Some of the moves the human guide performed were necessary to open the box, while some were not. When the clear box was used first, and chimps had a better sense of what was going on, they discarded the irrelevant steps the human model was showing them. They did this even when they tried to open the opaque box; they had transferred the learning.