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by Tom Vanderbilt

  NOVELTY VERSUS FAMILIARITY, CONFORMITY VERSUS DISTINCTION, SIMPLICITY VERSUS COMPLEXITY. These three oppositions, and the tension that exists within each of the pairs, go a great way toward explaining our liking, toward accounting for our tastes.

  DISLIKES ARE HARDER TO SPOT BUT MORE POWERFUL. We live in a positive world. The Power of Negative Thinking is not a best seller. Facebook does not allow users to not like things. We do not look for “negative feedback.” As much as we seek out positive experiences, however, it is our dislikes that register more powerfully. Our facial muscles work harder to express our dislike of food, there are many more words for negative emotions than for positive emotions, one negative review among a group of largely positive reviews carries more weight than one positive among a group of mostly negative reviews. Dislikes can reveal more about who you are than likes.

  ON ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE. Trying to explain, or understand, any one person’s particular tastes—including one’s own—is always going to be a maddeningly elusive and idiosyncratic enterprise. But the way we come to have the tastes we do can often be understood through a set of psychological and social dynamics that function much the same, from the grocery store to the art museum. The more interesting question is not what we like, but why we like.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE COLOR (AND WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE ONE)?

  People buy fewer black cars: See Meghan R. Busse, et al., “Projection Bias in the Car and Housing Markets,” Working Paper 18212 (Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2012).

  In one elegantly constructed: Because the puppets did not “see” which food the infants had preferred, the researchers speculated, infants were preferring puppets who seemed to actually “hold” those tastes, not the puppets that were merely “expressing” those tastes so as to gain favor in some way. See Neha Mehajan and Karen Wynn, “Origins of ‘Us’ Versus ‘Them’: Prelinguistic Infants Prefer Similar Others,” Cognition 124 (2012): 227–33. In another study, this effect disappeared when the puppets in question were shown to be “antisocial.” J. Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn, “Who Knows What’s Good to Eat? Infants Fail to Match the Food Preferences of Antisocial Others,” Cognitive Development 27 (2012): 227–39.

  Maddeningly, however: As Paul Rozin notes, “Surprisingly, parents, who share genes with their children and control most of the child’s environment for the early years of life, do not transmit their food and other preferences very well to their children. Parent-child correlations are in the range of 0 to .30 for food or music preferences.” Rozin, “From Trying to Understand Food Choice to Conditioned Taste Aversion and Back,” http://​w.​american.​edu/​cas/​psychology/​cta/​highlights/​rozin_​highlight.​pdf.

  “this delicate and aerial faculty”: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: Penguin, 2004), 63.

  “No significant behavior”: Gary Becker, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 49.

  “explain everything”: See Bryan Caplan, “Stigler-Becker Versus Myers-Briggs: Why Preference-Based Explanations Are Scientifically Meaningful and Empirically Important,” https://​ideas.​repec.​org/​a/​eee/​jeborg/​v50y2003​i4p391-​405.​html#​biblio.

  But the Rocky Mountains: See Paul Albanese, “Introduction to the Symposium on Preference Formation,” Journal of Behavioral Economics 17, no. 1 (1988): 1–5. Ernst Fehr and Karla Hoff also note that economists’ traditional view—describing the preferences of individuals, and the society that they will create, and “that preferences remain the same regardless of the society that emerges”—is demonstrably false. See Fehr and Hoff, Economic Journal 121 (Nov. 2011): f396–f412.

  Our tastes seem endlessly “adaptive”: Elster, of course, is talking about more than a taste for grapes. He writes, “The idea of sour grapes appears to me just as important for understanding individual behavior as for appraising schemes of social justice.” Woven throughout his book is the implicit question of when people do what they really want or only what seems possible in the current constraints of their lives. See Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The political scientist Michael Locke McLendon, in a worthwhile critique of Elster, suggests that Elster has mischaracterized the fox’s response to not getting the grapes: “[Elster] claims that the fox readjusts his attitude towards the grapes. More accurately, he is readjusting the world to fit his failed preferences. The fox still wants grapes—that fact has not changed. Rather, he rejects the particular grapes on the trellis that he was unable to reach. Unable to consume the only available grapes, he falsely attributes to them traits they do not have, i.e., they are sour.” See McLendon, “The Politics of Sour Grapes: Sartre, Elster, and Tocqueville on Emotions and Politics,” http://​ssrn.​com/​abstract=​1460905 or http://​dx.​doi.​org/​10.​2139/​ssrn.​1460905.

  Where economists tend: As Dan Ariely and Michael Norton note, we might think we are choosing something because it is the best, but we may be drawing upon a memory of past choices, which now seem as if they were consciously made but might in fact not have been: “We suggest that rather than being driven by hedonic utility, behavior is based in part on observations of past actions, actions that have been influenced by essentially random situational factors—such as the weather—but that people interpret as reflective of their stable preferences.” Ariely and Norton, “How Actions Create—Not Just Reveal—Preferences,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 16.

  Imagine the fox: Any number of studies have tried to sort out these dynamics, often by asking research subjects to rank a list of items, then choose their favorite, and then rerank the list. In theory, this could mean people liked an item more after they chose it (and disliked more what they didn’t choose); in other words, the choice drove the preference. But in one study, researchers argued that in a “free choice” experiment, rankings will naturally spread even as attitudes remain “perfectly stable.” They write, “While it may appear that participants became more fond of the higher ranked item after choosing it, in reality, participants were also ‘more fond’ of the higher ranked item before choosing it (so long as they eventually chose it). Thus, the spreading seen here, which would normally be mistaken for evidence of choice-induced attitude change, is better interpreted as evidence for the importance of choice information.” See M. Keith Chen and Jane L. Risen, “How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-Choice Paradigm,” Journal of Personal Social Psychology 99, no. 4 (Oct. 2010): 573–94.

  “An academic history”: Stephen Bayley, Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1991), xviii.

  “blue seven”: See William E. Simon and Louis H. Primavera, “Investigation of the ‘Blue Seven Phenomenon’ in Elementary and Junior High School Children,” Psychological Reports 31 (1972): 128–30. The finding was replicated in a number of other studies; see, for example, Julian Paciak and Robert Williams, “Note on the ‘Blue-Seven Phenomenon’ Among Male Senior High Students,” Psychological Reports 35 (1974): 394.

  “the sacred number”: Louis Jacobs, “The Numbered Sequence as a Literary Device in the Babylonian Talmud,” Hebrew Annual Review 7 (1983): 143.

  Perhaps it is the way: The seminal research here was George Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63, no. 2 (1956): 81–87.

  And yet its influence: See, for example, Dave Munger, “Is 17 the ‘Most Random’ Number?,” Cognitive Daily (blog), Feb. 5, 2007, http://​scienceblogs.​com/​cognitivedaily/​2007/​02/​05/​is-​17-​the-​most-​random-​number/.

  As for why my daughter: It is theorized that expressing preferences, and knowing how they might differ from other people’s preferences, are key steps in a child’s developing what psychologists call a “theory of mind,” one part of which is empa
thy.

  With a touch of alarm: Carol Zaremba Berg et al., “The Survey Form of the Leyton Obsessional Inventory-Child Version: Norms from an Epidemiological Study,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 27, no. 6 (Nov. 1988): 759–63.

  “public restroom at a California”: See Nicholas Christenfeld, “Choices from Identical Options,” Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (Jan. 1995). Ironically, this preference for the middle seems to make those the least clean stalls, at least according to one microbiologist, Dr. Charles Gerba, of the University of Arizona, known as Dr. Germ. See, for example, Elizabeth Landau, “Conquering the ‘Ewww’ Factor of the Public Potty,” CNN, Dec. 9, 2008, http://​www.​cnn.​com/​2008/​HEALTH/​10/​03/​bathroom.​hygiene/​index.​html?​eref=​rss_​latest.

  Has paper mounted: See, for example, “Ending the Over-Under Debate on Toilet Paper,” NPR, http://​www.​npr.​org/​2015/​03/​19/​393982199/​ending-​the-​over-​under-​debate-​on-​toilet-​paper.

  As inconsequential as either: See Rick Kogan, America’s Mom: The Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers (New York: William Morrow, 2005), 163.

  If people seem to prefer “bnick”: As one report notes, “Typological research suggests that onsets with large sonority rises (e.g., blif) are preferred to onsets with smaller rises (e.g., bnif), which, in turn are preferred to sonority plateaus (e.g., bdif); the plateaus, in turn, are preferred to onsets with sonority falls (e.g., lbif).” This even though “the structure of the English lexicon offers English speakers little evidence for the sonority hierarchy.” See Iris Berent et al., “What We Know About What We Have Never Heard: Evidence from Perceptual Illusions,” Cognition 104 (2007): 590–631.

  Why would artists’ preferences: One finds this gap in almost every creative profession. One idea is that experts and laypeople disagree on what’s good because of what criteria they are examining. In architecture, for example, one study noted that “architects and laypersons agreed that a meaningful building is an aesthetically good building…[b]ut the two groups used no physical cues in common as the basis for deciding which buildings are more (or less) meaningful.” The authors of that study suggested a “cognitive reconciliation campaign” to bring this difference to light. See Robert Gifford et al., “Why Architects and Laypersons Judge Buildings Differently: Cognitive Properties and Physical Bases,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 19, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 131–48.

  Palmer queried a range: See Stephen Palmer and William Griscom, “Accounting for Taste: Individual Differences in Preference for Harmony,” Psychonomic Bulletin Review 20, no. 3 (2013): 453–61.

  Days after being: Teresa Farroni, Enrica Menon, and Mark H. Johnson, “Factors Influencing Newborns’ Preference for Faces with Eye Contact,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 95 no. 4 (2006): 298–308.

  Since the dawn of psychology: Jastrow actually found in his study that women preferred red. See Joseph Jastrow, “The Popular Esthetics of Color,” Popular Science Monthly, Jan. 1897. Jastrow cautioned that only a certain range of colors were presented and that people’s choices might have been influenced by the arrangement of colors on the page. Still, a host of studies have largely found a consensus around blue (and for less liking of dark yellow). For an excellent survey on the work that has been done on human color preference, see A. Hurlbert and Y. Ling, “Understanding Colour Perception and Preference,” in Colour Design: Theories and Applications, ed. Janet Best (Oxford: Woodhead, 2012), 129, 157. They caution, “Despite the common-sense appeal of these arguments, it is important to stress that neither the evolutionary nor the ontogenetic claim has been proven, and the extent to which preferences are hard-wired versus individually malleable is still an open question.”

  “general fussiness”: Chloe Taylor et al., “Color Preferences in Infants and Adults Are Different,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 20, no. 1 (Feb. 2013).

  “It happens at the beach”: See Nathan Heller, “The Cranky Wisdom of Peter Kaplan,” New Republic, Sept. 14, 2012.

  When Palmer and his colleagues: Karen Schloss, Rosa Poggesi, and Stephen Palmer, “Effects of University Affiliation and ‘School Spirit’ on Color Preferences: Berkeley Versus Stanford,” Psychonomic Bulletin Review 18 (2011): 498–504.

  Query Democrats and Republicans: Karen Schloss and Stephen Palmer, “The Politics of Color: Preferences for Republican Red Versus Democratic Blue,” Psychonomic Bulletin Review 21, no. 2 (April 2014). As they note, the effect is not found on nonelection days. One reason might be that people actually normally associate Republicans with blue and Democrats with red. The media’s use of Red and Blue America is rather recent. “When Republican Reagan swept the 1984 presidential elections,” they write, “the election map coded Reagan victories in blue and was referred to as a ‘suburban swimming pool.’ ”

  Some have argued: The key proponent of this line of thinking is Itamar Simonson. He suggests preference construction is a sort of laboratory artifact and argues, “The literature on preference construction has been largely confined to local decisions and is less relevant to more enduring preferences.” New innovations, like the Nintendo Wii, he argues, tap into preexisting, inherent preferences. The fact that people come to like something they initially disliked, he argues, is one “post-hoc indicator of inherent preferences.” Simonson, “Will I Like a ‘Medium’ Pillow? Another Look at Constructed and Inherent Preferences,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 18 (2008): 155–69. Critics have responded, however, that Simonson has set up an “unfalsifiable” condition, because we can never really know if someone who comes to like something she disliked at first merely adapted to something or liked it all along (and just didn’t know it). See James Battman et al., “Preference Construction and Preference Stability: Putting the Pillow to Rest,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 18 (2008): 170–74.

  The idea that pink: For a thorough account, see Jo Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

  Just having a face: See Saeideh Bakshi, David A. Shamma, and Eric Gilbert, “Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram.” ACM: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2014): 965–74.

  Are liking and disliking: The philosopher Karl Duncker notes that “the unpleasantness of a toothache and the pleasantness of a beautiful view are not likely to coexist—not so much because the two hedonic tones have opposite signs, but because the underlying experiences or attitudes are incomparable.” See Duncker, “On Pleasure, Emotion, and Striving,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1, no. 4 (June 1941): 391–430.

  In 2000, a team of Italian: C. Geroldi et al., “Pop Music and Frontotemporal Dementia,” Neurology 55 (2000): 1935–36. In another case, in which the aesthetic transformation rather went the other way, a group of neuroscientists reported a patient whose liking for hard rock suddenly shifted—in the wake of a left temporal lobectomy—to a “preference for Celtic or Corsican polyphonic singing.” The patient, they noted, “was surprised by his taste changes, did not find that they were the mere result of maturation, and complained about them.” François Sellal et al., “Dramatic Changes in Artistic Preference After Left Temporal Lobectomy,” Epilepsy and Behavior 4 (2003): 449–51.

  It was not so much: See, for example, Daniel J. Graham, Simone Stockinger, and Helmut Leder, “An Island of Stability: Art Images and Natural Scenes—but Not Natural Faces—Show Consistent Esthetic Response in Alzheimer’s-Related Dementia,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (March 2013), article 107. Curiously, the study found that people’s recall of photographs of faces was far less stable than their preference for landscape and other paintings. The authors suggest that Alzheimer’s patients, upon viewing faces, may be suffering “cognitive interference”—for example, a nagging thought that they have seen this photograph before; paintings, meanwhile, might “be evaluated more easily on basic esthetic grounds, with less interfere
nce of face detection and recognition systems.”

  In an experiment conducted: R. Haller et al., “The Influence of Early Experience with Vanillin on Food Preference Later in Life,” Chemical Senses 24, no. 4 (1999): 465–67. The authors raise the interesting point that as “bottle feeding stops long before children speak,” the experiment raises the idea that “olfactory memory” exists outside “verbal memory.” We remember what we smell even before we know what the what is.

  It is unlikely they made: Kevin Melchionne makes the interesting point that because “it is difficult to imagine doubting our immediate, sensual responses to food”—even if we might not be able to locate the precise reasons—we carry that confidence in our own judgment into fields like art, where we must certainly know what we like. See Melchionne, “On the Old Saw ‘I Know Nothing About Art but I Know What I Like,’ ” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 131–40.

  But the expert musicians: See Claudia Fritz et al., “Player Preferences Among New and Old Violins,” PNAS 109, no. 3 (2012): 760–63. In Fritz’s study, most players could not actually distinguish the old from the new instruments. That study was criticized because the testing was done in a hotel room. However, in a follow-up study whose locations include rehearsal spaces and a concert hall, more musicians preferred the new instruments. As Fritz cautions, there “is no way of knowing the extent to which our test instruments (old or new) are representative of their kind”—the same might be said about the musicians—“so results cannot be projected to the larger population of fine violins.” But it certainly raises the idea that what people love about an old Italian violin is that it is an old Italian violin, rather than its inherent sonic virtues. Fritz et al., “Soloist Evaluations of Six Old Italian and Six New Violins,” PNAS 111, no. 20 (2014): 7224–29.

  “adaptive unconscious”: See Timothy Wilson, “Self-Knowledge and the Adaptive Unconscious,” in Neuroscience and the Human Person: New Perspectives on Human Activities, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Scripta Varia 121 (Vatican City, 2013).