Linda Bartoshuk is interested in the latter question. She is a psychology professor at the University of Florida and is in demand as a speaker at meetings around the world. She has also been president of the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, both organizations with Washington, D.C., headquarters. She travels frequently between Gainesville and Washington.
To fly from Gainesville to Washington, you have to stop in Charlotte, and from painful experience she knows that catching a tight connection in Charlotte rarely works. “The flight from Gainesville is always late,” she explains. It’s annoying but so predictable that she’s only mildly irritated by it.
Bartoshuk is with the Center for Taste and Smell at the University of Florida. She has spent a substantial part of her career studying how people taste things. In the 1980s, she discovered a group of people whom she dubbed supertasters. These are individuals who are much more sensitive than most people to food flavors. Foods that are only somewhat bitter to “normal” tasters are unbearably bitter to supertasters. The discovery of supertasters underscored a problem that she has focused on for the last decade: how to measure something subjective such as taste in a way that you can make meaningful comparisons between two people. What does it mean to say something is “very salty” or “sort of sweet” or “slightly bitter?” You know what you mean when you say that, but it means something very different if you happen to be a supertaster.
Taste belongs to a class of experiences known as hedonic experiences. In general, these are qualities that you can sense or feel but can’t really measure in a physical way. For example, a food chemist can tell you the amount of sodium chloride in a particular food, and yes, the saltiness of food depends on the amount of sodium chloride in it. Yet a McDonald’s Vanilla Triple Shake in a twenty-one-ounce cup has more sodium than a medium order of french fries, and although you may have criticisms about the McDonald’s Vanilla Triple Shake, “too salty” is not likely to be one of them.{11}
Plenty of other experiences only partly depend on physical measurements. The loudness of sound, the brightness of light, and the degree that you’re in love can all be rated on a 9-point scale, where 1 is the least and 9 is the strongest, but is the “9” of men the same as the “9” of women when it comes to love? Some people would say no.
Pain can also be considered a hedonic experience. Yes, you can measure the amount of force that is applied to your thumb when you accidentally miss the nail with your hammer. And yes, if you’re asked, “On a scale of 1 to 9, how much pain are you in?” you might say 9. How does that 9 compare with the 9 that many women experience when they give birth?
The traditional scales work on an individual basis. Hospitals routinely ask patients to rate how much pain they are in, on a 1-to-9 scale, to determine whether to administer an analgesic. If your pain is 7, and you take Tylenol with codeine, and your pain drops to a 3, that’s a meaningful measurement.
Problems arise, however, when people try to make comparisons. Bartoshuk’s research suggests that women’s pain tolerance, in absolute terms, is higher than men’s, probably because men don’t experience anything quite as painful as childbirth. This means that if 4 is the magic number for receiving an analgesic in the hospital, women will actually have to experience more pain before they qualify to have their pain relieved.
Now, Bartoshuk has begun to think about how we can measure annoyance. Measuring annoyances poses the same kind of problems as measuring pain or love or taste. “I was thinking about that when I changed planes in Charlotte,” says Bartoshuk, when she stopped for a bite of lunch at National Airport before heading to downtown Washington for a meeting. “While we were waiting to board the flight to Washington, I asked the woman standing next to me, ‘Do you get more annoyed by some things than others?’”
Not surprisingly, the woman said yes. Bartoshuk says she asked because she wanted to double-check her belief that the sensation of annoyance has a range of intensities. Clearly, it does. Some things are more annoying than others. That’s an important property of the experience of being annoyed. “And then I said to her, ‘Think of the most angry you’ve ever been in your life and think of the most annoyed. Which was more intense?’ ‘Anger, definitely,’ the woman said.” Bartoshuk says those two properties, a varying intensity and an ability to compare annoyance with another sensation, such as anger, will help her develop a scale for annoyance. That’s what she is planning to do.
Why develop an annoying scale? “Because annoyance is also a hedonic experience,” she thinks. This means it can be measured to make comparisons between groups of people. Bartoshuk’s basic approach is to try to anchor a hedonic scale to something that is actually measurable. For example, she will ask people what is the brightest light they’ve ever seen. Most people will say the light coming from the sun. That’s something that can be measured physically, and it’s the same for everyone in the world.
Then she’ll ask people how the happiest they’ve ever been compares with the brightest light they’ve ever seen on a scale from 1 to 100. It’s a way to anchor the happy score. This may seem odd, but remember, they’re being asked to compare something that is inherently subjective with something that is essentially objective: the light from the sun. If your happiest feeling is only a 65 on the sun scale and mine is 95 on the sun scale, then my happiest is more intense than yours. To compare our happiness, our subjective ratings need to be adjusted.
If she tests a hundred people, she can then compare men’s happiness scores with women’s happiness scores because they are all anchored by the sunlight standard. Or she can measure whether obese people are happier than lean people. The comparisons become meaningful because of the absolute standard they’re measured against.
Another type of scaling method that Bartoshuk is experimenting with involves training the subjects in her studies to compare food taste sensations with the loudness of sounds. She told them, “If you give a sound a 9 on a scale of 0 to 9, and you give a food a 9, it means the intensity of liking the food is equal to the intensity of the loudness.” Similarly, if you were indifferent to a food, this would be linked to a barely audible sound.
At first, many subjects think that comparing loudness with taste is daft, but Bartoshuk has an easy way to show them that at least in principle, it’s possible. She gives them a small sip of water that has a barely detectable amount of salt in it, and then she plays them a sound so loud it makes their teeth rattle. “And I ask, ‘Do they match?’ And they say, ‘Of course, they don’t.’ Then I give them a sip of extremely salty water and play an extremely soft tone, and I ask, ‘Do they match?’ And they say, ‘No.’ So, they understand that you can match these up.”
Sounds can be measured with well-calibrated instruments. If you can get people to anchor their likeness scale to a sound scale, where 1 is the softest sound they can possibly hear and 10 is the loudest sound they can possibly stand, then you can start to say meaningful things about how a 5 on one person’s likeness scale compares with a 5 on someone else’s likeness scale.
To set up her test of annoyance, Bartoshuk piggybacked it onto another experiment she’s working on. She has teamed up with plant biologist Harry Klee to try to measure what people like about tomatoes. In particular, she wants to help Klee design a tomato variety that yields many fruits, something that farmers like, and is good tasting, something that consumers like.