Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence. You might feel certain you took a job because it presented a challenge, but perhaps you were really more interested in the greater prestige. You might swear you like that fellow for his sense of humor, but you might really like him for his smile, which reminds you of your mother’s. You might think you trust your gastroenterologist because she is a great expert, but you might really trust her because she is a good listener. Most of us are satisfied with our theories about ourselves and accept them with confidence, but we rarely see those theories tested. Scientists, however, are now able to test those theories in the laboratory, and they have proven astonishingly inaccurate.
An example: Imagine you are on your way into a movie theater when a person who appears to be an employee of the theater comes up to you and asks if you will answer a few questions about the theater and its concessions in exchange for a free tub of popcorn and a drink. What that person doesn’t tell you is that the popcorn you will be given comes in two sizes, one smaller than the other, but both so huge that you could not possibly finish the contents—and in two “flavors,” one that subjects will later describe as “good” and “high quality,” and another that will be described as “stale,” “soggy,” and “terrible.” Nor will you be told that you are actually participating in a scientific study to measure how much you eat of the popcorn and why. Now, here’s the question the researchers were studying: What will have a greater influence on the amount of popcorn you eat, its taste or the amount you are given? To address that question, they handed out four different popcorn-and-box combinations. Moviegoers were given either good popcorn in the smaller box, good popcorn in the larger box, bad popcorn in the smaller box, or bad popcorn in the larger box. The result? People seemed to “decide” how much to eat based on box size as much as taste. Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15
I put quotation marks around “decide” above because that word often connotes a conscious action. It’s unlikely that these decisions fit that description. The subjects did not say to themselves, This free popcorn tastes awful, but there’s plenty of it, so I may as well gorge. Instead, research such as this supports what advertisers have long suspected—that “environmental factors” such as package design, package or portion size, and menu descriptions unconsciously influence us. What is most surprising is the magnitude of the effect—and of people’s resistance to the idea that they could have been manipulated. While we sometimes acknowledge that such factors can influence other people, we usually believe—wrongly—that they cannot possibly affect us.16
In truth, environmental factors have a powerful—and unconscious—influence not only on how much we choose to eat but also on how the food tastes. For example, suppose you don’t eat just in movie theaters but sometimes go to restaurants, sometimes even restaurants that provide more than just a menu board listing various types of hamburgers. These more elegant restaurants commonly offer menus peppered with terms like “crispy cucumbers,” “velvety mashed potatoes,” and “slow-roasted beets on a bed of arugula,” as if at other restaurants the cucumbers are limp, the mashed potatoes have the texture of wool, and the beets are flash-fried, then made to sit up in an uncomfortable chair. Would a crispy cucumber, by any other name, taste as crisp? Would a bacon cheeseburger, presented in Spanish, become Mexican food? Could poetic description convert macaroni and cheese from a limerick to a haiku? Studies show that flowery modifiers not only tempt people to order the lyrically described foods but also lead them to rate those foods as tasting better than the identical foods given only a generic listing.17 If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, “I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives,” you’d probably get a pretty strange look; yet a dish’s description turns out to be an important factor in how it tastes. So the next time you have friends over for dinner, don’t serve them salad from the store down the street; go for the subliminal effect and serve them a mélange of local greens.
Let’s go a step further. Which would you enjoy more, velvety mashed potatoes or velvety mashed potatoes? Nobody has yet done a study on the effect of fonts on the taste of mashed potatoes, but a study has been done on the effects of font on attitudes toward preparing food. In that study participants were asked to read a recipe for creating a Japanese lunch dish, then to rate the amount of effort and skill they thought the recipe would require and how likely they were to prepare the dish at home. Subjects who were presented with the recipe in a difficult-to-read font rated the recipe as more difficult and said they were less likely to attempt to make the dish. The researchers repeated the experiment, showing other subjects a one-page description of an exercise routine instead of a recipe, and found similar results: subjects rated the exercise as harder and said they were less likely to try it when the instructions were printed in a font that was hard to read. Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.” If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that information.18
The science of the new unconscious is full of reports about phenomena such as these, quirks in our judgment and perception of people and events, artifacts that arise from the usually beneficial ways in which our brains automatically process information. The point is that we are not like computers that crunch data in a relatively straightforward manner and calculate results. Instead, our brains are made up of a collection of many modules that work in parallel, with complex interactions, most of which operate outside of our consciousness. As a consequence, the real reasons behind our judgments, feelings, and behavior can surprise us.
IF UNTIL RECENTLY academic psychologists have been reluctant to accept the power of the unconscious, so have others in the social sciences. Economists, for example, built their textbook theories on the assumption that people make decisions in their own best interests, by consciously weighing the relevant factors. If the new unconscious is as powerful as modern psychologists and neuroscientists believe it to be, economists are going to have to rethink that assumption. Indeed, in recent years a growing minority of maverick economists have had great success questioning the theories of their more traditional colleagues. Today, behavioral economists like Caltech’s Antonio Rangel are changing the way economists think by presenting strong evidence that the textbook theories are flawed.
Rangel is nothing like what most people think of when they picture economists—theorists who pore over data and build complex computer models to describe market dynamics. A portly Spaniard who is himself a great lover of the good things in life, Rangel works with real people, often student volunteers, whom he drags into his lab to study while they taste wine or stare at candy bars after having fasted all morning. In a recent experiment, he and his colleagues showed that people would pay 40 to 61 percent more for an item of junk food if, rather than choosing from a text or image display, they were presented with the actual item.19 The study also found that if the item is presented behind Plexiglas, rather than being available for you to simply grab, your willingness to pay sinks back down to the text and image levels. Sound weird? How about rating one detergent as being superior to another because it comes in a blue-and-yellow box? Or would you buy German wine rather than French because German beer hall music was playing in the background as you walked down the liquor aisle? Would you rate the quality of silk stockings as higher because you liked their scent?