By the way, we also tried a more extreme version of this experiment. We told one of two groups in advance about the vinegar (the “before” condition) and told the second group about the vinegar after they had finished the sampling (the “after” condition). Once the tasting was done, rather than offer them a large glass of their choice, we instead gave them a large cup of unadulterated beer, some vinegar, a dropper, and the recipe for the MIT Brew (two drops of balsamic vinegar per ounce of beer). We wanted to see if people would freely add balsamic vinegar to their beer; if so, how much they would use; and how these outcomes would depend on whether the participants tasted the beer before or after knowing about the vinegar.
What happened? Telling the participants about the vinegar after rather than before they tasted the beer doubled the number of participants who decided to add vinegar to their beer. For the participants in the “after” condition, the beer with vinegar didn’t taste too bad the first time around (they apparently reasoned), and so they didn’t mind giving it another try.*
AS YOU SEE, expectations can influence nearly every aspect of our life. Imagine that you need to hire a caterer for your daughter’s wedding. Josephine’s Catering boasts about its “delicious Asian-style ginger chicken” and its “flavorful Greek salad with kalamata olives and feta cheese.” Another caterer, Culinary Sensations, offers a “succulent organic breast of chicken roasted to perfection and drizzled with a merlot demi-glace, resting in a bed of herbed Israeli couscous” and a “mélange of the freshest roma cherry tomatoes and crisp field greens, paired with a warm circle of chèvre in a fruity raspberry vinagrette.”
Although there is no way to know whether Culinary Sensations’ food is any better than Josephine’s, the sheer depth of the description may lead us to expect greater things from the simple tomato and goat cheese salad. This, accordingly, increases the chance that we (and our guests, if we give them the description of the dish) will rave over it.
This principle, so useful to caterers, is available to everyone. We can add small things that sound exotic and fashionable to our cooking (chipotle-mango sauces seem all the rage right now, or try buffalo instead of beef). These ingredients might not make the dish any better in a blind taste test; but by changing our expectations, they can effectively influence the taste when we have this pre-knowledge.
These techniques are especially useful when you are inviting people for dinner—or persuading children to try new dishes. By the same token, it might help the taste of the meal if you omit the fact that a certain cake is made from a commercial mix or that you used generic rather than brand-name orange juice in a cocktail, or, especially for children, that Jell-O comes from cow hooves. I am not endorsing the morality of such actions, just pointing to the expected outcomes.
Finally, don’t underestimate the power of presentation. There’s a reason that learning to present food artfully on the plate is as important in culinary school as learning to grill and fry. Even when you buy take-out, try removing the Styrofoam packaging and placing the food on some nice dishes and garnishing it (especially if you have company); this can make all the difference.
One more piece of advice: If you want to enhance the experience of your guests, invest in a nice set of wineglasses.
Moreover, if you’re really serious about your wine, you may want to go all out and purchase the glasses that are specific to burgundies, chardonnays, champagne, etc. Each type of glass is supposed to provide the appropriate environment, which should bring out the best in these wines (even though controlled studies find that the shape of the glass makes no difference at all in an objective blind taste test, that doesn’t stop people from perceiving a significant difference when they are handed the “correct glass”). Moreover, if you forget that the shape of the glass really has no effect on the taste of the wine, you yourself may be able to better enjoy the wine you consume in the appropriately shaped fancy glasses.
Expectations, of course, are not limited to food. When you invite people to a movie, you can increase their enjoyment by mentioning that it got great reviews. This is also essential for building the reputation of a brand or product. That’s what marketing is all about—providing information that will heighten someone’s anticipated and real pleasure. But do expectations created by marketing really change our enjoyment?
I’m sure you remember the famous “Pepsi Challenge” ads on television (or at least you may have heard of them). The ads consisted of people chosen at random, tasting Coke and Pepsi and remarking about which they liked better. These ads, created by Pepsi, announced that people preferred Pepsi to Coke. At the same time, the ads for Coke proclaimed that people preferred Coke to Pepsi. How could that be? Were the two companies fudging their statistics?
The answer is in the different ways the two companies evaluated their products. Coke’s market research was said to be based on consumers’ preferences when they could see what they were drinking, including the famous red trademark, while Pepsi ran its challenge using blind tasting and standard plastic cups marked M and Q. Could it be that Pepsi tasted better in a blind taste test but that Coke tasted better in a non-blind (sighted) test?
To better understand the puzzle of Coke versus Pepsi, a terrific group of neuroscientists—Sam McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim Cypert, Latané Montague, and Read Montague—conducted their own blind and non-blind taste test of Coke and Pepsi. The modern twist on this test was supplied by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. With this machine, the researchers could monitor the activity of the participants’ brains while they consumed the drinks.
Tasting drinks while one is in an fMRI is not simple, by the way, because a person whose brain is being scanned must lie perfectly still. To overcome this problem, Sam and his colleagues put a long plastic tube into the mouth of each participant, and from a distance injected the appropriate drink (Pepsi or Coke) through the tube into their mouths. As the participants received a drink, they were also presented with visual information indicating either that Coke was coming, that Pepsi was coming, or that an unknown drink was coming. This way the researchers could observe the brain activation of the participants while they consumed Coke and Pepsi, both when they knew which beverage they were drinking and when they did not.
What were the results? In line with the Coke and Pepsi “challenges,” it turned out that the brain activation of the participants was different depending on whether the name of the drink was revealed or not. This is what happened: Whenever a person received a squirt of Coke or Pepsi, the center of the brain associated with strong feelings of emotional connection—called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, VMPFC—was stimulated. But when the participants knew they were going to get a squirt of Coke, something additional happened. This time, the frontal area of the brain—the dorsolateral aspect of the prefrontal cortex, DLPFC, an area involved in higher human brain functions like working memory, associations, and higher-order cognitions and ideas—was also activated. It happened with Pepsi—but even more so with Coke (and, naturally, the response was stronger in people who had a stronger preference for Coke).
The reaction of the brain to the basic hedonic value of the drinks (essentially sugar) turned out to be similar for the two drinks. But the advantage of Coke over Pepsi was due to Cokes’s brand—which activated the higher-order brain mechanisms. These associations, then, and not the chemical properties of the drink, gave Coke an advantage in the marketplace.
It is also interesting to consider the ways in which the frontal part of the brain is connected to the pleasure center. There is a dopamine link by which the front part of the brain projects and activates the pleasure centers. This is probably why Coke was liked more when the brand was known—the associations were more powerful, allowing the part of the brain that represents these associations to enhance activity in the brain’s pleasure center. This should be good news to any ad agency, of course, because it means that the bright red can, swirling script, and the myriad messages that have come down