Страница 36 из 53
In the earlier discussion, however, I was referring to things that impair our ability to solve problems. Now I’m talking about the loss of a much more fundamental ability, namely the ability to know our own mind. Furthermore, in this case we have a much more specific explanation for why introspections mess up our reactions. It’s that we simply don’t have any way of explaining our feelings about jam. We know unconsciously what good jam is: it’s Knott’s Berry Farm. But suddenly we’re asked to stipulate, according to a list of terms, why we think that, and the terms are meaningless to us. Texture, for instance. What does that mean? We may never have thought about the texture of any jam before, and we certainly don’t understand what texture means, and texture may be something that we actually, on a deep level, don’t particularly care much about. But now the idea of texture has been planted in our mind, and we think about it and decide that, well, the texture does seem a little strange, and in fact maybe we don’t like this jam after all. As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.
Jam experts, though, don’t have the same problem when it comes to explaining their feelings about jam. Expert food tasters are taught a very specific vocabulary, which allows them to describe precisely their reactions to specific foods. Mayo
Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look inside that room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret—and decode—what lies behind our snap judgments and first impressions. It’s a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconscious with the help of a trained therapist until they begin to get a sense of how their mind works. Heylmun and Civille have done the same thing—only they haven’t psychoanalyzed their feelings; they’ve psychoanalyzed their feelings for mayo
All experts do this, either formally or informally. Gottman wasn’t happy with his instinctive reactions to couples. So he videotaped thousands of men and women, broke down every second of the tapes, and ran the data through a computer—and now he can sit down next to a couple in a restaurant and confidently thin-slice their marriage. Vic Braden, the te
This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding. Do you think, for example, that you can accurately describe the difference between Coke and Pepsi? It’s actually surprisingly difficult. Food tasters like Civille and Heylmun use what they call a DOD (degree-of-difference) scale to compare products in the same category. It goes from 0 to 10, where 10 is for two things that are totally different and 1 or 2 might describe just the production-range differences between two batches of the same product. Wise’s and Lay’s salt and vinegar potato chips, for instance, have a DOD of 8. (“Ohmigod, they are so different,” says Heylmun. “Wise is dark, and Lay’s is uniform and light.”) Things with a DOD of 5 or 6 are much closer but still possible to tell apart. Coke and Pepsi, though, are only a 4, and in some cases the difference may be even less, particularly if the colas have aged a bit and the level of carbonation has decreased and the vanilla has become a little more pronounced and pruney.
This means that if we are asked to give our thoughts on Coke and Pepsi, most of our answers aren’t going to be very useful. We can say whether we like it. We can make some vague and general comments about the level of carbonation or flavor or sweetness and sourness. But with a DOD of 4, only someone schooled in colas is going to be able to pick up on the subtle nuances that distinguish each soft drink.
I imagine that some of you, particularly those who are diehard cola drinkers, are bristling at this point. I’m being a bit insulting. You think you really do know your way around Pepsi and Coke. Okay, let’s concede that you can reliably tell Coke from Pepsi, even when the DOD hovers around 4. In fact, I urge you to test yourself. Have a friend pour Pepsi into one glass and Coke into another and try to tell them apart. Let’s say you succeed. Congratulations. Now let’s try the test again, in a slightly different form. This time have your tester give you three glasses, two of which are filled with one of the Colas and the third with the other. In the beverage business, this is called a triangle test. This time around, I don’t want you to identify which is Coke and which is Pepsi. All I want you to say is which of the three drinks is not like the other two. Believe it or not, you will find this task incredibly hard. If a thousand people were to try this test, just over one-third would guess right—which is not much better than chance; we might as well just guess.