[ed. See also: The Harm in Blindly 'Going Gluten Free'.]
In the time of the Facebook thumbs up, what does it mean to “like” something? What is it that makes humans decide they prefer one thing over another, so that you click replay on one song all day and cover your ears whenever you hear another in public? And how do Netflix and Spotify and other recommendation engines seem to know your taste as well or better than you do sometimes?
What determines people’s preferences is a fuzzy, hard-to-pin-down process, but Tom Vanderbilt takes a stab at it in his new book, You May Also Like. He examines the broad collection of likes and dislikes that make up “taste,” and how they come to be. Sometimes, people just prefer the familiar. Sometimes they like what their friends like. Sometimes they pretend to like movies they never really watch or music they don’t actually listen to. A lot of the time, they can’t say why they like something, they just know that they do.
I spoke with Vanderbilt about how what we like is influenced by both culture and human nature, how being able to analyze things helps us like them more, and how the Internet changes the game. Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.
Julie Beck: I'm going to start really broad. What’s the point of liking anything? Why do humans as a species have preferences for things in the first place?
Vanderbilt: Taste is just a way of filtering the world, of ordering information. I use Michael Pollan's phrase, [from] The Omnivore's Dilemma—when humans do have this capacity to eat everything, how do you decide? I felt like the sheer availability of cultural choices is similar. We all face this new kind of dilemma of how to figure out what we like when the entirety of recorded music, more or less, is available on your phone within seconds. What do I decide to even look for now that I have everything available to me?
Beck: Do you think food was the first thing that people developed and shaped preferences for?
Vanderbilt: I would think so, because we're talking about sheer survival here. And then the very minute you have more than one food available you suddenly have a choice. [Cornell behavioral scientist] Brian Wansink has this great statistic that nowadays in current society we face something like 200 food decisions a day.
I think in early society the public probably tapped into these social mechanisms that are hugely important in taste. Taste is just another form of social learning. You saw your neighbor consume something, you saw that he didn't die, so you decided that would be a pretty good thing to eat too. Then as society became more complex, you start to have prestige models of, well, not only did he like that food, he's the most important person in the village, so of course I should really check it out. More began to be attached to those choices than sheer functionality.
There’s no silver bullet theory for explaining anyone's taste. It's always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person's personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed. The nice thing about tastes is that they are subject to change. We can kind of always be reinventing them and reinventing ourselves a little bit.
Beck: Sometimes the things that we say we like and the things that we actually like in our secret hearts don't match up. Is that a matter of lying to ourselves? I was thinking of Netflix specifically; you mentioned in the book that people never watch the foreign movies they say they're going to watch.
Vanderbilt: I think a lot of people are, in many ways, always striving for improvement. You want to eat the food that you think is best for you; you want to consume the culture that you think is best for you. That depends on who you are, of course.
Just to segue a little bit to the concept of the guilty pleasure—this is a very interesting and complicated dynamic. I do think it has been used culturally as kind of a cudgel to try to shape people's behavior and influence them and rein them in. You can find intimations going back to the emergence of the novel, for example, that the novel was a guilty pleasure enjoyed largely by women. I do think there has been this tendency to try to reign in guilty pleasure behavior when it comes to women. As a weird example here, if you go to a stock photo site like Shutterstock or something like that and type in the words “guilty pleasure,” what you will see is a page of women basically putting chocolate into their mouths.
So that's kind of the social aspect. And then for the personal aspect, maybe we're just reflecting that cultural anxiety and trying to be those people that we're supposed to be, those better people. The key to deceiving others is the ability to deceive yourself. That helps the lie. So I create these playlists and reading lists, and I orchestrate my bookshelves very carefully to have nothing but the finest tomes. How many of those I've actually read is another question.
Beck: I’m wondering how much of liking something is a feeling versus how much of it is thinking about the thing or intellectualizing the thing, or finding a language to describe the thing, like with wine connoisseurs.
Vanderbilt: Yeah, this is a question I grappled with. If you're a connoisseur of chocolate and you know the entire range of the world's chocolate available to you, does that lead to a greater pleasure or are you always sort of haunted by the notion that there might be something better out there? Whereas if a Hershey bar—and I'm being neutral about Hershey here—is the entirety of your chocolate knowledge, it's hard to see the chance for dissatisfaction there.
I'm not trying to argue that it's good to be a philistine or something. The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something. Obviously we should not just stop with our gut reaction and say “I don't like this.” If we did that, we would never get to a lot of the things we end up liking.
I think often we really are lacking the language, and the ways to frame it. If you look at films like Blade Runner or The Big Lebowski, when these films came out they were box office disasters. I think part of that was a categorization thing—not knowing how to think about it in the right way. Blade Runner didn't really match up with the existing tropes of science fiction, Big Lebowski was just kind of strange.
Beck: So it's easier to like things if we're able to fit them into some kind of label or category that we already understand and if it's too new, too different, than it's more baffling.
Vanderbilt: Absolutely. We like to sort things into categories to help us filter information more efficiently about the world. The example I like that's been used in talking about what's called categorical perception is: If you look at a rainbow, we read it as bands of color rather than this spectrum that smoothly evolves from one color to the next. Many things are the same way. In music we will discount things out of hand or be attracted to things because of the genre they fit in. But when you actually mathematically analyze that music, you might find something similar to that rainbow effect. You say, “This song by this artist, that's an R&B song.” Well if you actually put it on a map, it might be closer, musically, to rock than most of the other R&B songs, yet it gets classified within R&B. When we classify something I think all those things tend to [seem] more like one another than they really are.
In the time of the Facebook thumbs up, what does it mean to “like” something? What is it that makes humans decide they prefer one thing over another, so that you click replay on one song all day and cover your ears whenever you hear another in public? And how do Netflix and Spotify and other recommendation engines seem to know your taste as well or better than you do sometimes?
What determines people’s preferences is a fuzzy, hard-to-pin-down process, but Tom Vanderbilt takes a stab at it in his new book, You May Also Like. He examines the broad collection of likes and dislikes that make up “taste,” and how they come to be. Sometimes, people just prefer the familiar. Sometimes they like what their friends like. Sometimes they pretend to like movies they never really watch or music they don’t actually listen to. A lot of the time, they can’t say why they like something, they just know that they do.I spoke with Vanderbilt about how what we like is influenced by both culture and human nature, how being able to analyze things helps us like them more, and how the Internet changes the game. Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.
Julie Beck: I'm going to start really broad. What’s the point of liking anything? Why do humans as a species have preferences for things in the first place?
Vanderbilt: Taste is just a way of filtering the world, of ordering information. I use Michael Pollan's phrase, [from] The Omnivore's Dilemma—when humans do have this capacity to eat everything, how do you decide? I felt like the sheer availability of cultural choices is similar. We all face this new kind of dilemma of how to figure out what we like when the entirety of recorded music, more or less, is available on your phone within seconds. What do I decide to even look for now that I have everything available to me?
Beck: Do you think food was the first thing that people developed and shaped preferences for?
Vanderbilt: I would think so, because we're talking about sheer survival here. And then the very minute you have more than one food available you suddenly have a choice. [Cornell behavioral scientist] Brian Wansink has this great statistic that nowadays in current society we face something like 200 food decisions a day.
I think in early society the public probably tapped into these social mechanisms that are hugely important in taste. Taste is just another form of social learning. You saw your neighbor consume something, you saw that he didn't die, so you decided that would be a pretty good thing to eat too. Then as society became more complex, you start to have prestige models of, well, not only did he like that food, he's the most important person in the village, so of course I should really check it out. More began to be attached to those choices than sheer functionality.
There’s no silver bullet theory for explaining anyone's taste. It's always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person's personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed. The nice thing about tastes is that they are subject to change. We can kind of always be reinventing them and reinventing ourselves a little bit.
Beck: Sometimes the things that we say we like and the things that we actually like in our secret hearts don't match up. Is that a matter of lying to ourselves? I was thinking of Netflix specifically; you mentioned in the book that people never watch the foreign movies they say they're going to watch.
Vanderbilt: I think a lot of people are, in many ways, always striving for improvement. You want to eat the food that you think is best for you; you want to consume the culture that you think is best for you. That depends on who you are, of course.
Just to segue a little bit to the concept of the guilty pleasure—this is a very interesting and complicated dynamic. I do think it has been used culturally as kind of a cudgel to try to shape people's behavior and influence them and rein them in. You can find intimations going back to the emergence of the novel, for example, that the novel was a guilty pleasure enjoyed largely by women. I do think there has been this tendency to try to reign in guilty pleasure behavior when it comes to women. As a weird example here, if you go to a stock photo site like Shutterstock or something like that and type in the words “guilty pleasure,” what you will see is a page of women basically putting chocolate into their mouths.
So that's kind of the social aspect. And then for the personal aspect, maybe we're just reflecting that cultural anxiety and trying to be those people that we're supposed to be, those better people. The key to deceiving others is the ability to deceive yourself. That helps the lie. So I create these playlists and reading lists, and I orchestrate my bookshelves very carefully to have nothing but the finest tomes. How many of those I've actually read is another question.
Beck: I’m wondering how much of liking something is a feeling versus how much of it is thinking about the thing or intellectualizing the thing, or finding a language to describe the thing, like with wine connoisseurs.
Vanderbilt: Yeah, this is a question I grappled with. If you're a connoisseur of chocolate and you know the entire range of the world's chocolate available to you, does that lead to a greater pleasure or are you always sort of haunted by the notion that there might be something better out there? Whereas if a Hershey bar—and I'm being neutral about Hershey here—is the entirety of your chocolate knowledge, it's hard to see the chance for dissatisfaction there.
I'm not trying to argue that it's good to be a philistine or something. The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something. Obviously we should not just stop with our gut reaction and say “I don't like this.” If we did that, we would never get to a lot of the things we end up liking.
I think often we really are lacking the language, and the ways to frame it. If you look at films like Blade Runner or The Big Lebowski, when these films came out they were box office disasters. I think part of that was a categorization thing—not knowing how to think about it in the right way. Blade Runner didn't really match up with the existing tropes of science fiction, Big Lebowski was just kind of strange.
Beck: So it's easier to like things if we're able to fit them into some kind of label or category that we already understand and if it's too new, too different, than it's more baffling.
Vanderbilt: Absolutely. We like to sort things into categories to help us filter information more efficiently about the world. The example I like that's been used in talking about what's called categorical perception is: If you look at a rainbow, we read it as bands of color rather than this spectrum that smoothly evolves from one color to the next. Many things are the same way. In music we will discount things out of hand or be attracted to things because of the genre they fit in. But when you actually mathematically analyze that music, you might find something similar to that rainbow effect. You say, “This song by this artist, that's an R&B song.” Well if you actually put it on a map, it might be closer, musically, to rock than most of the other R&B songs, yet it gets classified within R&B. When we classify something I think all those things tend to [seem] more like one another than they really are.
by Julie Beck, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Lisa Maree Williams / Getty
