If you had asked me, when I was 10, to forecast my life as an adult, I would probably have sketched out something like this: I would be driving a Trans Am, a Corvette, or some other muscle car. My house would boast a mammoth collection of pinball machines. I would sip sophisticated drinks (like Baileys Irish Cream), read Robert Ludlum novels, and blast Van Halen while sitting in an easy chair wearing sunglasses. Now that I am at a point to actually be able to realise every one of these feverishly envisioned tastes, they hold zero interest (well, perhaps the pinball machines in a weak moment).
It was not just that my 10-year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of imagining that my tastes could undergo such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be?
One problem is that we do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things. We may instinctively realise we will tire of our favourite food if we eat too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we could like something if only we ate it more often. Another issue is psychological “salience”, or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers cashback, the offer is claiming our attention; it might even have influenced the purchase. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the cashback goes unclaimed. When I was 10, what mattered in a car to me was that it be “cool” and fast. What did not matter to me were monthly payments, side-impact crash protection, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the appearance of being in a midlife crisis.
Even when we look back and see how much our tastes have changed, the idea that we will change equally in the future seems to confound us. It is what keeps tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have identified the illusion that for many, the present is a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives”.
In one experiment, they found that people were willing to pay more money to see their favourite band perform 10 years from now than they were willing to pay to see their favourite band from 10 years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old photo album, when you see an earlier picture of yourself and exclaim, “Oh my God, that hair!” Or “Those corduroys!” Just as pictures of ourselves can look jarring because we do not normally see ourselves as others see us, our previous tastes, viewed from “outside”, from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. Your hairstyle per se was probably not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary taste. We say, with condescension, “I can’t believe people actually dressed like that,” without realising we ourselves are currently wearing what will be considered bad taste in the future.
One of the reasons we cannot predict our future preferences is one of the things that makes those very preferences change: novelty. In the science of taste and preferences, novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one hand, we crave novelty, which defines a field such as fashion (“a field of ugliness so absolutely unbearable,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “that we have to alter it every six months”). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the women’s designer floor of the flagship store: “The first thing the customer asks when they come into the store is, ‘What’s new?’ They don’t want to know what was; they want to know what is.” How strong is this impulse? “We will sell 60% of what we’re going to sell the first four weeks the goods are on the floor.”
But we also adore familiarity. There are many who believe we like what we are used to. And yet if this were strictly true, nothing would ever change. There would be no new art styles, no new musical genres, no new products. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism’s role was in teaching people to want (and buy) new things. Producers drive economic change, he wrote, and consumers “are taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using”.
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” as Steve Jobs put it. And even then, they still might not want it. Apple’s ill-fated Newton PDA device, as quaint as it now looks in this age of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably too new at the time of its release, anticipating needs and behaviours that were not yet fully realised. As Wired described it, it was “a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language”.
So, novelty or familiarity? As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway point of some optimal U-shaped curve plotting the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he termed the “MAYA stage”, for “most advanced, yet acceptable”. This was the moment in a product design cycle when, Loewy argued, “resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in”. We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.
Anticipating how much our tastes will change is hard because we cannot see past our inherent resistance to the unfamiliar. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty can be. When you had your first sip of beer (or whisky), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, “Where has this been all my life?” It was, “People like this?”
We come to like beer, but it is arguably wrong to call beer an “acquired taste”, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. “If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer.” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: it tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect.
It was not just that my 10-year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of imagining that my tastes could undergo such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be?
One problem is that we do not anticipate the effect of experiencing things. We may instinctively realise we will tire of our favourite food if we eat too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we could like something if only we ate it more often. Another issue is psychological “salience”, or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers cashback, the offer is claiming our attention; it might even have influenced the purchase. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the cashback goes unclaimed. When I was 10, what mattered in a car to me was that it be “cool” and fast. What did not matter to me were monthly payments, side-impact crash protection, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the appearance of being in a midlife crisis.Even when we look back and see how much our tastes have changed, the idea that we will change equally in the future seems to confound us. It is what keeps tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have identified the illusion that for many, the present is a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives”.
In one experiment, they found that people were willing to pay more money to see their favourite band perform 10 years from now than they were willing to pay to see their favourite band from 10 years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old photo album, when you see an earlier picture of yourself and exclaim, “Oh my God, that hair!” Or “Those corduroys!” Just as pictures of ourselves can look jarring because we do not normally see ourselves as others see us, our previous tastes, viewed from “outside”, from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. Your hairstyle per se was probably not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary taste. We say, with condescension, “I can’t believe people actually dressed like that,” without realising we ourselves are currently wearing what will be considered bad taste in the future.
One of the reasons we cannot predict our future preferences is one of the things that makes those very preferences change: novelty. In the science of taste and preferences, novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one hand, we crave novelty, which defines a field such as fashion (“a field of ugliness so absolutely unbearable,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “that we have to alter it every six months”). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the women’s designer floor of the flagship store: “The first thing the customer asks when they come into the store is, ‘What’s new?’ They don’t want to know what was; they want to know what is.” How strong is this impulse? “We will sell 60% of what we’re going to sell the first four weeks the goods are on the floor.”
But we also adore familiarity. There are many who believe we like what we are used to. And yet if this were strictly true, nothing would ever change. There would be no new art styles, no new musical genres, no new products. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism’s role was in teaching people to want (and buy) new things. Producers drive economic change, he wrote, and consumers “are taught to want new things, or things which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using”.
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” as Steve Jobs put it. And even then, they still might not want it. Apple’s ill-fated Newton PDA device, as quaint as it now looks in this age of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably too new at the time of its release, anticipating needs and behaviours that were not yet fully realised. As Wired described it, it was “a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language”.
So, novelty or familiarity? As is often the case, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway point of some optimal U-shaped curve plotting the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he termed the “MAYA stage”, for “most advanced, yet acceptable”. This was the moment in a product design cycle when, Loewy argued, “resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in”. We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.
Anticipating how much our tastes will change is hard because we cannot see past our inherent resistance to the unfamiliar. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty can be. When you had your first sip of beer (or whisky), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, “Where has this been all my life?” It was, “People like this?”
We come to like beer, but it is arguably wrong to call beer an “acquired taste”, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. “If beer went on tasting to me the way the first sip tasted,” he writes, “I would never have gone on drinking beer.” Part of the problem is that alcohol is a shock to the system: it tastes like nothing that has come before, or at least nothing pleasant. New music or art can have the same effect.
by Tom Vanderbilt, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Aart-Jan Venema
