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Why do you like what you like? Tom Vanderbilt sets out to dismantle the comforting illusion that taste is fixed, innate, or purely individual. Across domains—color, food, music, art, ratings, and cultural trends—he shows that what you call “taste” is a composite of biology, context, learning, imitation, chance, and technology. Every choice you make and every environment you inhabit feeds back into what you think you prefer. Taste is less a stable possession than an evolving negotiation between your senses, your memory, and your surroundings.

The Construction of Liking

Vanderbilt begins by exposing how your preferences are assembled from categories and comparisons rather than absolutes. You never simply “like blue”; you like blue shirts but not blue cars, and your choices shift with context. Ecological valence theory, from Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss, suggests that you enjoy colors associated with pleasant environments—blue with sky, green with nature—showing how taste builds out of learned connections to valued experiences. The same principle scales up: the souvenirs you collect abroad or the jeans you stop wearing after returning home reveal that taste is contextual, social, and provisional.

Biology Meets Culture

Food crystallizes this fusion of nature and nurture. You are born with an attraction to sweetness and an avoidance of bitterness—ancestral cues about calories and poisons—but your lifelong food preferences evolve through repetitive exposure and conditioning. Marcia Pelchat’s research on flavor–nutrient learning demonstrates that you can grow to like a taste merely because it's paired with a caloric reward. Yet even identical food tastes different depending on label or context: a Pop-Tart served in its commercial wrapper tastes better than when it appears as a “military ration.” The multi-layered act of eating—anticipation, texture, setting, and memory—turns out to be a miniature model of how all tastes are composed.

Choice, Comparison, and Memory

Taste evolves through action. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory and Tali Sharot’s brain studies reveal that once you choose something, you begin to like it more. The act of selection, even when subconscious, rewires attention and memory. This explains why diners at a restaurant like their meal more once they’ve ordered it, and why Netflix’s predictive algorithms rely less on declared ratings than on the subtle data of what people actually click and finish watching. Choosing is not a neutral expression of preference—it manufactures it.

The Social and Algorithmic Web of Taste

You rarely choose in isolation. Online, every click, upvote, and star is both a declaration and a contagion. Early ratings can launch feedback cascades, as Sinan Aral demonstrated on Digg.com, where one positive vote produced long chains of agreement. Platforms like Yelp or TripAdvisor amplify this herding through averages and algorithms that surface positive consensus, sometimes regardless of truth. At the same time, services like Netflix or Spotify track your behavior not merely to reflect your taste but to sculpt it—by deciding what options you see next. In the digital age, curation is creation.

Culture’s Dynamics of Drift and Design

Taste also changes through collective randomness. Borrowing from genetics, researchers like R. Alexander Bentley reveal that cultural fads—from baby names to dog breeds—often follow stochastic “neutral drift,” where copying and forgetting cause fashions to rise and fall without clear causes. Likewise, Duncan Watts’s social-influence experiments show that visibility magnifies inequality: when people can see others’ preferences, peaks become taller, and “snowball smashes” dominate. Online abundance, far from democratizing taste, often narrows it through runaway attention.

The Loop Between Individual and Collective

Throughout, you learn that your pursuit of difference—whether in music, fashion, or opinion—is channeled by social imitation. Copying is efficient (Henrich), but humans also crave distinction (Simmel). These dual motives create waves of norm formation, visible from Portland subcultures to global fashion trends. The paradox: to stand apart, you must first belong somewhere. Distinctiveness breeds its own conformity.

Expertise, Evaluation, and Measurement

Professionals who claim to measure taste—panelists, judges, or curators—are no less subject to context and bias. Whether tasting spices at McCormick, judging cats by breed standards, or evaluating Olympic gymnasts, experts oscillate between analytic scoring and intuitive recall of an ideal prototype. Sequential order, fatigue, and expectation introduce hidden variances. Even standard measures like nine-point hedonic scales distort true liking, while explicit reflection can backfire—Timothy Wilson shows that explaining your feelings can make you like things less. Art and music supply the same lesson: attention, exposure, and labeling can transform indifference into attachment. What you feel as “pure” response is always mediated by learning and framing.

Taken together, Vanderbilt’s argument reshapes what “taste” means. It is not the revelation of essence but a behavioral process—a dance among sense perception, cognitive bias, cultural imitation, algorithmic mediation, and random drift. Understanding taste, he suggests, demands humility: you are both author and audience of your preferences, their product and their propagator.

At the foundation of all taste lies the body. You inherit neural wiring that biases you toward sweetness and away from bitterness—a survival system. But biology alone cannot explain your palate. Vanderbilt uses food as a laboratory to illustrate how exposure, expectation, and association reshape innate responses.

Innate Preferences and the Omnivore Challenge

Humans must balance exploration and caution. Babies love sugary flavors but reject bitter vegetables until repeated exposure overcomes neophobia. Gary Beauchamp’s research at the Monell Chemical Senses Center shows how deeply reward circuits connect to sweetness. Yet even early in life, context layers over biology: bottle-fed infants later preferred ketchup containing vanillin, linking early dietary inputs to adult taste.

Learning Through Association

Experiences forge new flavor alignments. Marcia Pelchat’s experiments with glucose capsules demonstrated that post-ingestive effects—calories absorbed after consumption—can increase liking for associated flavors, even without conscious sweetness. Over time you create “flavor objects”: integrated bundles of taste, smell, texture, and consequence. Repetition triggers Robert Zajonc’s mere exposure effect; the familiar becomes more palatable simply because it’s encountered often. Combined, these mechanisms explain why cuisines of childhood linger as comfort food long into adulthood.

Expectation and Context

Expectation mediates perception. At the U.S. Army’s Natick labs, researchers discovered that MREs rated worse when labeled as “military rations,” even if identical to supermarket food. Meanwhile, upmarket descriptions at Del Posto amplified pleasure before a bite was taken—Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson call this anticipatory “prefeeling.” Gerald Darsch and Armand Cardello’s field data showed that soldiers’ consumption fell when eating under stress, proving that the eating context, not just the recipe, shapes enjoyment.

Limits of Measurement

Vanderbilt reveals the complications of quantifying liking. The familiar nine-point hedonic scale, born from wartime labs, hides interpretive drift: what “like slightly” means varies by person and by mood. People avoid extremes and re-anchor with experience, causing favorite foods to drop on retest. Debra Zellner’s plating studies show that visual presentation alters stated liking even when eating behavior stays constant. The conclusion is practical: your rated preferences may say less about truth than about context and expectation in the moment of judgment.

Biology equips you with raw appetites, but learning weaves them into culture. The more you link experiences to positive outcomes, the more “natural” they feel. Taste is thus a living memory system—what you feed it, it becomes.

If food reveals how you learn to like, decision-making reveals how you persuade yourself that you already did. Vanderbilt shows that your tastes are constantly rewritten by the acts of choosing, predicting, and remembering. Choice doesn’t simply disclose preferences—it fabricates them.

The Self-Generating Nature of Choice

Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains why people inflate the value of their own choices. After choosing a dish, movie, or brand, you rate it higher to justify commitment. Vanderbilt’s “buffet line” example captures this: once you pick the pork, you convince yourself it’s tastier than the chicken you left behind. This psychological adjustment reduces dissonance but implies that liking follows action, not the reverse.

Anticipation and Memory

Your predictions of future pleasure shape what you eventually feel. Wilson and Gilbert call this anticipatory simulation “prefeeling.” Menus at Del Posto seduce not just with flavor but with words that activate memory and imagination; diners pre-experience delight. Once reality arrives, memory merges experience and forecast, creating post-choice rationalization. In Tali Sharot’s subliminal studies, even when people made choices unconsciously, they later preferred the options they had “chosen.” Choice itself writes value into memory’s script.

Social Projection and Feedback

You often assume others share your taste—the “false consensus effect.” This illusion stabilizes identity and justifies taste as common sense. On digital platforms, this bias scales into algorithmic feedback loops. Netflix learned to prioritize observed behavior over self-report because viewers’ ratings diverged from what they actually watched. Clicking, skipping, and rewatching express truer preferences than any after-the-fact star system.

Sequential and Comparative Biases

Your judgments depend heavily on sequence and similarity context. Amos Tversky’s contrast–assimilation framework and Thomas Mussweiler’s experiments show that adjacent choices calibrate perception: a strong predecessor makes the next performance seem weak unless similarity cues trigger assimilation. Evaluation is thus relational. In hiring, tasting, or dating, your standards evolve across the sequence, turning preference into a moving target.

Vanderbilt’s insight reframes autonomy: liking is recursive. You act, your mind adjusts, and memory records that adjustment as genuine preference. The construction is so seamless that you believe it was there all along.

Humans are copycats who think they are originals. Vanderbilt explores imitation and individuality as two sides of the same cultural mechanism. You learn by copying, but you copy selectively—to belong without dissolving into the mass.

Imitation as Adaptation

Anthropologists Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich argue that copying others is an evolutionarily efficient shortcut. Culture accumulates because individuals don’t need to rediscover survival strategies—imitation and transmission do the work. From hairstyle to consumer product, replication sustains complexity. Gabriel Tarde predicted this pattern more than a century ago: social life is imitation punctuated by innovation.

Need for Uniqueness

At the same time, people pursue distinctiveness. Georg Simmel described fashion’s centrifugal dance: elites adopt novelty, masses imitate, elites abandon, and the cycle repeats. Vanderbilt’s “Spyke” anecdote captures this logic—when a rival copied his shell art, Spyke quit, preferring originality to popularity. Jonah Berger and Chip Heath’s Livestrong wristband study shows how brand symbols shift groups when they lose exclusivity. The result is what psychologists call “optimal distinctiveness”: you crave a group small enough to feel unique but large enough for belonging.

Conformity Breeds Novelty

Efforts to be different often generate new uniformities—subcultures that function like synchronized rebellion. Normcore’s ironic plainness became its own code of cool. In that sense, cultural evolution alternates between convergence and divergence, imitation and differentiation. Trends burn out not when they lose beauty but when they lose exclusivity.

For designers and marketers, the lesson is double: encourage mimicry to diffuse innovation but leave space for self-expression. For individuals, realizing that taste signals identity more than truth can free you from chasing uniqueness and let you follow curiosity instead.

You often assume winners deserve their fame. Vanderbilt introduces a humbling corrective: much of culture’s churn may result from random drift rather than genuine superiority.

Cultural Evolution Without Selection

Borrowing from population genetics, R. Alexander Bentley models cultural change as neutral drift: minor copying errors and sampling randomness cause variants to spread or vanish by chance. The same statistical shapes describe bird songs, dog breeds, baby names, and pop hits. Bruce Byers’s recordings of chestnut-sided warblers show how unselected male call variations replaced previous ones within a decade. Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel’s study of irregular English verbs (“throve” becoming “thrived”) offers the linguistic parallel—frequency preserves variants; rarity dooms them.

Noise, Frequency, and Rogue Waves

In markets saturated with feedback, randomness couples with visibility to amplify inequality. Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik’s music experiments revealed that when participants saw others’ choices, unpredictability soared: social influence increased inequality but reduced predictability. The same snowball dynamics explain why “Happy” or “Radioactive” dominated charts for years, while equally catchy songs disappeared. Visibility and timing decide who rides the wave, not necessarily quality.

Copying Momentum

Consumers copy not only what’s popular but what seems to be getting more popular. Todd Gureckis and Robert Goldstone’s baby-name data revealed accelerating momentum effects once parents could track rising trends online. The loop between data visibility and social imitation intensifies fashions, explaining why online abundance paradoxically concentrates attention. The Internet was supposed to broaden taste; it magnified the hit economy.

Understanding drift invites humility. Success may owe more to sequence, exposure, and feedback than to inherent merit. The wise observer asks first whether randomness and social contagion suffice before invoking superior quality.

If amateurs’ tastes are fluid, can experts anchor them? Vanderbilt dives into the laboratories and competitions where people try to formalize taste—only to find subjectivity lurking beneath every metric.

Trained Senses and Language

At McCormick’s flavor labs, “human chromatographs” replace machines when chemical peaks need translation into meaning. Panelists undergo 150 hours of training to verbalize nuances like “persistence of crisp” or “musty.” By binding sensation to language, they turn ephemeral impressions into communicable data. The paradox: even with precise vocabulary, perception stays relational—you detect a taste only after it’s named. Training refines discrimination but doesn’t remove subjectivity; it standardizes it.

Judging and Memory

In cat shows, figure skating, or beer contests, judges rotate between analytic points and holistic prototypes. Order effects distort results: later performers score higher due to recency and comparative uplift (“the Best Is Yet to Come” effect). Similarity labeling alters fairness—gymnasts flagged as from the same nation benefit by association, others suffer contrast. The cognitive toolkit of categorization and memory, essential for expertise, inevitably introduces bias.

Art, Attention, and Canon

Moving from taste panels to museums, Vanderbilt shows that seeing is also structured seeing. Luc Tuymans’s unnoticed street painting underscores how expectations determine perception: you spot art where you expect it. Neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee and fMRI researcher Ed Vessel reveal that being “moved” activates both perceptual and self-referential networks simultaneously—beauty is a dialogue between eye and self. Historical exposure then codifies the canon: repeated viewing makes the familiar seem great. Kant’s dream of universal aesthetic standards dissolves into Fechner’s empirical reality—taste consolidates through exposure and consensus, not objective essence.

The pursuit of objectivity in taste ends where it began: in human psychology. Experts can discipline bias but not escape it. Their rigor teaches you the same humility the book teaches throughout—that judgment, no matter how trained, remains an act of context-bound interpretation.