Narrator: What is your favorite color? It seems like a simple, innocent question. But the follow-up is far more revealing: why? Most people stumble, offering vague reasons or admitting they have no idea. We treat our preferences as fundamental parts of our identity, yet we can rarely explain their origins. This puzzle is at the heart of Tom Vanderbilt’s book, Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things. It embarks on a fascinating investigation into the hidden forces that dictate our likes and dislikes, revealing that our tastes in everything from food and music to art and even people are not as personal or innate as we believe. They are, in fact, a complex product of psychology, culture, and context.

Narrator: One of the book's foundational arguments is that our preferences are not hardwired but are actively constructed throughout our lives. A perfect illustration of this is our preference for certain colors. Vanderbilt introduces the "ecological valence theory," which proposes that we don't like colors in the abstract; we like them because of the things we associate with them. Blue, for instance, is the world’s most popular favorite color, likely because it’s the color of positive things like clear skies and clean water.

Psychologist Stephen Palmer put this theory to the test in a brilliant study. First, he asked participants to rate how much they liked a series of colors. Then, he asked a different group to list as many objects as they could think of for each of those colors. Finally, a third group rated how much they liked the objects that were named. The results were stunning: the things people liked predicted, with 80 percent accuracy, the colors they liked. People who liked blueberries and clear skies tended to like blue and cyan. This connection is so strong that it can be shaped by local loyalties. In another study, Palmer found that students at Berkeley and Stanford each showed a stronger preference for their own school's colors over those of their rival. Taste, it turns out, is not an abstract judgment but a reflection of our positive and negative experiences with the world.

Narrator: Vanderbilt demonstrates that our perception of taste is dramatically shaped by our expectations. The first taste, as the saying goes, is with the eyes. When our expectations are violated, our experience can sour, regardless of the objective quality of a product.

The infamous failure of Crystal Pepsi in the 1990s serves as a powerful case study. In blind taste tests, many people actually preferred the clear cola. However, the product was a massive commercial failure. Why? Because decades of conditioning had taught consumers that a cola-flavored drink should be dark brown. The clear liquid created a cognitive dissonance; it didn't look like what a cola was "supposed" to look like, and so it didn't taste right to them.

The U.S. military learned a similar lesson when developing MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat. Researchers at the Combat Feeding Directorate found that soldiers’ enjoyment of food was heavily influenced by its appearance and packaging. In one study, they put Green Giant corn, a familiar brand, into a standard MRE pouch, and the soldiers’ ratings for it plummeted. Conversely, when they put generic MRE corn into a Green Giant package, its ratings went up. The lesson was clear: managing expectations is paramount. Liking isn't just about the food itself, but about how well it aligns with the mental picture we have of it before it ever touches our lips.

Narrator: In the digital age, our tastes have become a massive source of data, and companies like Netflix have learned to decode them with startling accuracy. Vanderbilt explores how Netflix discovered a fundamental truth about human nature: there is often a huge gap between our aspirational selves and our actual selves.

Initially, Netflix relied on the explicit five-star rating system. But they soon noticed strange patterns. A user might give a five-star rating to a critically acclaimed documentary like An Inconvenient Truth, signaling their desire to be seen as a thoughtful, informed person. However, the data showed that the DVD would often sit at their house for weeks, unwatched. Meanwhile, a movie they rated only three stars might be watched immediately and multiple times.

This led to a profound shift in strategy. Netflix realized that what we say we like is often a performance, but what we do is the truth. They began to de-emphasize star ratings in favor of implicit behavioral data: what you watch, when you pause, what you re-watch, and what you search for. They concluded that "you are what you watch," not what you claim to like. This trove of behavioral data allows them to create hyper-personalized categories like "Mind-Bending Foreign Dramas," which not only predict what we might like but also help shape our understanding of our own taste.

Narrator: Vanderbilt argues that taste is rarely a purely individual act; it is deeply social. We are constantly looking to others for cues, and our preferences are powerfully swayed by the opinions of the crowd. The rise of online review platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor has made this social dynamic more visible than ever.

An experiment conducted by researchers on a social news site perfectly illustrates this "social influence bias." The researchers took a set of new, unrated comments and artificially gave some of them an initial "up-vote." They found that this single, fake vote had a dramatic effect. Comments that received the positive seed vote ended up with a 25 percent higher final score than the control group. This created a cascade of conformity, as subsequent users were more likely to agree with the perceived early consensus.

This effect can even work in paradoxical ways. Studies of book ratings on Goodreads have found that when a book wins a major literary prize, its average rating often goes down. The award raises the book's profile, attracting a wider audience beyond its core fans. These new readers, whose tastes may not align with the book, feel the book doesn't live up to the hype and rate it more harshly. This reveals that our liking is not an objective assessment, but a comparison between the experience and the socially-fueled expectation.

Narrator: Just as we can learn to like certain foods, we can also learn to like certain kinds of art. A key mechanism for this is the "mere exposure effect," the psychological phenomenon where people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. However, Vanderbilt shows that this effect has its limits and interacts with a work's inherent quality.

A fascinating study from the University of Leeds explored this idea by exposing students to paintings by two very different artists: John Everett Millais, a respected 19th-century painter, and Thomas Kinkade, a commercially successful but critically panned artist known as the "Painter of Light." Over the course of a semester, students were repeatedly shown works by both artists.

The results were telling. For the Millais paintings, the more the students saw them, the more they reported liking them. Mere exposure enhanced their appreciation. But for Kinkade, the opposite happened: the more they saw his work, the less they liked it. The study suggests that exposure acts as an amplifier. For art with complexity and depth, familiarity breeds affection. For art perceived as lacking substance, familiarity breeds contempt. This shows that while we can learn to like new things, our taste isn't infinitely malleable; it is an active process of engagement where we eventually learn to distinguish what is genuinely rewarding from what is merely familiar.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Taste is that we are, as Vanderbilt concludes, "strangers to our tastes." Our preferences are not a pure expression of an authentic, inner self. Instead, they are a complex and often invisible negotiation between our biology, our personal history, the powerful influence of our social circles, and the specific context in which we make a choice. Our sense of taste is not a fixed destination but a dynamic, ever-shifting landscape.

The book challenges us to move beyond simply stating what we like and to start asking why we like it. It encourages a more mindful and curious approach to our own preferences, transforming taste from a static badge of identity into an active, ongoing journey of discovery. The ultimate question it leaves us with is not just "What do I like?" but a more adventurous and open-ended one: "What could I learn to like next?"