Michelle: Okay, Mark, quick-fire round. I say a thing, you say the first word that comes to mind. Ready? Ketchup. Mark: Red. Michelle: Stradivarius violin. Mark: Expensive. Michelle: Your Netflix queue. Mark: Guilt. Michelle: Perfect. That guilt, that expense, that color association... it’s all about taste. And it turns out, we're mostly strangers to why we feel it. Mark: That hits a little too close to home. My Netflix queue is basically a digital monument to my best intentions. Michelle: Well, that's the central puzzle in Tom Vanderbilt's fantastic book, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice. He dives into this incredibly slippery subject of why we like what we like. Mark: Tom Vanderbilt... isn't he the guy who wrote that famous book about traffic? Michelle: That's the one. He's this fascinating journalist who writes about design, technology, and human behavior. So he comes at this not as a pure psychologist, but as a curious observer trying to decode the hidden systems that run our lives. Mark: So he's looking at our brains like a traffic system. I like that. It feels like there’s a lot of hidden wiring and weird intersections in there. Where does he even start?

Michelle: He starts with the most basic question imaginable, one a five-year-old would ask: What's your favorite color? He tells this charming story about his own daughter, whose favorite color changed from pink to red in a week, for no discernible reason. Mark: That's every kid, right? It’s completely arbitrary. But for adults, it feels more... real. It feels like part of our identity. I like blue. I don't know why, I just do. It feels innate. Michelle: That’s what we all think! But Vanderbilt unpacks this and finds it’s not innate at all. He points to something called the Ecological Valence Theory. Mark: Okay, hold on. 'Ecological Valence Theory'? Can you break that down for me in plain English, please? Michelle: Absolutely. It’s surprisingly simple. The theory suggests we don't like colors in a vacuum; we like the colors of things we like. A researcher named Stephen Palmer tested this. He found that blue is almost universally liked. Why? Because we have positive associations with it: clear skies, clean water. Mark: And what about a color like brown? Michelle: Generally disliked. The associations are less pleasant: feces, decay, rotting food. So your preference isn't for the color blue itself, but for all the good things your brain has filed away under the label 'blue' over your entire lifetime. Mark: Whoa. So my profound, identity-defining love for blue is just... good PR from Mother Nature? That feels a little deflating, honestly. Michelle: It’s a bit of a mind-bender, isn't it? And it gets weirder when you apply it to food. Vanderbilt brings up this incredible study about ketchup. Researchers at a country fair in Germany had people sample two ketchups. One was standard, the other had a tiny, almost undetectable amount of vanillin added. Mark: Vanilla in ketchup? That sounds... wrong. Michelle: You'd think! But here's the twist. After the taste test, they asked the participants a strange question: "Were you bottle-fed or breast-fed as an infant?" Mark: Come on. What could that possibly have to do with ketchup preference? Michelle: Everything, it turns out. People who were breast-fed overwhelmingly preferred the 'natural' ketchup. But the people who had been bottle-fed—whose baby formula often contained vanillin as a flavor compound—strongly preferred the ketchup with the hint of vanilla. Mark: That is insane. So a choice I make in the grocery store today could be dictated by something that happened when I was six months old that I have zero memory of? That's... deeply unsettling. Michelle: It shows our tastes are often constructed, not discovered. They're built from these forgotten experiences. Vanderbilt has a great personal story about this. He lived in Spain in the 90s and noticed all the men were wearing red pants. It was just the style. So he bought a pair and wore them all the time. Mark: Bold move. Michelle: He felt great in them! But then he moved back to New York, and suddenly, no one was wearing red pants. They felt ridiculous, loud, wrong. So they stayed in his drawer. The pants didn't change, his feelings about them did. The taste was entirely dependent on the context. Mark: Okay, so our brains are full of these hidden tripwires from childhood and culture. But that feels... old world. What about now, in the age of the internet, where we have infinite choice? Surely that's different. We have all the information, we can make our own calls.

Michelle: That's the perfect question, and it's where Vanderbilt really shines in the book. He takes us inside the places that are actively engineering our taste, starting with Netflix. We all think the star rating system is how Netflix knows us, right? You watch a movie, you give it four stars. Mark: Yeah, I meticulously rate everything. I see it as my civic duty to the algorithm. I'm giving them good data! Michelle: Well, here's the bad news. Netflix found out that what we say we like is often aspirational, not honest. Vanderbilt tells this great story from the early days of Netflix, the DVD-by-mail era. They noticed that certain DVDs, like Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, would be rented by thousands of people... and then just sit in their homes, unwatched, for weeks. Mark: Oh, I've been there. That’s my 'intellectual coffee table book' move. It's pure self-deception. I'm trying to convince my own algorithm that I'm smarter than I am. Michelle: You and everyone else! Vanderbilt calls it the 'Inconvenient Truth as a cup holder' phenomenon. We rent the documentary to signal to ourselves and to the algorithm that we're serious, thoughtful people. But on a Tuesday night, we're not watching a climate change documentary. We're watching a reality baking show. Mark: Guilty as charged. So what did Netflix do? Michelle: They shifted their entire philosophy. They realized, 'You are what you watch,' not 'You are what you rate.' They started focusing on implicit behavioral data. What you actually click on, how long you watch, what you search for, when you pause, what you re-watch. Your behavior, they found, is far more honest than your opinion. Mark: So they're not just reflecting my taste, they're kind of... calling my bluff. They know I'm not the person who watches serious foreign dramas; I'm the person who watches sitcoms from the 90s for the fifth time. And then they use that to shape what I see next. It's a feedback loop. Michelle: A powerful one. And it’s not just algorithms. It's crowds, too. He explores the world of online reviews, like on Yelp or TripAdvisor. We think we're reading a bunch of independent opinions, but research shows we're incredibly susceptible to social influence bias. Mark: What does that mean, exactly? Michelle: An experiment showed that if you artificially give the very first comment on an article a positive 'up vote,' it creates a cascade of positivity. The final score ends up being 25 percent higher than if it had started neutrally. We see an early positive review, and we tend to herd, to conform. We don't want to be the one person who dislikes the place everyone else seems to love. Mark: So we're not just choosing a restaurant; we're subconsciously trying to agree with the first few people who showed up. Our 'independent' choice is anything but. Michelle: Exactly. Between the algorithms that know our secret habits and the digital crowds that nudge our opinions, the external forces shaping our taste have never been more powerful or more visible.

Mark: Okay, so if my personal taste is basically an illusion constructed from forgotten baby formula and cultural pressure, and my online choices are being manipulated by algorithms and crowds... are we doomed? Is there no such thing as an authentic choice anymore? Michelle: It sounds bleak, but Vanderbilt doesn't leave us in despair. His conclusion is actually quite empowering. He quotes the end of the book's introduction: "We are, in effect, strangers to our tastes. It is time we got acquainted." The first step isn't to fight the system, but just to understand ourselves better. Mark: To get acquainted with our own minds. How do we do that? Michelle: He suggests that one of the most powerful things we can do is to simply talk about why we like something. To articulate it. The act of putting words to a preference moves it from a vague, subconscious gut feeling to a conscious, considered thought. Mark: That makes sense. So instead of just saying 'I like this movie,' I should try to explain that 'I like it because the dialogue was sharp, and the ending was unexpected, and it reminded me of my own family.' The act of explaining it makes the liking more real, more my own. Michelle: Precisely. It adds a layer of self-awareness. It's interesting because the book itself got some mixed reviews. Some readers found it a bit meandering, jumping from cat shows to MREs to Netflix. But I think that's the point. Taste is meandering. It's not a straight line from A to B. The value is in the exploration, in the curiosity. Mark: So the takeaway isn't to try and escape the system, but to be a more conscious participant in it. To know that these forces are at play and to respond by being more thoughtful about my own choices. I like that. It feels less like being a puppet and more like being a detective of my own mind. Michelle: That’s a perfect way to put it. So, I'll ask you a reflective question to end on: What's one thing you've liked recently—a song, a food, a movie—that you've never really stopped to think about why you liked it? Mark: Wow, that's a great question. I'm thinking of a specific coffee I buy. I just like it, but I've never broken down why. Is it the taste? The packaging? The memory it triggers? I'll have to think about that. We'd love to hear from our listeners too. What's your 'guilty pleasure' that maybe isn't so guilty after all, once you think about it? Let us know on our socials. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.