— although that is undeniable. When we become expert in
something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I
mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably
account for their reactions.
Jonathan Schooler — whom I introduced in the previous
chapter — once did an experiment with Timothy Wilson that
beautifully illustrates this difference. It involved strawberry
jam. Consumer Reports put together a panel of food experts and
had them rank forty-four different brands of strawberry jam
from top to bottom according to very specific measures of
texture and taste. Wilson and Schooler took the first-, eleventh-,
twenty-fourth-, thirty-second-, and forty-fourth-ranking jams —
Knott’s Berry Farm, Alpha Beta, Featherweight, Acme, and
Sorrell Ridge — and gave them to a group of college students.
Their question was, how close would the students’ rankings
come to the experts? The answer is, pretty close. The students
put Knott’s Berry Farm second and Alpha Beta first (reversing
the order of the first two jams). The experts and the students
both agreed that Featherweight was number three. And, like the
experts, the students thought that Acme and Sorrell Ridge were
markedly inferior to the others, although the experts thought
Sorrell Ridge was worse than Acme, while the students had the