which is Coke and which is Pepsi. All I want you to say is which
of the three drinks is not like the other two. Believe it or not,
you will find this task incredibly hard. If a thousand people
were to try this test, just over one-third would guess right —
which is not much better than chance; we might as well just
guess.
When I first heard about the triangle test, I decided to try it
on a group of my friends. None of them got it right. These were
all well-educated, thoughtful people, most of whom were
regular cola drinkers, and they simply couldn’t believe what
had happened. They jumped up and down. They accused me of
tricking them. They argued that there must have been
something funny about the local Pepsi and Coke bottlers. They
said that I had manipulated the order of the three glasses to
make it more difficult for them. None of them wanted to admit
to the truth: their knowledge of colas was incredibly shallow.
With two colas, all we have to do is compare two first
impressions. But with three glasses, we have to be able to
describe and hold the taste of the first and then the second cola
in our memory and somehow, however briefly, convert a
fleeting sensory sensation into something permanent — and to
do that requires knowledge and understanding of the