ative has had nothing to do with advancing the project or has, in some
cases, voted against it.
While politicians have long strained to associate themselves with the
values of motherhood, country, and apple pie, it may be in the last of
these connections—to food—that they have been most clever. For in-
stance, it is White House tradition to try to sway the votes of balking
legislators over a meal. It can be a picnic lunch, a sumptuous breakfast,
or an elegant dinner; but when an important bill is up for grabs, out
comes the silverware. And political fund-raising these days regularly
involves the presentation of food. Notice, too, that at the typical fund-
raising dinner the speeches, the appeals for further contributions and
heightened effort never come before the meal is served, only during or
after. The advantages to this pairing of the affairs of the table with those
of the state are several: For example, time is saved and the reciprocity
rule is engaged. The least recognized benefit, however, may be the one
uncovered in research conducted in the 1930s by the distinguished
psychologist Gregory Razran.
Using what he termed the “luncheon technique,” he found that his
subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while
they were eating. In the example most relevant for our purposes,
Razran’s subjects were presented with some political statements they
had rated once before. At the end of the experiment, after all the polit-
ical statements had been presented, Razran found that only certain of
them had gained in approval—those that had been shown while food
was being eaten. And these changes in liking seem to have occurred
unconsciously, since the subjects could not remember which of the
statements they had seen during the food service.
How did Razran come up with the luncheon technique? What made
him think it would work? The answer may lie in the dual scholarly
roles he played during his career. Not only was he a respected independ-
ent researcher, he was also one of the earliest translators into English
of the pioneering psychological literature of Russia. It was a literature
dedicated to the study of the association principle and dominated by
the thinking of a brilliant man, Ivan Pavlov.
Although a scientist of varied and elaborated talent—he had, for in-
stance, won a Nobel Prize years earlier for his work on the digestive
system—Pavlov’s most important experimental demonstration was
simplicity itself. He showed that he could get an animal’s typical re-
sponse to food (salivation) to be directed toward something irrelevant
to food (a bell) merely by connecting the two things in the animal’s
mind. If the presentation of food to a dog was always accompanied by
the sound of a bell, soon the dog would salivate to the bell alone, even
when there was no food to be had.
146 / Influence