Authors: Tom Vanderbilt

“No,” I say. When I lived in Spain, I bought and wore a pair of red pants, because I had noticed Spanish men wearing them. Once I got to New York, where hardly any men wore red pants, they stayed in the drawer. What was mainstream in Madrid was, to my eyes anyway, quite
fashion forward in America circa 1991. But I do not explain any of this to her.

“You should get a pair of red pants.”

“You think so?”

Nods. “What's your favorite number?”

This stops me. “Hmmm, I'm not sure I have a favorite number.” Then I offer, “Maybe eight.” As I say it, I try to fathom why. Perhaps because as a young child I always thought it was the most fun to write?

“Mine is six,” she says.

“Why?”

Furrows brow, shrugs. “I don't know. I just like it.”

Why do we like the things we like? In our brief conversation, my daughter and I had raised at least five important principles in the science of preferences. First, they tend be
categorical:
I like blue, just not for cars (and why ever not?). You may like orange juice, just not in cocktails. Second, they are usually
contextual
. The pants that charmed in Spain did not wear so well in New York. You have probably brought home some souvenir from your travels (espadrilles, a colorful blanket) that delighted in the place of its purchase but now sits in baleful exile in a closet.
People buy fewer black cars when it gets hotter and pay more for houses with pools in the summertime. Third, they are often
constructed
. When asked for my favorite number, a digit swam into my head first, dragging in its wake possible explanations. Fourth, they are inherently
comparative
. Even before infants can talk, they seem more drawn to those who share their taste than those who do not.
In one elegantly constructed (and no doubt fun to watch) study, infants first chose one of two foods. Then puppets were shown either “liking” or “disliking” those same foods. When the puppets were presented to the infants, the young research subjects tended to reach for the ones who “liked” the food they liked.
Maddeningly, however, tastes are rarely
congenital:
However we may try to influence them, however much genetic material we share, children rarely match parental preferences in anything.

My daughter and I ended the conversation with the most familiar fact of all about tastes and preferences: They can be devilishly hard to explain. Nearly three centuries ago, the philosopher Edmund Burke, in one of the first thoroughgoing essays on taste, complained that
“
this delicate and aerial faculty, which seems too volatile to endure even the chains of a definition, cannot be properly tried by any test, nor regulated by any standard.”

People struggling to understand taste have sometimes suggested there is nothing to explain. As the Nobel Prizeâwinning economists George Stigler and Gary Becker controversially argued, “
No significant behavior has been illuminated by assumptions of differences in taste.” Because any behaviorâmy daughter's fondness for the number sixâcould simply be attributed to a private preference, preferences could seem to “
explain everything and therefore nothing.” Arguing over tastes, Stigler and Becker suggested, would be like arguing over the Rocky Mountains: “Both are there, will be there next year, too, and are the same to all men.”

But the Rocky Mountains
are
changing, as one economist noted, just not at a speed one can discern. As psychologists, increasingly aided by neuroscientists, have shown, in study after study, tastes change, often in the course of a single experiment: We like food more when a certain music is played; we like a certain music less when we learn some insalubrious fact about its composer.

Our tastes seem endlessly “adaptive,” in the word favored by the influential Norwegian political theorist Jon Elster. Using the fable of sour grapes, in which the hapless fox, unable to reach a bunch of grapes he clearly desires, labels them “sour,” Elster noted that rather than simply move on to his
next
preferred choiceâas “rational choice” theorists might have itâthe fox retroactively “downgrades” the grapes. The grapes were not sour, nor did the fox lose his overall taste for grapes. Preferences, Elster argued, may also be “counter-adaptive”: Not being able to get the grapes, in a different situation, might have only increased the fox's desire to have them. In both cases, the preference seems shaped by the constraints of the moment, and the question looms: What is the fox's
true
preference for the grapes?

Where economists tend to think that a choice “reveals” a preference, psychologists often suspect a choice
creates
the preference.
Imagine the fox making a “free choice” between grapes and cherries and then reporting he likes more what he has chosen; is he choosing what he wants or wanting what he chooses? Both may be right, for trying to fathom taste itself is a slippery process. Already you may be wondering, are we talking about the sensory experience of taste? Or one's taste in
clothes? Or what society thinks is “good taste”? These are all subtly interrelated; the fox could have enjoyed the taste of the grapes, but he also could have liked the feeling of being the only animal able to enjoy the grapes.

For now, think of taste as the things one likes (for whatever reason). But one still has to identify the tastes; note who holds those tastes; try to account for why they do; then try to explain why other people (who might be quite similar across other variables) do
not;
try to figure out why tastes change; what tastes are for; and so on. As the design writer Stephen Bayley surmised, hoisting the flag of surrender, “
An academic history of taste is not so much difficult as impossible.” And yet, I think we can account for tastes. We can discern why and how we come to have tastes or what is going on when we express a preference for something out of a crowded field.

What is
your
favorite number? If you are like most people, you answered, “Seven.” Sevenâagain, in the Westâis the blue of numbers. The two were so often chosen together as favorites in a set of 1970s studies that psychologists began to talk of a “
blue seven phenomenon,” almost as if they were linked in some way. Leaving aside color for a moment, why should seven be preferred?

As with most preferences, the answer is a tangle of cultural learning, psychological biases, and internal qualities, influenced by the context of the choice. The simplest reason seven is a favorite is that it is culturally popular. It is the “lucky” number, probably because it is “
the sacred number
par excellence
,” as one scholar described it, making noteworthy appearances “in the Bible and the Rabbinic literature.”
Perhaps it is the way our ability to keep strings of things in working memory falls off at the “magical” seven (hence the digits in your phone number).

Or maybe there is something about seven itself. When asked to name the first number between one and ten that pops into their heads, people most often say seven (followed by three). They may want to make the choice that feels most “random,” which seems, for obscure reasons of “mathiness,” to be seven. We can imagine the thought process: “One or ten? Too obvious. Five? That's right in the middle. Two? Even numbers seem less random than odd ones, don't they? Zero? Is that a number?” As a prime, seven seems less related to other numbers,
thus more random: It stands alone; it came unaccompanied by patterns. But for all its power, when you change the contextâthink of a number between six and twenty-twoâsuddenly seven is no longer the top choice.
And yet its influence lives on; seventeen now comes out on top.

Each day, we are asked to decide, in many different ways, why we like one thing more than another. Why did you change the radio station when that song came on? Why did you “like” that Facebook post and not the other one? Why did you choose the lemonade over the Diet Coke? At one end, these choices are small and mundane ways we have of ordering our world, much as we “order” breakfast: “How would you like your eggs? White or whole wheat? Sausage or bacon?” As minor as those choices seem, you can surely appreciate the displeasure involved when they are gotten wrong. At the other end, these preferences might have morphed into broad, deep-seated tastes that help us define who we are: “I
love
country music.” “I adore the sound of the French language.” “I don't like sci-fi films.”

As for why my daughter was so obsessed with favorites, there is actually scant research on the topic.
With a touch of alarm, I noted that in one of the rare mentions of a “favorite number” I could find in the scientific literature, it was associated with obsessive-compulsive disorders. Without a grand theory, it is not hard to envision “favorites” as easily understood, cheaply acquired tokens of identity, ways of asserting yourself in the world and understanding others, of showing you are both like
and
unlike other people. Tellingly, one of the first items of information my daughter gives me about a new friend, after noting the child's birthday, is his or her favorite color.

One might presume that we grow out of this ever-shifting whirlwind of preferences and become rational holders of stable tastes. But this is not always the case. For example, we often, as if by superstition, seem to have a predilection for things that have no intrinsic superiority over another thing.

When you enter a public bathroom, for instance, do you have a preference for which stall to use? Assuming all are open, do you like to take one that is on the end of the row or in the middle? According to at least one study, conducted at a “
public restroom at a California state beach” (and clearly reporting from the frontiers of social science), people preferred the middle stalls over the ends. The patrons were not queried, but one might imagine they had their reasons, just as with
choosing a number. The first stall may seem too close to the door, while the stall on the end seems too far away. So the one in the middle is “just right.” Is it the best choice? It depends on the criteria (ironically, these most preferred stalls may be the least clean, according to one microbiologist who measured bacteria counts).

To take another bathroom example, there is no strongly functional basis in a preference for the toilet paper being hung “over” or “under.”
Has paper mounted in either fashion ever failed to adequately dispatch?
As inconsequential as either preference may seem, the advice columnist Ann Landers famously reported that it generated the highest volume of letters of any issueâabortion, gun controlâshe had tackled.

Perhaps the intimate nature of bathrooms brings out curiously strident convictions. But preferences can be so weak that they appear to be what psychologists call “unmotivated preferences,” or preferences that seem to emerge for no real reason. Unmotivated preferences are, as one study described them, “a bit of experimental debris that tidy psychological theories have yet to sweep up.” Perhaps we are employing some unseen, and barely expressed, rule in making such choices, a rule that helps us, in essence, choose without making a choice. Even then, the idea that most people settle on the same preference would hint that the most seemingly arbitrary choice might have some reasoning to it (and hence is not truly unmotivated).

But where does that preference
come
from? A classic exercise in linguistics is to ask people which of a series of words (for example, “blick” or “bnick”) could most realistically be a word in English. You do not have to be a Scrabble champion to guess that “blick” is more likely, simply because there are English words that start with “bl” but none with “bn.” But what happens, asks the MIT linguist Adam Albright, when you ask people to pick the word they prefer out of a series of words that are
all
unlikely to be real English wordsâ“bnick,” “bdick,” “bzick”? How and why does one prefer something when there seems to be little solid basis for a preference, and yet one
must
choose among alternatives (in what is called a “forced choice” exercise)?
If people seem to prefer “bnick,” is it because it somehow seems most like other words in English (even if it is not)? Or is it because of some inherent “phonological bias”; that is, we like the way one “onset cluster”âwhat linguists term those first two consonants in the beginning of “bnick” or “bzick”âsounds more than the other when we say it? The answer seems to be in some
ineffable combination of what we have learned and what we inherently favor. Because learning to like things usually happens beneath the level of conscious awareness, it can be hard to tell the two apart.

Which brings us back to blue. Not long after my daughter made her pronouncement, I traveled to Berkeley to visit Stephen Palmer, a professor of psychology at the University of California who directs the Visual Perception and Aesthetics Lab, usually just called the Palmer Lab. Palmer and his colleagues have come up with one of the more compelling theories for why we like the colors we do.

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