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Looking back, we can find it hard to believe we did not like something we now do. Current popularity gets projected backward: We forget that a now ubiquitous song like the Romantics' “What I Like About You” was never a hit or that recently in vogue “antique” baby names like Isabella or Chloe, which seem to speak to some once-flourishing tradition, were never popular (
Mittie or Virgie were more consistently liked names of the early twentieth century).

It now seems impossible to imagine, a few decades ago, the scandal provoked by the now widely cherished Sydney Opera House. The Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, was practically driven from the country, his name went unuttered at the opening ceremony, the sense of national scandal was palpable toward this harborside monstrosity. Not only did the building not fit the traditional form of an opera house; it did not fit the traditional form of a
building
. It was most advanced and
un
acceptable. It was as foreign as its architect.

The truth is, most people probably did not know what to make of it, and our default setting, faced with an insecure unknown, is disliking. Frank Gehry, talking about his iconic, widely admired Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, admitted that “
it took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually.” The architect Mark Wigley suggests that “
maybe we only ever learn something when some form we think of as foreign provokes us—and we resist. But sometimes, many times, in the middle of the resistance, we end up loving this thing that has provoked us”—even if it is no longer the same “thing” it was when it first provoked us.

Fluency begets liking. When shown images of buildings, architects have rated them as “
less complex” than laypersons did; in other words, they “read” them more fluently, and the buildings seem less “foreign.” The role of the architect, suggests Wigley, is not to “give the client exactly what he was asking for”—in other words, to cater to current taste—but to “change the idea of what one can ask for,” or to project future tastes
no one knew they had. No one said an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. The world changed around the building, in response to it, which is why, in the curious words of one architecture critic, “
Utzon's breathtaking building looks better today than ever.”

A few decades from now, someone will inevitably look with dread upon a new building and say, “The Sydney Opera House, now there's a building. Why can't we build things like that anymore?” This argument—for example, “Why isn't music as good as it used to be?”—reflects a historical selection bias, one colorfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. “Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn't better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”

The only guarantee we have of taste is that it will change. Now let us look a bit more closely at exactly how.

In a 2011 sketch on the show
Portlandia
, the obsessive satirical catalog of the hipster mores of the Oregon city, an exaggeratedly posturing character known as Spyke—replete with “chin beard,” lobe-stretching disk earrings, and a fixed-gear bike—is shown walking past a bar. He sees some people inside, equally adorned with the trappings of a certain kind of cool, and gives an affirming nod. A few days later, he spies a clean-shaven guy wearing khakis and a dress shirt at the bar. “Aw, c'mon!” he hollers. “Guy like that is hanging out here? That bar is so
over
!” It only gets worse: He sees his straight-man nemesis astride a fixed-gear bicycle, partaking in “shell art,” and wearing a chin beard—all of which, he churlishly admonishes, is “over.” A year later, we see Spyke, freshly shorn of beard, wearing business casual, and having a banal conversation, perched in the very same bar that led off the whole cycle. The nemesis? He loiters outside, scornfully declaring the bar to be “over.”

The sketch wonderfully encapsulates the idea of taste as a kind of
perpetual motion machine. This machine is driven in part by the oscillations of novelty and familiarity, of hunger and satiation, that curious internal psychophysical calculus that causes us to tire of food, music, the color orange. But it is also driven in part by the subtle movements of people trying to be like each other and people trying to be different from each other. There is a second-guessing kind of struggle here, not unknown to strategists of Cold War–era game theory (in which players are rarely acting on “perfect information”). Or, indeed, to readers familiar with Dr. Seuss's Sneetches, the mythical star-adorned creatures who suddenly ditch their decorations when they discover their rival plain-bellied counterparts “have stars upon thars.”

That taste might move in the kind of ouroboros-like cycle that
Portlandia
hypothesized is not so far-fetched. A French mathematician named Jonathan Touboul identified a “
non-concerted emergent collective phenomenon of looking alike trying to look different,” or what he called the “hipster effect.” Unlike “cooperative systems,” in which everyone might agree in a coordinated fashion on what decisions to make, the hipster effect occurs, he suggests, when people try to make decisions in opposition to the majority.

Because no one knows exactly what other people are going to do next, and information can be noisy or delayed, there can also be periods of brief “synchronization,” in which nonconformists fail to be “
disaligned with the majority.” Spyke, in reality, might have had to see several people doing shell art—maybe it even suddenly appeared at a store in the mall—before quickly packing it in. And because there are varying degrees of hipness, one person may choose to wade into a trend later than another, that person is followed by another, and so on, until, like an astronomical explorer chasing a dead star, there is nothing really there anymore.
*
¹
As another modeling analysis put it, “
The quest for distinctiveness can also generate conformity.”

The
Portlandia
sketch actually goes well beyond taste and illuminates two central, if seemingly contradictory, strands of human behavior. The first is that we want to be like other people. “
The social being,
in the degree that he is social, is essentially imitative,” wrote the rather overlooked French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in his 1890 book
The Laws of Imitation
. Imitating others, what is known as “social learning,” is an evolutionary adaptive strategy; that is, it helps you survive, even prosper. While it is seen in other species, there are no better social learners than humans, none that take that knowledge and
continue
to build upon it, through successive generations.

The sum of this social learning—culture—is what makes humans so unique, and so uniquely successful in spreading throughout the globe.
As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich notes, humans, despite being more genetically alike than other primates, have foraged in the Arctic, harvested crops in the tropics, and lived pastorally in deserts—a wider range than all the other primates put together. This is not because we were meant to but because we learned to.

In their book
Not by Genes Alone
, the anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson use the example of a bitter plant that turns out to have medicinal value. Our sensory system would interpret the bitter as potentially harmful and thus inedible. Instinctively, there is no reason we should
want
to eat it. But someone eats it anyway and sees some curiously beneficial result. Someone else sees this and gives it a try. “
We take our medicine in spite of its bitter taste,” they write, “not because our sensory psychology has evolved to make it less bitter, but because the idea that it has therapeutical value has spread through the population.” It is like the primordial “first sip of beer” for an entire culture.

People imitate, and culture becomes adaptive, they argue, because learning from others is more efficient than trying everything out on your own through costly and time-consuming trial and error. The same is as true for people now reading Netflix or TripAdvisor reviews as it was for primitive foragers trying to figure out which foods were poisonous or where to find water. When there are too many choices, or the answer does not seem obvious, it seems better to go with the flow; after all, you might miss out on something good.

My favorite example of this comes from a study of Ugandan chimpanzees conducted by a pair of Scottish researchers. One chimp, an adult male they named Tinka, had almost completely paralyzed hands after he was caught in a hunter's snare. He also had a chronic skin condition. Because he was not a high-ranking chimp, he could not rely on
others to scratch him. So Tinka improvised: He grasped a vine with his foot and pulled it across his back, the way one would dry oneself with a towel.

Clever stuff. Apparently, some juvenile chimpanzees thought so too: They began scratching themselves in the Tinka way, even though
they had no need to
. One of the researchers, Richard Byrne, told me the suggestion had been made that the chimps were mocking Tinka in some way, which he discounts: “That seems to imply a lot more theory of mind than I'm inclined to grant chimpanzees.” More likely, they did it simply to see what the point of it was, to see what they were missing. “Of course, there was no point,” Byrne said, “so they gave up that way of scratching in time.” Curiously, even the most arbitrary, nonfunctional behavior can spread.
One day in 2010, at a chimp refuge in Zambia, researchers at the Max Planck Institute observed that a chimp they'd named Julie had started putting a single blade of grass in her ear. Unlike Tinka's scratching mechanism, this seemed to have no purpose, even to Julie. And yet, not long after, most of the chimps of the group were seen also sporting ear grass.

This sort of imitative behavior has often been seen as crude and a bit slavish, hence the negative connotation in English of the verb “to ape.” But no ape likes to ape more than humans do. In one compelling study, the researchers Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten had a human subject demonstrate, to chimps, the proper way to open a box containing a food reward. In some conditions, the box was opaque; in others, transparent. Some of the moves the human guide performed were necessary to open the box, while some were not. When the clear box was used first, and chimps had a better sense of what was going on, they discarded the irrelevant steps the human model was showing them. They did this even when they tried to open the opaque box; they had transferred the learning.

When a similar experiment was performed with preschool children, however, the kids “
tended to re-create the actions they observed without appearing to consider the causal efficiency of their behaviour.” It is not as if the kids could not figure out cause and effect or that opening the box was too complex (for they seemed to imitate closely even when the task was made easier). Rather, suggested Horner and Whiten, the children seemed to focus more on the
model
than the task, even when
that model was not showing them the easiest way to open the box. To ape is to be human.

If you are the parent of a small child, as I am, you probably do not need an experiment to inform you of children's tendency to imitate. One day, I asked my daughter why her pant legs were pushed up slightly. Because her friend Madeline's were, she told me. “Did you like the way it looked, or is it because you like your friend?” I asked. The question seemed to confuse her, and I sensed she wanted to say, “Both,” without being able to disentangle the causes. It just seemed something worth copying, for whatever reason.

Ironically, the things that are often the
least
functional—like small variations in fashion—are the ones we seem to most want to copy. This is precisely because, the sociologist Georg Simmel suggested over a century ago, “
they are independent of the vital motives of human action.” Minor fashion gradations acquire such great power in their very lack of meaning, as well as the relatively low costs of switching. As noted by Adam Smith, “
The modes of furniture change less rapidly than those of dress; because furniture is commonly more durable.”

But imitation is going on everywhere. Recall the preschool experiments mentioned in chapter 1; children's food choices depended on what the other kids at their table were eating. Humans seem programmed to learn socially, as if in the face of uncertainty we instinctively rely on what others are doing. So powerful is this instinct that we not only look to others to see what to do but choose to do the things that others are
looking
at.
In a study conducted by Henrich and other researchers at the University of British Columbia, children watched videos of adult “models” consuming food. Some models had bystanders watching them; others had bystanders looking away. When later asked what food they would prefer, children were more likely to choose the food eaten by the model who was watched by others. “
When environmental cues are not of sufficiently high quality,” write Henrich and Robert Boyd, “individuals imitate.”

Think of the psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous New York City street corner experiment in which he had people look up toward a building—at nothing. The more people who were doing it, the more
others stopped to look. And why not? How could there not be something valuable in what so many others were doing?
*
²

But if social learning is so easy and efficient, if all this imitation is such a good way to ensure the survival of our genes, it raises the question of why anyone does anything different to begin with. Or indeed why someone, like Spyke, might abandon an innovation. It is a question asked of evolution itself: Why is there so much
stuff
for natural selection to sift through? Survival of the fittest, as the biologist Hugo de Vries pointed out, does not explain “
arrival of the fittest.” Jørn Utzon could have turned in a more traditional opera house design; the Impressionists could have played more to the tastes of the current market.
The artist or innovator who was attacked in his day seems like some kind of genetic altruist, sacrificing his own immediate fitness for some future payoff at the level of the group.