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In one experiment
: See E. Robinson, J. Blissett, and S. Higgs, “Changing Memory of Food Enjoyment to Increase Food Liking, Choice, and Intake,”
British Journal of Nutrition
108, no. 8 (2012): 1505–10.

Buyer's remorse
: See Yan Zhang, “Buyer's Remorse: When Evaluation Is Affect-Based Before You Choose but Deliberation-Based Afterwards” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, 2009).

Even amnesiacs
: Matthew D. Lieberman et al., “Do Amnesics Exhibit Cognitive Dissonance Reduction? The Role of Explicit Memory and Attention in Attitude Change,”
Psychological Science
, 12, no. 2 (March 2001): 135–40.

The same effect, interestingly
: See Geraldine Coppin et al., “I'm No Longer Torn After Choice: How Explicit Choices Implicitly Shape Preference of Odors,”
Psychological Science
21 (2010): 489–93. As they write, “We demonstrated the existence of postchoice preference changes not only when choices were remembered, but also, critically, when choices were forgotten.”

Even when people were making
: Tali Sharot et al., “How Choice Reveals and Shapes Expected Hedonic Outcome,”
Journal of Neuroscience
, March 25, 2009, 3760–65. The researchers note that subjects might have had some preference for a vacation destination before they made their choice but that “these differences may not have been large enough prechoice to be captured behaviorally using standard ratings.” But, they note, “postchoice differences in preferences became large enough to be observed using the same rating scale. The critical finding is that after a decision was made, the difference in caudate nucleus activity associated with the selected, versus the rejected, option was further enhanced.” For another study, which involved an increase in liking for a CD after it was chosen (associated with specific brain activity), see Jungang Qin et al., “How Choice Modifies Preference: Neural Correlates of Choice Justification,”
NeuroImage
55 (2011): 240–46.

In a follow-up study
: The authors point out that they were trying, in this study, to counter a methodological critique that has been made against arguments that preference can come after choice: “The core argument here is that people's preferences cannot be measured perfectly, and are subject to rating noise. As participants gain experience with the rating scale they will provide more accurate ratings such that post-choice shifts in ratings simply reflect the unmasking of the participants' initial preferences (which can be predicted by their choices) rather than reflecting any changes in preference induced by choice.” In this study,
however, preferences were actually entirely detached from the decision-making process. See Tali Sharot et al., “Do Decisions Shape Preference? Evidence from Blind Choice,”
Psychological Science
9 (2010): 1231–35.

Some even suggest
: See Carlos Alós-Ferrer et al., “Choices and Preferences: Evidence from Implicit Choices and Response Times,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
48, no. 6 (Nov. 2012): 1336–42.

In studies Zellner has done
: See Debra Z. Zellner et al., “Protection for the Good: Subcategorization Reduces Hedonic Contrast,”
Appetite
38 (2002): 175–80. Zellner notes, “Notice the subjects had plenty of room in the rating scale to indicate that the test stimuli were less good than the context (good) stimuli without indicating that they disliked them.”

A more palatable opening
: See Martin Yeomans, “Palatability and the Microstructure of Feeding in Humans: The Appetizer Effect,”
Appetite
27 (1996): 119–33. In another study, it was noted that the mere
sight
of a palatable meal (versus a less palatable meal) was enough to increase the subjects' “rated desire to eat.” See Andrew J. Hill et al., “Hunger and Palatability: Tracking Ratings of Subjective Experience Before, During, and After the Consumption of Preferred and Less Preferred Food,”
Appetite
5 (1984): 361–71.

The peak of our sudden disliking
: “For all sensory variables measured and for all foods consumed, the greatest decline in pleasantness occurred for the eaten food 2 min after consumption.” See Marion Heterington, Barbara J. Rolls, and Victoria J. Burley, “The Time Course of Sensory-Specific Satiety,”
Appetite
12 (1989): 57–68.

“The pleasantness of foods”
: Barbara J. Rolls et al., “How Sensory Properties of Foods Affect Human Feeding Behavior,”
Physiological Behavior
29 (1982): 409–17.

In monkeys the mere
sight:
The drop-off was much less for foods that had not been eaten, even after satiation. Hugo D. Critchley and Edmund T. Rolls, “Hunger and Satiety Modify the Olfactory and Visual Neurons in the Primate Orbitofrontal Cortex,”
Journal of Neurophysiology
75, no. 4 (April 1996): 1673–86.

Scientists have speculated
: See, for example, Edmund T. Rolls, “Multisensory Neuronal Convergence of Taste, Somatosensory, Visual, Olfactory, and Auditory Inputs,” in
The Handbook of Multisensory Processes
, ed. Gemma Calvert, Charles Spence, and Barry E. Stein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 319.

“There were no failures”
: See Clara M. Davis, “Results of the Self-Selection of Diets by Young Children,”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
, Sept. 1939, 257–61. For an excellent account of the context and impact of Davis's work, see Stephen Strauss, “Clara M. Davis and the Wisdom of Letting Children Choose Their Own Diets,”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
, Nov. 7, 2006, 1199–201. Strauss notes that Davis had planned a follow-up experiment that would measure what would happen if infants could pick from less healthy, processed foods: “But alas, it was not to be: ‘The depression dashed this hope,' she laconically remarked, after a lack of funding forced the original experiment itself to end in 1931.”

Sensory-specific satiety
: F. Zampollo et al., “Food Plating Preferences of Children: The Importance of Presentation on Desire for Diversity,”
Acta Paediatrica
101 (2012): 61–66. That same study noted that children seemed to desire the maximum number—seven—of food items and colors.

When people were offered
: Barbara J. Rolls, Edward A. Rowe, and Edmund T. Rolls, “How Sensory Properties of Foods Affect Human Feeding Behavior,”
Appetite
12 (1989): 57–68. Interestingly, the researchers also conducted an experiment to see if the “shape” of food would affect sensory-specific satiety, using pasta (“bow ties,” “hoops,” and “spaghetti”). They reported that “there was a larger decrease in the pleasantness of the taste of the shape of the pasta eaten…[t]han of the other shapes of the pasta which were not eaten.”

In a potato chip study
: Andrea Maier, Zata Vickers, and J. Jeffrey Inman, “Sensory-Specific Satiety, Its Crossovers, and Subsequent Choice of Potato Chip Flavors,”
Appetite
49 (2007): 419–28.

In the so-called ice cream effect
: Robert J. Hyde and Steven A. Witherly, “Dynamic Contrast: A Sensory Contribution to Palatability,”
Appetite
21 (1993): 1–16.

the so-called dessert effect
: As Elizabeth Capaldi notes, “Our habit of eating dessert at the end of a meal will increase preference for the sweet taste of the dessert because the postingestive consequences of the meal are more closely associated with the flavor of the dessert than the flavor of the meal.” See Capaldi, “Conditioned Food Preferences,” in
Psychology of Learning and Motivation
, ed. Douglas Medin (San Diego: Academic Press, 1992), 9.

“A few bites”
: Elizabeth Rode, Paul Rozin, and Paula Durlach, “Experience and Remembered Pleasure for Meals: Duration Neglect but Minimal Peak, End (Recency) or Primacy Effects,”
Appetite
49 (2007): 18–29.

Our memory for meals
: Ibid.

“desiccated vegetables”
: William C. Davis,
A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray
(Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003), 22.

Tell people a coffee is bitter
: This effect may only work when the intrinsic experiences align with the extrinsic information. In one fascinating study, subjects were given samples of wine they were told was sour due to an off year (while some weren't given any information about its potential quality). Some subjects were merely given the wine; others were given the wine spiked with a dose of “miracle fruit,” which turns the sour into sweet. People who tasted the wine without the miracle fruit (but with the “sour” information) liked it less than those who simply drank the wine without any taste information. Those who tasted the miracle fruit version and were told it would taste sour actually liked the wine more than those who were not told what to expect. The authors write, “In the face of expecting to taste potentially sour elements, but having a disrupted ability to do so, the wine was rated as tasting better than in the absence of such a contrast with an extrinsic taste signal.” In other words, people were not merely blindly swayed by the information that it would be sour when it in fact
could not be
. See Ab Litt and Baba Shiv, “Manipulating Basic Taste Perception to Explore How Product Information Affects Experience,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
22, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 55–66.

The opposite can happen
: See Issidoros Sarinopoulos et al., “Brain Mechanisms of Expectation Associated with Insula and Amygdala Response to Aversive Taste: Implications for Placebo,”
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity
20, no. 2 (March 2006): 120–32.

Tell subjects that an orange juice
: See Gerard J. Connors et al., “Extension of the Taste-Test Analogue as an Unobtrusive Measure of Preference for Alcohol,”
Behavioral Research and Therapy
16 (1978): 289–91. The authors note, “When subjects were asked to estimate how much alcohol they had consumed during the
two taste-tests, the average estimation was 3.31 oz; individual values ranged from 1 to 10 oz.”

People will still like it
: See Joel Wolfson and Naomi S. Oshinsky, “Food Names and Acceptability,”
The Journal of Advertising Research
6 (1961): 21–23.

In one well-known study
: Martin R. Yeomans et al., “The Role of Expectancy in Sensory and Hedonic Evaluation: The Case of Smoked Salmon Ice-Cream,”
Food Quality and Preference
19, no. 6 (Sept. 2008): 565–73.

“If we say something”
: Melissa Clark, “The Best in the Box,”
New York Times
, Feb. 5, 2003.

“novel foods”
: Armand Cardello et al., “Role of Consumer Expectancies in the Acceptance of Novel Foods,”
Journal of Food Science
50 (1985): 1707–14.

Three months after
: See Wei Xiao, “The Competitive and Welfare Effects of New Product Introduction: The Case of Crystal Pepsi” (Food Marketing Policy Center, Research Report No. 112, University of Connecticut, Nov. 2008).

A blind taste test
: Larry Brown, “A New Generation: Pepsi Offers Clear Choices,”
Seattle Times
, Jan. 13, 1993.

“taste enough like Pepsi”
: David Novak, “It Tasted Great in the Lab,”
Conference Board Review
,
http://​tcbreview.​com/​tcbr-​quick-​insights/​it-​tasted-​great-​in-​the-​lab.​html
.

“principal use”
: Lawrence Garber, Eva Hyatt, and Richard Starr, “The Effects of Food Color on Perceived Flavor,”
Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice
8 (2003): 59–72.

The program itself
: For a good history of food research at Natick and its predecessor agencies, see Herbert L. Meiselman and Howard G. Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in the U.S. Army,”
Appetite
40 (2003): 199–216.

“11-point scale”
: See, for example, Warren D. Smith, “Rating Scale Research to Scale Voting,”
http://​www.​rangevoting.​org/​Rate​Scale​Research.​html
. Original source is D. R. Peryam and F. J. Pilgrim, “Hedonic Scale Method of Measuring Food Preferences,”
Food Technology
, Sept. 1957, 9–14.

“Perhaps surprisingly”
: G. J. Pickering, “Optimizing the Sensory Characteristics and Acceptance of Canned Cat Food: Use of a Human Taste Panel,”
Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition
93, no. 1 (2009): 52–60.

Other methods, like polygraphs
: See Meiselman and Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in the U.S. Army.”

The number eight
: This is a problem that other, more complex methods, like “magnitude estimation scales,” have tried to factor.

As work by Timothy Wilson
: Timothy Wilson et al., “Introspecting About Reasons Can Reduce Post-choice Satisfaction,”
Personal Social Psychology Bulletin
18, no. 3 (June 1993): 331–39.

There is just one problem
: See Richard Popper and Daniel R. Kroll, “Just-About-Right Scales in Consumer Research,”
Chemosense
7, no. 3 (June 2005). As the authors note, other scales, such as those that measure for “intensity” of a certain attribute, often have less bias, even though the attributes being measured are the same. “The difference between the two scale types is that in answering JAR questions respondents need to consider how products differ from an ideal, which may focus them on reasons why they like or dislike a product, something that intensity scales may not.”

Ask them ahead of time
: It is as if, as Cardello once wrote, “our stated preferences for foods reflect a quintessential or idealized image or memory trace of the food, and that actual preparations of the food item are never as good or as bad as this mental image.” See A. V. Cardello and O. Maller, “Relationship Between Food Preferences and Food Acceptance Ratings,”
Journal of Food Science
47 (1982): 1553–57.