Elephants on Acid (5 page)

Harris found the students laughed just as hard when they believed they were being tickled by a machine as when they believed a human to be the source of the sensation. This led her to conclude that the reflex theory was correct. In her words, “The tickle response is some form of innate stereotyped motor behavior, perhaps akin to a reflex.” Which is a useful fact to know the next time the subject comes up at a cocktail party.

You might also be relieved to learn that the research assistant has finally been allowed out from under the table. Though if you ever visit the Harris lab you might want to take a quick peek beneath the tables, just to be on the safe side.

You reach out and touch a stranger. As your fingers brush against his arm, it’s like an electric current passing between the two of you. You become aware of the texture of his skin, the warmth of his body, and his proximity to you. But you also feel an undercurrent of apprehension. How will he react to your touch? Will he interpret the gesture as friendly? Erotic? Comforting? Condescending? What about threatening?

Colin Silverthorne, a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, discovered the power and danger of touching a stranger during an experiment he conducted in 1972. He told subjects the purpose of his research was to gather information on the aesthetic value of a series of pictures. But the real purpose was to see whether being touched by the researcher would translate into a greater appreciation of whatever they were viewing.

At one point during the presentation, while pretending to adjust the focus of the slide projector, Silverthorne casually placed his hand on each subject’s shoulder for three seconds. Most people didn’t seem to notice the touch, but they did give higher marks to the pictures seen at the moment of contact, except for one woman. When Silverthorne’s hand landed on her shoulder, she “showed an agitated response” so extreme that she had to be excused from the experiment. Evidently, some people don’t like strangers touching them.

However, there is one situation in which the touch of a stranger is almost always well received—in restaurants. In 1984 researchers April Crusco and Christopher Wetzel enlisted the help of waitresses at two restaurants in Oxford, Mississippi, to investigate the effect of touch on tipping. When returning with a customer’s change, a waitress performed one of three “touch manipulations.” She either briefly touched the diner’s palm while delivering the change, placed a hand on the customer’s shoulder, or didn’t touch the person at all. The waitresses did not vary any other aspect of their behavior:

The waitresses approached the customers from their sides or from slightly behind them, made contact but did not smile as they spoke “Here’s your change” in a friendly but firm tone, bent their bodies at an approximately 10 degree angle as they returned the change, and did not make eye contact during the touch manipulation.

The researchers collected data on 114 diners, most of them college students, none of whom suspected they were the subject of an experiment. The no-touch condition generated the smallest tips. A touch on the shoulder earned 18 percent more, and a fleeting touch on the palm garnered a full 37 percent bonus. Clearly, it paid to touch the diners.

Follow-up experiments by other researchers have confirmed these results, while simultaneously exploring other variables that may play a role in the touch-tipping effect. For instance, a 1986 experiment in Greensboro, North Carolina, focused on the element of gender. When serving a man and a woman dining together, would a waitress earn more by touching the man or the woman? The answer was the woman. The investigators theorized that a female server touching the male diner generated jealousy from his companion. However, touching the man still led to a higher tip than touching neither diner.

A 1992 Chicago experiment included the attractiveness of the server as a variable. The largest tip earners turned out to
¹⁰
be highly attractive waitresses who touched female diners. They received a full 41 percent more, on average, than the lowest earners, unattractive men who touched no one. The researcher measured attractiveness by prior customer surveys and didn’t inform the servers that their good looks (or lack thereof) played a part in the study. Breaking the bad news to the waiters rated ugliest-of-the-bunch doubtless would have been a bit cruel.

Tip-maximization strategies turn out to be a popular subject for research—perhaps a case of scientists preparing for hard times in case their next grant application doesn’t get funded. Thanks to the tireless efforts of experimenters, we know that servers can increase their tips by, in addition to touching customers, introducing themselves, being friendly, kneeling down during interactions, smiling a lot, immediately repeating a diner’s order, wearing flowers in their hair (if female), giving a joke-bearing card or a gift of candy with the check (the more candy, the better), writing a patriotic message such as “United We Stand” or a smiley face on the check, and, most important of all, showing up for work when either the moon is full or the sun is shining. A 1996 experiment even found that if a waitress works in an Atlantic City casino where the outside weather conditions can’t be seen, it behooves her to tell patrons it’s sunny outside, though it might be pouring rain.

Waiters may also want to remember a tip-maximization strategy that has received less attention from researchers—providing prompt, attentive service.

The wine connoisseur picks up the glass of red wine and holds it to the light. “Deep mahogany,” he mutters. He swirls the glass, noting how the liquid clings to the sides. Then he sniffs it, deeply inhaling the bouquet. “A touch of ground coffee, spices, leather, and black currants,” he murmurs. Finally, he sips the wine. He swirls it around in his mouth and allows it to linger on his tongue. He savors the experience, and only then does he let the liquid slide down his throat.

He places the wineglass on the table. “A full, rounded body,” he proclaims. “Good fruit. Cloves and sweet toffee flavors. Lovely finish. An excellent vintage. My guess—Châteauneuf, 1989.”

Wine connoisseurs can put on quite a show. But is there anything to it? Can they really pinpoint the exact vintage of a wine simply by tasting it? If they do make this claim, they’d better hope they don’t find themselves in one of Frédéric Brochet’s experiments, because Brochet has a way of making wine connoisseurs look like fools.

Brochet was a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Bordeaux. In 1998 he invited fifty-four specialists to taste some wines and write down their impressions. First he served a red and a white. The tasters scribbled down their notes. Next he served a different red and white. Again, they jotted down comments. To describe the two reds they used terms such as
plump, deep, dark, black currant, cherry, fruit, raspberry,
and
spice.
The two white wines evoked descriptors such as
golden, floral, pale, dry, apricot, lemon, honey, straw,
and
lively
. Both sets of adjectives are commonly used in the wine industry, with specific reference to either reds or whites.

The specialists thought they were just tasting some wine. Little did they know they were the subjects in an experiment to find out whether connoisseurs can tell the difference between red and white wine.

Unbeknownst to all the specialists, the second set of wines they tasted, the red and the white, were identical. Brochet had simply added flavorless food coloring to some of the white wine to create a faux red. One would think that if connoisseurs’ palettes are sensitive enough to allow them to detect the exact vintage of a wine, then they should have no problem telling when they’ve been served two glasses of the same wine—even if one of the glasses has a bit of red dye in it. But no. Not a single person wrote down that the second pair of wines tasted similar, nor that the “red” tasted like a white. Their descriptions of the dyed white read exactly like descriptions of a red wine. The inescapable conclusion was that the specialists had all been fooled.

A follow-up experiment proved just as bruising to the egos of wine connoisseurs. Brochet told his group of specialists he would serve them two wines, the first a common table wine and the second a premium vintage.

He showed them the table wine, poured a sample into their glasses, and took a sip himself. He promptly spat it out dismissively. The tasters then tried it and wrote down their impressions—
simple, unbalanced, light, fluid,
and
volatile.

Next Brochet showed them the premium wine. He took a long sip and smacked his lips in appreciation. When it was their turn, the tasters described the wine as
complex, balanced, flavorsome, smoky, fresh, woody,
and
excellent
. You can probably guess the punchline. Again, the two wines were identical. They were both the same common Bordeaux.

Does this prove that wine connoisseurs are full of hot air? Are they unable to tell the difference between the good stuff and plonk, or even between red and white? Not quite, though it would be easy to interpret Brochet’s experiments in that way.

Brochet didn’t design his studies to knock wine connoisseurs down a peg. He himself is a wine lover and founder of the Ampelidae winery in the west of France. He argues that his experiments instead demonstrate the power of perceptive expectation: “The subject perceives, in reality, what he or she has pre-perceived and finds it difficult to back away.”

What this means is that the brain does not treat taste as a discrete sensation. Instead, it constructs the experience of flavor by taking into consideration information from all the senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Paradoxically, it places the greatest emphasis on sight—almost twenty times more emphasis, according to Brochet, than it places on any other sense. So if our eyes tell us there’s red wine in the glass, our brain places more faith in that data than in the information coming from the taste buds. Our expectation becomes our reality.

Ironically, the more highly trained a wine drinker is, the more likely it is he’ll fall for the red-dye-in-white-wine trick. This is because connoisseurs are highly conditioned to expect a red-colored wine to taste a certain way. They can’t escape their preconceptions.

Does this mean you can pour some swill into fancy bottles, serve it at your next party, and no one will be the wiser? Sure. Give it a try. But ask yourself this: How do you
¹¹
know the same trick hasn’t already been played on you? Brochet points out that almost all wine fraud is exposed by faulty paperwork, not by consumers complaining about the taste. In other words, just how good
was
that cabernet you paid fifty dollars for last month?

It’s one thing to suggest wine connoisseurs may not be able to tell the difference between red and white wine. But try telling Coke and Pepsi fans that their beloved soft drinks are indistinguishable. You’ll soon have an angry mob on your hands, begging to differ.

The foolhardy researcher who dared question the cola dogma was Read Montague of Baylor College of Medicine. In 2005 Montague conducted a scientifically controlled, double-blind version of the Pepsi challenge. Participants received two unlabeled cups containing Coke and Pepsi. They were asked to drink them and indicate which tasted better. The result—an even split between the two drinks, with no correlation between the brand of cola participants claimed to prefer beforehand and the one they chose in the study. Tasters could not distinguish between the two. These results horrify Coke and Pepsi lovers. They insist—science and double-blind tests be damned—that
they
would have been able to tell the difference.

But it gets worse for cola fans, because Montague then took his experiment a step further. He served participants two cups—one labeled Coke, the other unlabeled. Subjects stated a preference for what was in the cup labeled Coke almost 85 percent of the time. The catch was that both cups contained Coke. Apparently Coke with a label tastes better than Coke without one. When Montague next served Pepsi in labeled and unlabeled cups, he found no similar preference effect. This finding suggests that Coke has a better marketing department, which has succeeded in convincing consumers to prefer drinks served as Coke—no matter what the drinks
actually
taste like. Montague put it this way:

There are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks. It is possible that these cultural messages perturb taste perception.

Finally Montague placed subjects in an MRI scanner and observed their brains as they drank Coke and Pepsi. Serving them the drinks wasn’t easy. A vise that prevented movements larger than two millimeters in any direction held their heads in place. Cooled plastic tubes directed the liquid into their mouths.

When Montague flashed an image of a Coke can on a screen over the subjects’ heads before squirting the Coke into their mouths, their brains lit up like Christmas trees. But when he flashed a colored light before serving the Coke, or when he served Pepsi (preceded by a picture of a Pepsi can), brain activity was far less. In other words, Coca-Cola’s advertising had a measurable effect on neural response.

The slightly creepy implication of Montague’s experiment is that advertising can literally rewire the neurons in our head and alter our sensory experience of the world. It
¹²
can reprogram our perception of reality, compelling us to perceive two near-identical forms of sugary carbonated water as tasting different. So when Coke and Pepsi fans insist there’s a difference between the two beverages, for them this is true, because viewing the label has become an inextricable part of the taste experience. This is how their brains are wired. And when others insist there is no difference, that is also true. It’s like two species—fizzy-drink lovers and fizzy-drink skeptics—living in incommensurable worlds, constantly arguing past one another. One of those species just happens to suffer from considerably more tooth decay than the other.