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And boy do we know what she's having. If, for Ortega, journalistic dispatches from explorers seemed to thrust one into a vertiginous global gyre, what would he make of the current situation, where a flurry of tweets comes even before the breaking news announcements, which then turn into wall-to-wall coverage, followed by a think piece in the
next day's newspaper? He would have to factor in social media, in which it often seems as if we were really living “the life of the whole world”; one has a peripheral, real-time awareness of any number of people's whereabouts, achievements, status updates, via any number of platforms.

Ortega called this “the increase of life,” even if it often seems to come with the cost of time in one's own life, or indeed our happiness (
studies suggest social media can be bad for one's self-esteem). If media (large broadcasters creating audiences) helped define his age of mass society, social media (audiences creating ever more audiences) help define our age of mass individualism. The Internet is exponential social learning: You have ever more ways to learn what other people are doing; how many of the more than thirteen thousand reviews of the Bellagio in Las Vegas do you need to read on TripAdvisor before making a decision? There are ever more ways to learn that what you are doing is not good enough or was already done last week by someone else, that what you like or even
who
you like is also liked by some random person you have never met. It is social learning by proxy. Remotely seeing the perfect Instagram post of an artisanal pastry in San Francisco engenders a “
frenzy” in others to consume it, not unlike Julie's grass-in-the-ear trick.

People have always wanted to be around other people and to learn from them. Cities have long been dynamos of social possibility, foundries of art, music, and fashion. Slang, or, if you prefer, “
lexical innovation,” has always started in cities—an outgrowth of all those different, densely packed people so frequently exposed to one another.
It spreads outward, in a manner not unlike infectious disease, which itself typically “takes off” in cities. If, as the noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield contended, the way a person talks is a “
composite result of what he has heard before,” then language innovation would happen where the most people heard and talked to the most other people. Cities drive taste change because they offer the greatest exposure to other people, who not surprisingly are often the creative people cities seem to attract.
Media, ever more global, ever more penetrating, spread language faster to more people (to cite just one example, the number of entries in Japanese “loanword” dictionaries—words “borrowed” from English—more than doubled from the 1970s to 2000).

With the Internet, we have a kind of city of the mind, a medium that people do not just consume but
inhabit
, even if it often seems to
replicate and extend existing cities (
New Yorkers, already physically exposed to so many other people, use Twitter the most). As Bentley has argued, “
Living and working online, people have perhaps never copied each other so profusely (since it usually costs nothing), so accurately, and so indiscriminately.” Things spread faster and more cheaply; more people can copy from more people.

But how do we know what to copy and from whom? The old ways of knowing what we should like—everything from radio station programmers to restaurant guides to book critics to brands themselves—have been supplanted by Ortega's “multitudes,” acting not en masse but as a mass of individuals, connected but apart, unified but disparate. Whom to follow? What to choose? Whom can you trust?

This is why things have become both flatter and spikier: In an infinite realm of choice, our choices often seem to cluster by default toward those we can see others making (or
away
from those we sense too many are choosing).
Whatever the direction, experimental work has shown that when “wise crowds” can see what others in the crowd are thinking, when there is too much “social influence,” people start to think more like one another (and not like the “ideal judges” with whom we are about to visit in the next chapter).
They take less information into account to make their decisions yet are
more
confident that what they are thinking is the truth—because more people seem to think that way. As in a high-frequency trading market, social imitation has gotten easier, faster, and more volatile; all those micro-motives of trying to be like others and yet different can intensify into explosive bursts of macro-behavior. The big waves have gotten bigger, and we know that they will come, but it is harder to tell from where in the vast and random ocean surface they will swell.

HOW DO EXPERTS DECIDE WHAT'S GOOD?

 

I have been describing to you, over the last several hundred pages, how our tastes are so elusive, even to us; how they are inevitably malleable to social influence; what a fleeting grasp we have of the things we put in our mouths or before our eyes. If all this was really so messy, I began to think, it seemed worth spending some time with people who need to reasonably think about, and compellingly articulate, why they like things—or, at least, explain why certain things are not only good (and I would argue one does not generally like what one does not think is good), but better than
other
things. I am talking about judges in competitions. Surely they would be able to cut steely-eyed through our fog of proclivities and bring crystalline neutrality to the murky thickets of taste. What might we learn from them to bring more clarity to our own liking?

Let us begin with a simple inquiry, about something with which most of us have at least a passing familiarity: What makes a good cat? To find out, I have traveled to Paris, where, in a small conference center in the twelfth arrondissement, the Salon International du Chat is under way. Despite its grandiose title, it seems a pretty regional affair,
a medium-sized hall's worth of blue-eyed Ragdolls and fluffy woolen Selkirk Rexes and sleekly poised European Burmese. Perhaps sensing it is getting away with something, a Seeing Eye dog leads its owner through the show aisles, but even the presence of this large hound does not measurably stir these unperturbed show cats.

I am not here because this is a particularly important cat show, and cat shows, it must be said, are, like their owners, more low-key than dog shows. Rather, I am here because one of the judges, a Dutchman named Peter Moormann, happens to be not only a cat judge but a professor of psychology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. To bring it full circle, he has investigated the psychology of judges in competitions.

Moormann, whose swept-back, flowing silver hair and sympathetic eyes give him an air of elegant Continental authority, got into cats around the same time he got into psychology. Born in colonial Indonesia to parents who were survivors of the Burma railroad and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, he fled with his family to Holland. There, some old friends from Indonesia were raising Persian cats. Because he seemed to have an affinity for handling animals, they asked him along to a show. He steadily climbed through the cat show ranks: steward, pupil judge, judge. Meanwhile, he was a psychology student and a champion skater; first roller, then ice. (“I have always tried to combine things in life,” he said.) His dissertation was on the psychology of figure skating performance, not a hard sell in the skating-mad Netherlands. It included a chapter on “involuntary bias when judging figure skating performance,” which presumably he tried to rein in during the multiple times he was a judge on the television program
Sterren Dansen op het Ijs
, the Dutch version of
Dancing on Ice
.

As I sat next to Moormann at a folding table in the judge's area, a procession of owners, smiling and expectant, presented their cats to him. The first thing that became apparent was that as soon as the cats were on the table, the dynamics of just who was being judged were called into question. The cats seemed to pull off an astonishing double axel of casual haughtiness: They at once looked as if they owned the place and appeared vaguely annoyed for having been deposited here, in front of this cheery Dutchman waving a feather at them. The feather is a common judge's ploy to get the cats to, in essence, be cats. As one judge had described it to me, “You get the toy out, you want to see expression, the ears up.”

One is hesitant to assign national characteristics to man or animal, but it is difficult to resist seeing in these French cats something of the famous and colossal disregard exhibited by French waiters, who will look upon you with an almost sympathetic glance as you wait for service, as if they were watching the playing out of an existential drama over which they have no control. Some cats glance at Moormann's feather with the world-weary pity the garçon exhibits toward a patron trying to signal for the check.

Moormann poked and prodded, feeling for skull deformations, scanning for “tail faults” or indistinct markings, probing for missing testicles. As with a used car, looks can be deceiving. Some breeds are even dismissed as being a “paint job,” simply daubed up with a new coat color or pattern. A lot of the judging is done by feel: the length of the cat, the muscle tone, or whether, as one judge told me, “they have a funky front end.” As he examined, Moormann occasionally issued a word of encouragement like “bonne” or “très expressif.” “All cats,” he declared, “have something you can penalize. No cat is perfect.” But neither is any judge a robot. Sitting across from him is a human owner, who has paid money, some of which has gone to bringing the judges to this show. “You almost want to make the person feel…” He searched for the word. “Happy.”

As Moormann studied the cats, I would study the owners. The woman with cat paw prints painted on her fingernails. The one who apologized as she struggled to restrain her charge. “I was once bit through the fingernail by a Persian,” Moormann said wearily. I cannot help thinking there is some truth in the old cliché of owners taking on the appearance of their pets. The woman clutching an Oriental short-hair, when seen in profile, turned out to have a similarly long, sloping nose. As Moormann stroked the tail of one Persian, I caught its owner absently running her hand through her own hair.

For Moormann, there are two ways of judging cats. There is the “analytic style,” in which “the whole is the sum of its parts.” Each cat breed has a range of “points” that are assigned for certain attributes: eyes, color, tail. The best cat has the most points across these categories. This seems objective, but the judge, Moormann has written, “
forgets that there is no objective measuring device available other than his/her own brain.” In the “holistic style,” by contrast, “the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.” The judge in this case begins with
“an ideal mental image of the cat,” and the closer that cat seems to be to that image, the more the judge will like it. “The whole should have something special, something charismatic,” he says. “Something that feels good, but you cannot describe it completely. All the parts fit together and make something additional which is very beautiful.” The danger here, Moormann warns, is that the judge may lose the trees for the forest, overlooking flaws because of the “halo effect” of some larger impression.

As each cat was hoisted off the table, Moormann would scrawl a number of stars next to each cat's name. Sometimes he would write “BV,” for “best variety.” The stars are his own scaled system, meant less as some Michelin-style indication of quality than simply as a way to distinguish, and remember, individual cats in what can be a long succession of fur, claws, and arched backs. “If I have too many cats in one day, I am not able to do this; there's too much interference. Cats are cats.” Judging them is no simpler than herding them.

Memory may be the most important skill for any judge. A “trained eye” may tell someone where to look. To make a quality judgment, however, means not only remembering what the judge has seen that day but measuring that against all the other cats or figure skaters he has
ever
seen. We remember what we like, but perhaps even more accurately
we like what we remember
.

There are many ways a judge in a competition might be biased. The gymnastics judge who shares a language with a competitor might give that gymnast a higher ranking (and this is why a Dutch judge is at a French cat show). The judge in an
American Idol
–style show who favors pop might be less enthusiastic about the heavy metal group. Or a judge with a strong personality at a table might sway the group.
A Belgian study—and I must note here a distinct Low Countries bias in expert judging research—looked at competitive rope jumping (yes, it exists!). The researchers found that when judges were shown video clips of performances whose scores had been artificially manipulated upward, they voted higher. When the scores were falsely set lower, they followed suit. Judges, it seems, want to be judged well by their fellow judges.

One of the simplest and most innocent forms of bias, however, is memory itself. It has been found, for example, in various types of competitions,
that people who performed later seemed to do better. You might think, as you headed to a job interview or some other competition with a number of candidates, that going later might be a liability. The judges, you would reason, may be tired. They might have already, in effect, decided. And yet, in studies that have looked at everything from
classical music competitions to
synchronized swim meets, researchers have found a clear and compelling pattern: The later contestants appeared, the higher they scored.

The Belgian (!) researcher Wändi Bruine de Bruin analyzed several decades' worth of voting data from the Eurovision Song Contest—an arguably more palatable task than actually listening to all the songs. She first controlled for potential “home advantage.” Not only do German judges, for example, like German acts a bit more; they also like the acts from countries that
border
Germany a bit more than others. She emerged with another strong, linear relationship: Performers who appeared later were judged higher. “
Judges,” she concluded, “may base their final rating of a performance on how well they remember it.”

In competitions where judges watch all of the contestants before finally issuing scores, this makes intuitive sense. It echoes findings of “primacy bias” and “recency bias” in so-called list memory: We seem to remember the first and last entrants in any kind of list or series. This is either because we shift those items into short- and long-term memory or because the first and last things are themselves distinctive:
Nothing comes before or after. There is a reason the “first” of a thing (a car, a pet, and so on) is used as a prompt in computer security questions: It stands out more in your memory than your third. Poets and songwriters do not reminisce over fourth loves.

What happens when judges make their judgments just after each contestant has made an appearance, when the performance will still be clear in their memory? Curiously, the “later is better” effect seems to show up here as well. In looking at data from the World and European Figure Skating Championships, which are judged on a “step by step” basis, Bruine de Bruin again found an upward, linear pattern of scores, even when the appearance order of contestants was randomly drawn. What was going on? Bruine de Bruin suggests that judges may consider the first performance as its own discrete thing. With each successive performance, however, judges began to look for what was
better
and
different
from the previous performance.

This has been called, after work by the psychologist Amos Tversky, the “
direction of comparison effect.” Later performances are compared only with earlier ones; the earlier ones, as they are happening, cannot be compared with later performances. So the scores tend to travel in one direction, with one important qualifier, which I will shortly return to:
Judges need to be looking for instances of
positive
difference.

Another dynamic troubles serially judged competitions; let us call it “The Best Is Yet to Come Effect.” Scores tend to get more extreme toward the end. Judges may be unsure how good or bad early competitors are and vote conservatively, reserving their strongest judgments for the final entrants. Later contestants, in turn, having seen what they are up against, may be motivated to perform at a higher level. Not uncommon are comments like that of the English gymnast Louis Smith: “
If my main rival…goes through his routine and puts in a high score, it gives me the opportunity to think, ‘Okay, maybe I need to try my harder routine.' ” Athletes may intuit that an eye-catching move, strikingly different from what their immediate rival has done, will net them a higher score. Indeed, one analysis of gymnastics data, taking advantage of the different scores awarded for “difficulty” and “execution” (a system created after the notorious judging fiasco at the 2004 Olympics in Athens), finds what it calls a “
difficulty bias.” Even though the two metrics are supposed to be independent, the analysis found that when contestants try harder moves, their execution scores are “artificially inflated.”

But a novel series of experiments by the German researchers Thomas Mussweiler and Lysann Damisch shows why judging bias, and not simply athletes rising to the occasion, may be behind score inflation. They begin by observing that athletes' scores tended to be higher “
if the preceding gymnast presented a good rather than a flawed performance.” This could simply be athletes adjusting: A gymnast coming on the heels of a terrible performance might decide to “play it safe” and get a respectably high score, rather than “going for broke.”

Mussweiler and Damisch, however, argue that something else is going on. When we make comparison judgments, we instinctively look for similarities between things, or differences. Typically, we favor similarity—“
one of the building blocks of human cognition,” suggests Mussweiler—because sensing similarity is not only extremely useful, but quick and easy (children, after all, are not asked in puzzles to “spot the similarities”). You meet a new person, you immediately think how
he or she reminds you of someone you know, not all the ways they are
unlike
someone you know. Even the search for differences tends to happen after this initial establishing of similarities. But this initial, often subconscious, decision (whether things feel more similar or more different) then goes on to profoundly influence how we feel about those things. When we perceive things to be similar, we tend toward “assimilation”—which will typically make us like something more: A good wine is lifted when it comes after a great wine. But if we emphasize differences among things to be judged, “contrast” will result.
Judges will, in essence, be looking for things
not
to like.