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People buy fewer black cars
: See Meghan R. Busse, et al., “Projection Bias in the Car and Housing Markets,”
Working Paper 18212
(Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2012).

In one elegantly constructed
: Because the puppets did not “see” which food the infants had preferred, the researchers speculated, infants were preferring puppets who seemed to actually “hold” those tastes, not the puppets that were merely “expressing” those tastes so as to gain favor in some way. See Neha Mehajan and Karen Wynn, “Origins of ‘Us' Versus ‘Them': Prelinguistic Infants Prefer Similar Others,”
Cognition
124 (2012): 227–33. In another study, this effect disappeared when the puppets in question were shown to be “antisocial.” J. Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn, “Who Knows What's Good to Eat? Infants Fail to Match the Food Preferences of Antisocial Others,”
Cognitive Development 27
(2012): 227–39.

Maddeningly, however
: As Paul Rozin notes, “Surprisingly, parents, who share genes with their children and control most of the child's environment for the early years of life, do not transmit their food and other preferences very well to their children. Parent-child correlations are in the range of 0 to .30 for food or music preferences.” Rozin, “From Trying to Understand Food Choice to Conditioned Taste Aversion and Back,”
http://​w.​american.​edu/​cas/​psychology/​cta/​highlights/​rozin_​highlight.​pdf
.

“this delicate and aerial faculty”
: Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful
(New York: Penguin, 2004), 63.

“No significant behavior”
: Gary Becker,
Accounting for Tastes
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 49.

“explain everything”
: See Bryan Caplan, “Stigler-Becker Versus Myers-Briggs: Why Preference-Based Explanations Are Scientifically Meaningful and Empirically Important,”
https://​ideas.​repec.​org/​a/​eee/​jeborg/​v50y2003​i4p391-​405.​html#​biblio
.

But the Rocky Mountains
: See Paul Albanese, “Introduction to the Symposium on Preference Formation,”
Journal of Behavioral Economics
17, no. 1 (1988): 1–5. Ernst Fehr and Karla Hoff also note that economists' traditional view—describing the preferences of individuals, and the society that they will create, and “that preferences remain the same regardless of the society that emerges”—is demonstrably false. See Fehr and Hoff,
Economic Journal
121 (Nov. 2011): f396–f412.

Our tastes seem endlessly “adaptive”
: Elster, of course, is talking about more than
a taste for grapes. He writes, “The idea of sour grapes appears to me just as important for understanding individual behavior as for appraising schemes of social justice.” Woven throughout his book is the implicit question of when people do what they really want or only what seems possible in the current constraints of their lives. See Elster,
Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The political scientist Michael Locke McLendon, in a worthwhile critique of Elster, suggests that Elster has mischaracterized the fox's response to not getting the grapes: “[Elster] claims that the fox readjusts his attitude towards the grapes. More accurately, he is readjusting the world to fit his failed preferences. The fox still wants grapes—that fact has not changed. Rather, he rejects the particular grapes on the trellis that he was unable to reach. Unable to consume the only available grapes, he falsely attributes to them traits they do not have, i.e., they are sour.” See McLendon, “The Politics of Sour Grapes: Sartre, Elster, and Tocqueville on Emotions and Politics,”
http://​ssrn.​com/​abstract=​1460905
or
http://​dx.​doi.​org/​10.​2139/​ssrn.​1460905
.

Where economists tend
: As Dan Ariely and Michael Norton note, we might think we are choosing something because it is the best, but we may be drawing upon a memory of past choices, which now seem as if they were consciously made but might in fact not have been: “We suggest that rather than being driven by hedonic utility, behavior is based in part on observations of past actions, actions that have been influenced by essentially random situational factors—such as the weather—but that people interpret as reflective of their stable preferences.” Ariely and Norton, “How Actions Create—Not Just Reveal—Preferences,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
12, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 16.

Imagine the fox
: Any number of studies have tried to sort out these dynamics, often by asking research subjects to rank a list of items, then choose their favorite, and then rerank the list. In theory, this could mean people liked an item
more
after they chose it (and
disliked
more what they didn't choose); in other words, the choice drove the preference. But in one study, researchers argued that in a “free choice” experiment, rankings will naturally spread even as attitudes remain “perfectly stable.” They write, “While it may appear that participants became more fond of the higher ranked item after choosing it, in reality, participants were also ‘more fond' of the higher ranked item before choosing it (so long as they eventually chose it). Thus, the spreading seen here, which would normally be mistaken for evidence of choice-induced attitude change, is better interpreted as evidence for the importance of choice information.” See M. Keith Chen and Jane L. Risen, “How Choice Affects and Reflects Preferences: Revisiting the Free-Choice Paradigm,”
Journal of Personal Social Psychology
99, no. 4 (Oct. 2010): 573–94.

“An academic history”
: Stephen Bayley,
Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things
(New York: Pantheon, 1991), xviii.

“blue seven”
: See William E. Simon and Louis H. Primavera, “Investigation of the ‘Blue Seven Phenomenon' in Elementary and Junior High School Children,”
Psychological Reports
31 (1972): 128–30. The finding was replicated in a number of other studies; see, for example, Julian Paciak and Robert Williams, “Note on the ‘Blue-Seven Phenomenon' Among Male Senior High Students,”
Psychological Reports
35 (1974): 394.

“the sacred number”
: Louis Jacobs, “The Numbered Sequence as a Literary Device in the Babylonian Talmud,”
Hebrew Annual Review 7
(1983): 143.

Perhaps it is the way
: The seminal research here was George Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,”
Psychological Review
63, no. 2 (1956): 81–87.

And yet its influence
: See, for example, Dave Munger, “Is 17 the ‘Most Random' Number?,”
Cognitive Daily
(blog), Feb. 5, 2007,
http://​scienceblogs.​com/​cognitivedaily/​2007/​02/​05/​is-​17-​the-​most-​random-​number/
.

As for why my daughter
: It is theorized that expressing preferences, and knowing how they might differ from other people's preferences, are key steps in a child's developing what psychologists call a “theory of mind,” one part of which is empathy.

With a touch of alarm
: Carol Zaremba Berg et al., “The Survey Form of the Leyton Obsessional Inventory-Child Version: Norms from an Epidemiological Study,”
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
27, no. 6 (Nov. 1988): 759–63.

“public restroom at a California”
: See Nicholas Christenfeld, “Choices from Identical Options,”
Psychological Science
6, no. 1 (Jan. 1995). Ironically, this preference for the middle seems to make those the
least
clean stalls, at least according to one microbiologist, Dr. Charles Gerba, of the University of Arizona, known as Dr. Germ. See, for example, Elizabeth Landau, “Conquering the ‘Ewww' Factor of the Public Potty,” CNN, Dec. 9, 2008,
http://​www.​cnn.​com/​2008/​HEALTH/​10/​03/​bathroom.​hygiene/​index.​html?​eref=​rss_​latest
.

Has paper mounted
: See, for example, “Ending the Over-Under Debate on Toilet Paper,” NPR,
http://​www.​npr.​org/​2015/​03/​19/​393982199/​ending-​the-​over-​under-​debate-​on-​toilet-​paper
.

As inconsequential as either
: See Rick Kogan,
America's Mom: The Life
,
Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers
(New York: William Morrow, 2005), 163.

If people seem to prefer “bnick”
: As one report notes, “Typological research suggests that onsets with large sonority rises (e.g., blif) are preferred to onsets with smaller rises (e.g., bnif), which, in turn are preferred to sonority plateaus (e.g., bdif); the plateaus, in turn, are preferred to onsets with sonority falls (e.g., lbif).” This even though “the structure of the English lexicon offers English speakers little evidence for the sonority hierarchy.” See Iris Berent et al., “What We Know About What We Have Never Heard: Evidence from Perceptual Illusions,”
Cognition
104 (2007): 590–631.

Why would artists' preferences
: One finds this gap in almost every creative profession. One idea is that experts and laypeople disagree on what's good because of what criteria they are examining. In architecture, for example, one study noted that “architects and laypersons agreed that a meaningful building is an aesthetically good building…[b]ut the two groups used no physical cues in common as the basis for deciding which buildings are more (or less) meaningful.” The authors of that study suggested a “cognitive reconciliation campaign” to bring this difference to light. See Robert Gifford et al., “Why Architects and Laypersons Judge Buildings Differently: Cognitive Properties and Physical Bases,”
Journal of Architectural and Planning Research
19, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 131–48.

Palmer queried a range
: See Stephen Palmer and William Griscom, “Accounting for Taste: Individual Differences in Preference for Harmony,”
Psychonomic Bulletin Review
20, no. 3 (2013): 453–61.

Days after being
: Teresa Farroni, Enrica Menon, and Mark H. Johnson, “Factors
Influencing Newborns' Preference for Faces with Eye Contact,”
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
95 no. 4 (2006): 298–308.

Since the dawn of psychology
: Jastrow actually found in his study that women preferred red. See Joseph Jastrow, “The Popular Esthetics of Color,”
Popular Science Monthly
, Jan. 1897. Jastrow cautioned that only a certain range of colors were presented and that people's choices might have been influenced by the arrangement of colors on the page. Still, a host of studies have largely found a consensus around blue (and for less liking of dark yellow). For an excellent survey on the work that has been done on human color preference, see A. Hurlbert and Y. Ling, “Understanding Colour Perception and Preference,” in
Colour Design: Theories and Applications
, ed. Janet Best (Oxford: Woodhead, 2012), 129, 157. They caution, “Despite the common-sense appeal of these arguments, it is important to stress that neither the evolutionary nor the ontogenetic claim has been proven, and the extent to which preferences are hard-wired versus individually malleable is still an open question.”

“general fussiness”
: Chloe Taylor et al., “Color Preferences in Infants and Adults Are Different,”
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
20, no. 1 (Feb. 2013).

“It happens at the beach”
: See Nathan Heller, “The Cranky Wisdom of Peter Kaplan,”
New Republic
, Sept. 14, 2012.

When Palmer and his colleagues
: Karen Schloss, Rosa Poggesi, and Stephen Palmer, “Effects of University Affiliation and ‘School Spirit' on Color Preferences: Berkeley Versus Stanford,”
Psychonomic Bulletin Review
18 (2011): 498–504.

Query Democrats and Republicans
: Karen Schloss and Stephen Palmer, “The Politics of Color: Preferences for Republican Red Versus Democratic Blue,”
Psychonomic Bulletin Review
21, no. 2 (April 2014). As they note, the effect is not found on nonelection days. One reason might be that people actually normally associate Republicans with
blue
and Democrats with
red
. The media's use of Red and Blue America is rather recent. “When Republican Reagan swept the 1984 presidential elections,” they write, “the election map coded Reagan victories in blue and was referred to as a ‘suburban swimming pool.' ”

Some have argued
: The key proponent of this line of thinking is Itamar Simonson. He suggests preference construction is a sort of laboratory artifact and argues, “The literature on preference construction has been largely confined to local decisions and is less relevant to more enduring preferences.” New innovations, like the Nintendo Wii, he argues, tap into preexisting, inherent preferences. The fact that people come to like something they initially disliked, he argues, is one “post-hoc indicator of inherent preferences.” Simonson, “Will I Like a ‘Medium' Pillow? Another Look at Constructed and Inherent Preferences,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
18 (2008): 155–69. Critics have responded, however, that Simonson has set up an “unfalsifiable” condition, because we can never really know if someone who comes to like something she disliked at first merely adapted to something or liked it all along (and just didn't know it). See James Battman et al., “Preference Construction and Preference Stability: Putting the Pillow to Rest,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
18 (2008): 170–74.

The idea that pink
: For a thorough account, see Jo Paoletti,
Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).