Our experience is not only hostage to
our slippery memory—it’s also powerfully shaped by the expectations we bring
with us. Even something as fundamental as how we taste food is remarkably
susceptible to manipulation based on our expectations. You only need to look at
Brian Wansink’s brilliant work as the director of the Cornell University Food
and Brand Lab. He has done a number of clever studies at the Spice Box, a
laboratory that masquerades as a restaurant. In one experiment, he offered
diners a free glass of Cabernet Sauvignon—but with one devious alteration.
Although all the diners were given a glass of a wine known as Two-Buck Chuck
(the nickname tells you the price), half of them were told that they were being
served wine from a new California label, while the other half were told that
they were getting a glass of North Dakota’s finest. Even though they drank the
same wine, their expectations radically shaped their experience. Not only did
those diners who thought they were drinking North Dakotan wine rate their wine
as tasting bad, they also rated their food as worse
than the other group. In fact, it altered their entire meal. They ended up
eating less and leaving the restaurant sooner.
The power of expectations is so great
that it has an almost preternatural ability to become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. In one study, after a test was given to all the students in an
elementary school, a few students were randomly selected, and the teachers were
told that these students had scored so highly on the test that they were sure to
excel in the coming year. The parents and the students weren’t told about this
so that the only difference was in the minds of the teachers. But just that
small intervention led to a major difference. By the end of the year, the
falsely anointed “exceptional” students showed significantly higher gains in
their IQ scores than the other students. In other words, simply leading the
teachers to believe that these students were special led those teachers to treat
them in a way that ended up making them special.
Experiments have demonstrated the same
power of expectations for attraction. In one study, men and women were asked to
talk on the phone and get acquainted with an unknown member of the opposite sex.
Before the conversation, each man was given a photograph of his supposed
partner. The actual photograph was randomly selected from a group that was
either attractive or unattractive. The women were not given photographs. Then,
the couples spoke on the phone for roughly ten minutes about anything they
wanted. Men who had received photos of beautiful women spoke to the women in a
way that caused the women to be friendlier and more flirtatious—acting for all
intents and purposes as beautiful women, regardless of their actual
appearance.
In The Psychology
of Human Conflict, Edwin Guthrie tells a remarkable story of how one
college woman was transformed in real life by a similar experiment. A group of
college men chose a shy, socially inept student and decided to treat her as if
she were one of the most popular girls at the school. They made sure she was
invited to the right parties and always had men asking her to dance and
generally acted as if they were lucky to be in her company. Before the school
year had ended, her behavior had completely changed. She was more confident and
came to believe that she was indeed popular. Even after the men ended their
experiment (although without telling her anything about it), she continued to
behave with self-assurance. But here is the really amazing part—even the men who
“conducted” the experiment came to see her in the same way, so fully had her
demeanor been transformed. If only someone would secretly hire the people around
us to treat us not as we are but as we wish to be, we might all become the
people we aspire to be.
