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By Root 634 0

“and I can tell you not only what factory they came from but what rework they were using.” Civille jumped in. Just the previous night, she said, she had eaten two cookies — and here she named two prominent brands. “I could taste the rework,” she said and made another face. “We’ve spent years and years developing these skills,” she went on. “Twenty years. It’s like medical training. You do your internship, and then you become a resident. And you do it and do it until you can look at something and say in a very objective way how sweet it is, how bitter it is, how caramelized it is, how much citrus character there is — and in terms of the citrus, this much lemon, this much lime, this much grapefruit, this much orange.”

Heylmun and Civille, in other words, are experts. Would they get fooled by the Pepsi Challenge? Of course not. Nor would they be led astray by the packaging for Christian Brothers, or be as easily confused by the difference between something they truly don’t like and something they simply find unusual. The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious. This is the last and most important lesson of the Kenna story, because it explains why it was such a mistake to favor the results of Kenna’s market research so heavily over the enthusiastic reactions of the industry insiders, the crowd at the Roxy, and the viewers of MTV2. The first impressions of experts are different. By that I don’t mean that experts like different things than the rest of us — although that is undeniable. When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions.

Jonathan Schooler — whom I introduced in the previous chapter — once did an experiment with Timothy Wilson that beautifully illustrates this difference. It involved strawberry jam. Consumer Reports put together a panel of food experts and had them rank forty-four different brands of strawberry jam from top to bottom according to very specific measures of texture and taste. Wilson and Schooler took the first-, eleventh-, twenty-fourth-, thirty-second-, and forty-fourth-ranking jams — Knott’s Berry Farm, Alpha Beta, Featherweight, Acme, and Sorrell Ridge — and gave them to a group of college students. Their question was, how close would the students’ rankings come to the experts? The answer is, pretty close. The students put Knott’s Berry Farm second and Alpha Beta first (reversing the order of the first two jams). The experts and the students both agreed that Featherweight was number three. And, like the experts, the students thought that Acme and Sorrell Ridge were markedly inferior to the others, although the experts thought Sorrell Ridge was worse than Acme, while the students had the order the other way around. Scientists use something called a correlation to measure how closely one factor predicts another, and overall, the students’ ratings correlated with the experts’ ratings by .55, which is quite a high correlation. What this says, in other words, is that our jam reactions are quite good: even those of us who aren’t jam experts know good jam when we taste it.

But what would happen if I were to give you a questionnaire and ask you to enumerate your reasons for preferring one jam to another? Disaster. Wilson and Schooler had another group of students provide a written explanation for their rankings, and they put Knott’s Berry Farm — the best jam of all, according to the experts — second to last, and Sorrell Ridge, the experts’ worst jam, third. The overall correlation was now down to .11, which for all intents and purposes means that the students’ evaluations had almost nothing at all to do with the experts’ evaluations. This is reminiscent of Schooler’s experiments that I described in the Van Riper story, in which introspection destroyed people’s ability to solve insight problems. By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots.