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by a “weak” one.21 Marketers also know this and design ad campaigns to create and then exploit our expectations. One arena in which that was done very effectively is the vodka market. Vodka is a neutral spirit, distilled, according to the U.S. government definition, “as to be without distinctive character, aroma, taste or color.” Most American vodkas originate, therefore, not with passionate, flannel-shirted men like those who create wines, but with corporate giants like the agrochemical supplier Archer Daniels Midland. And the job of the vodka distiller is not to nurture an aging process that imparts finely nuanced flavor but to take the 190-proof industrial swill such suppliers provide, add water, and subtract as much of the taste as possible. Through massive image-building campaigns, however, vodka producers have managed to create very strong expectations of difference. As a result, people believe that this liquor, which by its very definition is without a distinctive character, actually varies greatly from brand to brand. Moreover, they are willing to pay large amounts of money based on those differences. Lest I be dismissed as a tasteless boor, I wish to point out that there is a way to test my ravings. You could line up a series of vodkas and a series of vodka sophisticates and perform a blind tasting. As it happens, The New York Times did just that.22 And without their labels, fancy vodkas like Grey Goose and Ketel One didn’t fare so well. Compared with conventional wisdom, in fact, the results appeared random. Moreover, of the twenty-one vodkas tasted, it was the cheap bar brand, Smirnoff, that came out at the top of the list. Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data.

A FEW YEARS AGO The Sunday Times of London conducted an experiment. Its editors submitted typewritten manuscripts of the opening chapters of two novels that had won the Booker Prize—one of the world’s most prestigious and most influential awards for contemporary fiction—to twenty major publishers and agents.23 One of the novels was In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature; the other was Holiday by Stanley Middleton. One can safely assume that each of the recipients of the manuscripts would have heaped praise on the highly lauded novels had they known what they were reading. But the submissions were made as if they were the work of aspiring authors, and none of the publishers or agents appeared to recognize them. How did the highly successful works fare? All but one of the replies were rejections. The exception was an expression of interest in Middleton’s novel by a London literary agent. The same agent wrote of Naipaul’s book, “We…thought it was quite original. In the end though I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”

The author Stephen King unwittingly conducted a similar experiment when, worried that the public would not accept his books as quickly as he could churn them out, he wrote a series of novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Sales figures indicated that even Stephen King, without the name, is no Stephen King. (Sales picked up considerably after word of the author’s true identity finally got out.) Sadly, one experiment King did not perform was the opposite: to swathe wonderful unpublished manuscripts by struggling writers in covers naming him as the author. But if even Stephen King, without the name, is no Stephen King, then the rest of us, when our creative work receives a less-than-Kingly reception, might take comfort in knowing that the differences in quality might not be as great as some people would have us believe.

Years ago at Caltech, I had an office around the corner from the office of a physicist named John Schwarz. He was getting little recognition and had suffered a decade of ridicule as he almost single-handedly kept alive a discredited theory, called string theory, which predicted that space has many more dimensions than the three