The Pepsi challenge: How beliefs affect what you taste

Taste — so essential to our very survival — is a complex experience. It’s influenced by many things: our past experiences, the associations we make with specific foods, advertising, brand loyalties, cultural and ethnic preferences, price. If we think of taste as something objective, determined exclusively by our taste buds, we’re underestimating it.

Researchers have experimented with many of the subjective influences on taste. For example, Coke is rated higher in taste when people drink from a cup with the Coke logo. Beer preferences disappear if the brand labels are removed. Bitter coffee tastes less bitter if you repeatedly tell consumers that it’s not bitter. This last one is from a study called “Cognitive Effects of Deceptive Advertising.”

One of my favorite examples is a study on wine tasting. Volunteers tasted what they thought were five different wines, priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90 a bottle. All 20 volunteers reported that the more expensive the wine, the more they liked the taste. Little did they know: The experiment only used three different wines. The $90 wine, for example, was also presented as the $10 wine. The tasters’ brains were hooked up to functional MRIs during this wine tasting. One significant and discouraging finding in this experiment: A part of the brain that notices the pleasantness of an experience becomes more active when we believe something costs more.

These studies are of great interest to food and beverage manufacturers and their advertising agencies. Coke still outsells Pepsi, despite losing the Pepsi challenge. One study in particular probed taste preferences at a fundamental level: Our personal values and the cultural symbols that represent those values.

Power seekers eat meat

Australian researchers set out to test a hypothesis: Our taste preferences depend on the symbolic meanings we attach to foods and on how those relate to our personal values.

For example, if you’re a sports fan who thinks Gatorade symbolizes “A Sense of Achievement,” and that’s one of your core values, chances are you’ll think Gatorade tastes good. If you’re a wonky intellectual who considers sports a sweat-inducing waste of time, you’re unlikely to drink or buy Gatorade. More significantly, you won’t like the taste.

Sociologists and anthropologists claim that meat is a symbol of social power. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, on the other hand, symbolize social equality and the rejection of power relationships. (See Sources below for some references that make a case for this.) People may claim they eat meat because it tastes good. But might the real reason simply be that they value authority, wealth, social recognition, and a good public image?

The Australians designed an experiment using two foods: A beef sausage roll was the meat option and an all-vegetable sausage roll – similar in taste and appearance — was the non-meat alternative.

Here’s how the experiment worked: Subjects were told they were about to taste either meat or a vegetarian alternative. They were given a list of the ingredients. Only half the subjects were told the truth about what they tasted. Test subjects were also interviewed to determine their personal values.

After tasting, the subjects rated the food for various qualities: Taste, aroma, flavor. They were also asked if they believed they’d been told the truth about what they’d just tasted.

The researchers ran a whole slew of regression analyses on the variables, but the high level results were basically what they expected. Subjects who valued social power – authority, wealth, etc. -preferred food they believed was meat even when it was really the vegetarian alternative. Those who valued social equality preferred the food they believed was vegetarian even when it was meat.

Fun lovers drink Pepsi

The experimenters also tested a beverage. Pepsi is associated with an exciting and enjoyable life, social power, and recognition. (See, all that advertising really pays off.) For an alternative image, they used an inexpensive store brand that tested low on these emotional qualities.

This experiment was similar to the one for meat. Half the subjects were told they were drinking Pepsi, the other half were told they were drinking the cheap store brand. Half of each group was told the truth. The other half was told a lie. They rated the taste and were asked if they believed they’d been told the truth. Not so surprisingly, subjects who supported the values associated with Pepsi favored Pepsi, even when that wasn’t what they tasted.

Taste is (or is not) everything

I’ve glossed over the details here, but the overall conclusion of the experiment was that the image of a brand, and how it compares itself to other brands, can determine a product’s success as much how it actually tastes. (Heck, we all knew that already. But at least now it’s been scientifically verified.)

Is there any useful information here that could help people change their eating habits, for whatever reason they might wish to do so? Maybe.

Research shows that when you ask people why they prefer the foods they do, the most important factor driving our choice of foods is taste. Would the USDA, which publishes the Food Pyramid, sponsor blind taste tests in supermarkets to show meat eaters that meat alternatives taste just as good? Probably not. Would the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association allow that to happen? No — they’d probably have a cow. Will people always end up more influenced by advertising than their taste buds? Is there really any doubt?

On the other hand, vegetables and fruits really need a better PR campaign. There are some things parents and schools can do to promote vegetables. A study at Cornell found that when kindergartners were told they were eating “X-ray vision carrots” and not just plain old vegetables, they ate 50 percent more. And as one taste/expectation researcher recalls:

Our mothers often used creative labeling to trick us into eating something they knew we would otherwise oppose (e.g., by calling crab cakes ”sea hamburgers”). They knew such deception was required to gain our consent, but that they need not maintain the lie after we had consumed the foods, and would often debrief us afterward, with smug satisfaction (”By the way, son, in case you were wondering, ‘”sea” means ”crab.”). They suspected (correctly in most cases) that we could not ”handle the truth” before eating, but could handle it after our senses had signaled that this was good stuff.

More taste!

This is the last in this series of posts on taste, starting with A Matter of Taste. I’ve focused mostly on the physiology and genetics of taste, but deciding what to eat involves a lot more than our genes or even our taste buds. What we eat, how much we eat, and how this affects our health is such a sumptuous subject that I’m sure I’ll have more to say on all this before long.

Related posts:
A matter of taste
How do you taste?
Orange juice and toothpaste
What is a supertaster?
The genetics of supertasting
Are you a supertaster: Do you really want to know?
Are you a supertaster: Look at your tongue
Are you a supertaster: How does PROP Taste to you?
Are you a supertaster: DNA testing
Why do we love high-fat foods?
Do we taste fat?
The taste advantage
“Killer” grapefruit?
Grapefruit and the Pill
This is your brain on sugar — and sugar substitutes