Expectation Effect (Expectation Bias)

Chapter 10 The Effect of Expectations

Why the Mind Gets What It Expects S uppose you’re a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles and you’re watching a football game with a friend who, sadly, grew up in New York City and is a rabid fan of the Giants. You don’t really understand why you ever became friends, but after spending a semester in the same dorm room you start liking him, even though you think he’s football-challenged. The Eagles have possession and are down by five points with no time-outs left. It’s the fourth quarter, and six seconds are left on the clock. The ball is on the 12-yard line. Four wide receivers line up for the final play. The center hikes the ball to the quarterback who drops back in the pocket. As the receivers sprint toward the end zone, the quarterback throws a high pass just as the time runs out. An Eagles wide receiver near the corner of the end zone dives for the ball and makes a spectacular catch. The referee signals a touchdown and all the Eagles players run onto the field in celebration. But wait. Did the receiver get both of his feet in? It looks close on the Jumbotron; so the booth calls down for a review. You turn to your friend: “Look at that! What a great catch! He was totally in. Why are they even reviewing it?” Your friend scowls. “That was completely out! I can’t believe the ref didn’t see it! You must be crazy to think that was in!” What just happened? Was your friend the Giants fan just experiencing wishful thinking? Was he deceiving himself? Worse, was he lying? Or had his loyalty to his team—and his anticipation of its win—completely, truly, and deeply clouded his judgment? I was thinking about that one evening, as I strolled through Cambridge and over to MIT’s Walker Memorial Building. How could two friends—two honest guys—see one soaring pass in two different ways? In fact, how could any two parties look at precisely the same event and interpret it as supporting their opposing points of view? How could Democrats and Republicans look at a single schoolchild who is unable to read, and take such bitterly different positions on the same issue? How could a couple embroiled in a fight see the causes of their argument so differently? A friend of mine who had spent time in Belfast, Ireland, as a foreign correspondent, once described a meeting he had arranged with members of the IRA. During the interview, news came that the governor of the Maze prison, a winding row of cell blocks that held many IRA operatives, had been assassinated. The IRA members standing around my friend, quite understandably, received the news with satisfaction—as a victory for their cause. The British, of course, didn’t see it in those terms at all. The headlines in London the next day boiled with anger and calls for retribution. In fact, the British saw the event as proof that discussions with the IRA would lead nowhere and that the IRA should be crushed. I am an Israeli, and no stranger to such cycles of violence. Violence is not rare. It happens so frequently that we rarely stop to ask ourselves why. Why does it happen? Is it an outcome of history, or race, or politics—or is there something fundamentally irrational in us that encourages conflict, that causes us to look at the same event and, depending on our point of view, see it in totally different terms? Leonard Lee (a professor at Columbia), Shane Frederick (a professor at MIT), and I didn’t have any answers to these profound questions. But in a search for the root of this human condition, we decided to set up a series of simple experiments to explore how previously held impressions can cloud our point of view. We came up with a simple test—one in which we would not use religion, politics, or even sports as the indicator. We would use glasses of beer.

Y OU REACH the entrance to Walker by climbing a set of broad steps between towering Greek columns. Once inside (and after turning right), you enter two rooms with carpeting that predates the advent of electric light, furniture to match, and a smell that has the unmistaken promise of alcohol, packs of peanuts, and good company. Welcome to the Muddy Charles—one of MIT’s two pubs, and the location for a set of studies that Leonard, Shane, and I would be conducting over the following weeks. The purpose of our experiments would be to determine whether people’s expectations influence their views of subsequent events—more specifically, whether bar patrons’ expectations for a certain kind of beer would shape their perception of its taste. Let me explain this further. One of the beers that would be served to the patrons of the Muddy Charles would be Budweiser. The second would be what we fondly called MIT Brew. What’s MIT Brew? Basically Budweiser, plus a “secret ingredient”—two drops of balsamic vinegar for each ounce of beer. (Some of the MIT students objected to our calling Budweiser “beer,” so in subsequent studies, we used Sam Adams—a substance more readily acknowledged by Bostonians as “beer.”) At about seven that evening, Jeffrey, a second-year PhD student in computer science, was lucky enough to drop by the Muddy Charles. “Can I offer you two small, free samples of beer?” asked Leonard, approaching him. Without much hesitation, Jeffrey agreed, and Leonard led him over to a table that held two pitchers of the foamy stuff, one labeled A and the other B. Jeffrey sampled a mouthful of one of them, swishing it around thoughtfully, and then sampled the other. “Which one would you like a large glass of?” asked Leonard. Jeffrey thought it over. With a free glass in the offing, he wanted to be sure he would be spending his near future with the right malty friend. Jeffrey chose beer B as the clear winner, and joined his friends (who were in deep conversation over the cannon that a group of MIT students had recently “borrowed” from the Caltech campus). Unbeknownst to Jeffrey, the two beers he had previewed were Budweiser and the MIT Brew—and the one he selected was the vinegar-laced MIT Brew. A few minutes later, Mina, a visiting student from Estonia, dropped in. “Like a free beer?” asked Leonard. Her reply was a smile and a nod of the head. This time, Leonard offered more information. Beer A, he explained, was a standard commercial beer, whereas beer B had been doctored with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. Mina tasted the two beers. After finishing the samples (and wrinkling her nose at the vinegar-laced brew B) she gave the nod to beer A. Leonard poured her a large glass of the commercial brew and Mina happily joined her friends at the pub. Mina and Jeffrey were only two of hundreds of students who participated in this experiment. But their reaction was typical: without foreknowledge about the vinegar, most of them chose the vinegary MIT Brew. But when they knew in advance that the MIT Brew had been laced with balsamic vinegar, their reaction was completely different. At the first taste of the adulterated suds, they wrinkled their noses and requested the standard beer instead. The moral, as you might expect, is that if you tell people up front that something might be distasteful, the odds are good that they will end up agreeing with you—not because their experience tells them so but because of their expectations. If, at this point in the book, you are considering the establishment of a new brewing company, especially one that specializes in adding some balsamic vinegar to beer, consider the following points: (1) If people read the label, or knew about the ingredient, they would most likely hate your beer. (2) Balsamic vinegar is actually pretty expensive—so even if it makes beer taste better, it may not be worth the investment. Just brew a better beer instead.

B EER WAS JUST the start of our experiments. The MBA students at MIT’s Sloan School also drink a lot of coffee. So one week, Elie Ofek (a professor at the Harvard Business School), Marco Bertini (a professor at the London Business School), and I opened an impromptu coffee shop, at which we offered students a free cup of coffee if they would answer a few questions about our brew. A line quickly formed. We handed our participants their cups of coffee and then pointed them to a table set with coffee additives—milk, cream, half-and-half, white sugar, and brown sugar. We also set out some unusual condiments—cloves, nutmeg, orange peel, anise, sweet paprika, and cardamom—for our coffee drinkers to add to their cups as they pleased. After adding what they wanted (and none of our odd condiments were ever used) and tasting the coffee, the participants filled out a survey form. They indicated how much they liked the coffee, whether they would like it served in the cafeteria in the future, and the maximum price they would be willing to pay for this particular brew. We kept handing out coffee for the next few days, but from time to time we changed the containers in which the odd condiments were displayed. Sometimes we placed them in beautiful glass-and-metal containers, set on a brushed metal tray with small silver spoons and nicely printed labels. At other times we placed the same odd condiments in white Styrofoam cups. The labels were handwritten in a red felt-tip pen. We went further and not only cut the Styrofoam cups shorter, but gave them jagged, hand-cut edges. What were the results? No, the fancy containers didn’t persuade any of the coffee drinkers to add the odd condiments (I guess we won’t be seeing sweet paprika in coffee anytime soon). But the interesting thing was that when the odd condiments were offered in the fancy containers, the coffee drinkers were much more likely to tell us that they liked the coffee a lot, that they would be willing to pay well for it, and that they would recommend that we should start serving this new blend in the cafeteria. When the coffee ambience looked upscale, in other words, the coffee tasted upscale as well.

W HEN WE BELIEVE beforehand that something will be good, therefore, it generally will be good—and when we think it will be bad, it will bad. But how deep are these influences? Do they just change our beliefs, or do they also change the physiology of the experience itself? In other words, can previous knowledge actually modify the neural activity underlying the taste itself, so that when we expect something to taste good (or bad), it will actually taste that way? To test this possibility, Leonard, Shane, and I conducted the beer experiments again, but with an important twist. We had already tested our MIT Brew in two ways—by telling our participants about the presence of vinegar in the beer before they tasted the brew, and by not telling them anything at all about it. But suppose we initially didn’t tell them about the vinegar, then had them taste the beer, then revealed the presence of the vinegar, and then asked for their reactions. Would the placement of the knowledge—coming just after the experience—evoke a different response from what we received when the participants got the knowledge before the experience? For a moment, let’s switch from beer to another example. Suppose you heard that a particular sports car was fantastically exciting to drive, took one for a test drive, and then gave your impressions of the car. Would your impressions be different from those of people who didn’t know anything about the sports car, took the test drive, then heard the car was hot, and then wrote down their impressions? In other words, does it matter if knowledge comes before or after the experience? And if so, which type of input is more important—knowledge before the experience, or an input of information after an experience has taken place? The significance of this question is that if knowledge merely informs us of a state of affairs, then it shouldn’t matter whether our participants received the information before or after tasting the beer: in other words, if we told them up front that there was vinegar in the beer, this should affect their review of the beer. And if we told them afterward, that should similarly affect their review. After all, they both got the same bad news about the vinegar-laced beer. This is what we should expect if knowledge merely informs us. On the other hand, if telling our participants about the vinegar at the outset actually reshapes their sensory perceptions to align with this knowledge, then the participants who know about the vinegar up front should have a markedly different opinion of the beer from those who swigged a glass of it, and then were told. Think of it this way. If knowledge actually modifies the taste, then the participants who consumed the beer before they got the news about the vinegar, tasted the beer in the same way as those in the “blind” condition (who knew nothing about the vinegar). They learned about the vinegar only after their taste was established, at which point, if expectations change our experience, it was too late for the knowledge to affect the sensory perceptions. So, did the students who were told about the vinegar after tasting the beer like it as little as the students who learned about the vinegar before tasting the beer? Or did they like it as much as the students who never learned about the vinegar? What do you think? As it turned out, the students who found out about the vinegar after drinking the beer liked the beer much better than those who were told about the vinegar up front. In fact, those who were told afterward about the vinegar liked the beer just as much as those who weren’t aware that there was any vinegar in the beer at all. What does this suggest? Let me give you another example. Suppose Aunt Darcy is having a garage sale, trying to get rid of many things she collected during her long life. A car pulls up, some people get out, and before long they are gathered around one of the oil paintings propped up against the wall. Yes, you agree with them, it does look like a fine example of early American primitivism. But do you tell them that Aunt Darcy copied it from a photograph just a few years earlier? My inclination, since I am an honest, upright person, would be to tell them. But should you tell them before or after they finish admiring the painting? According to our beer studies, you and Aunt Darcy would be better off keeping the information under wraps until after the examination. I’m not saying that this would entice the visitors to pay thousands of dollars for the painting (even though our beer drinkers preferred our vinegar-laced beer as much when they were told after drinking it as when they were not told at all), but it might get you a higher price for Aunt Darcy’s work. By the way, we also tried a more extreme version of this experiment. We told one of two groups in advance about the vinegar (the “before” condition) and told the second group about the vinegar after they had finished the sampling (the “after” condition). Once the tasting was done, rather than offer them a large glass of their choice, we instead gave them a large cup of unadulterated beer, some vinegar, a dropper, and the recipe for the MIT Brew (two drops of balsamic vinegar per ounce of beer). We wanted to see if people would freely add balsamic vinegar to their beer; if so, how much they would use; and how these outcomes would depend on whether the participants tasted the beer before or after knowing about the vinegar. What happened? Telling the participants about the vinegar after rather than before they tasted the beer doubled the number of participants who decided to add vinegar to their beer. For the participants in the “after” condition, the beer with vinegar didn’t taste too bad the first time around (they apparently reasoned), and so they didn’t mind giving it another try.

• A S YOU SEE, expectations can influence nearly every aspect of our life. Imagine that you need to hire a caterer for your daughter’s wedding. Josephine’s Catering boasts about its “delicious Asian-style ginger chicken” and its “flavorful Greek salad with kalamata olives and feta cheese.” Another caterer, Culinary Sensations, offers a “succulent organic breast of chicken roasted to perfection and drizzled with a merlot demi-glace, resting in a bed of herbed Israeli couscous” and a “mélange of the freshest roma cherry tomatoes and crisp field greens, paired with a warm circle of chèvre in a fruity raspberry vinagrette.” Although there is no way to know whether Culinary Sensations’ food is any better than Josephine’s, the sheer depth of the description may lead us to expect greater things from the simple tomato and goat cheese salad. This, accordingly, increases the chance that we (and our guests, if we give them the description of the dish) will rave over it. This principle, so useful to caterers, is available to everyone. We can add small things that sound exotic and fashionable to our cooking (chipotle-mango sauces seem all the rage right now, or try buffalo instead of beef ). These ingredients might not make the dish any better in a blind taste test; but by changing our expectations, they can effectively influence the taste when we have this pre-knowledge. These techniques are especially useful when you are inviting people for dinner—or persuading children to try new dishes. By the same token, it might help the taste of the meal if you omit the fact that a certain cake is made from a commercial mix or that you used generic rather than brand-name orange juice in a cocktail, or, especially for children, that Jell-O comes from cow hooves. I am not endorsing the morality of such actions, just pointing to the expected outcomes. Finally, don’t underestimate the power of presentation. There’s a reason that learning to present food artfully on the plate is as important in culinary school as learning to grill and fry. Even when you buy take-out, try removing the Styrofoam packaging and placing the food on some nice dishes and garnishing it (especially if you have company); this can make all the difference. One more piece of advice: If you want to enhance the experience of your guests, invest in a nice set of wineglasses. Moreover, if you’re really serious about your wine, you may want to go all out and purchase the glasses that are specific to burgundies, chardonnays, champagne, etc. Each type of glass is supposed to provide the appropriate environment, which should bring out the best in these wines (even though controlled studies find that the shape of the glass makes no difference at all in an objective blind taste test, that doesn’t stop people from perceiving a significant difference when they are handed the “correct glass”). Moreover, if you forget that the shape of the glass really has no effect on the taste of the wine, you yourself may be able to better enjoy the wine you consume in the appropriately shaped fancy glasses.

Expectations, of course, are not limited to food. When you invite people to a movie, you can increase their enjoyment by mentioning that it got great reviews. This is also essential for building the reputation of a brand or product. That’s what marketing is all about—providing information that will heighten someone’s anticipated and real pleasure. But do expectations created by marketing really change our enjoyment? I’m sure you remember the famous “Pepsi Challenge” ads on television (or at least you may have heard of them). The ads consisted of people chosen at random, tasting Coke and Pepsi and remarking about which they liked better. These ads, created by Pepsi, announced that people preferred Pepsi to Coke. At the same time, the ads for Coke proclaimed that people preferred Coke to Pepsi. How could that be? Were the two companies fudging their statistics? The answer is in the different ways the two companies evaluated their products. Coke’s market research was said to be based on consumers’ preferences when they could see what they were drinking, including the famous red trademark, while Pepsi ran its challenge using blind tasting and standard plastic cups marked M and Q. Could it be that Pepsi tasted better in a blind taste test but that Coke tasted better in a non-blind (sighted) test? To better understand the puzzle of Coke versus Pepsi, a terrific group of neuroscientists—Sam McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim Cypert, Latané Montague, and Read Montague—conducted their own blind and non-blind taste test of Coke and Pepsi. The modern twist on this test was supplied by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. With this machine, the researchers could monitor the activity of the participants’ brains while they consumed the drinks. Tasting drinks while one is in an fMRI is not simple, by the way, because a person whose brain is being scanned must lie perfectly still. To overcome this problem, Sam and his colleagues put a long plastic tube into the mouth of each participant, and from a distance injected the appropriate drink (Pepsi or Coke) through the tube into their mouths. As the participants received a drink, they were also presented with visual information indicating either that Coke was coming, that Pepsi was coming, or that an unknown drink was coming. This way the researchers could observe the brain activation of the participants while they consumed Coke and Pepsi, both when they knew which beverage they were drinking and when they did not. What were the results? In line with the Coke and Pepsi “challenges,” it turned out that the brain activation of the participants was different depending on whether the name of the drink was revealed or not. This is what happened: Whenever a person received a squirt of Coke or Pepsi, the center of the brain associated with strong feelings of emotional connection—called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, VMPFC—was stimulated. But when the participants knew they were going to get a squirt of Coke, something additional happened. This time, the frontal area of the brain—the dorsolateral aspect of the prefrontal cortex, DLPFC, an area involved in higher human brain functions like working memory, associations, and higher-order cognitions and ideas—was also activated. It happened with Pepsi—but even more so with Coke (and, naturally, the response was stronger in people who had a stronger preference for Coke). The reaction of the brain to the basic hedonic value of the drinks (essentially sugar) turned out to be similar for the two drinks. But the advantage of Coke over Pepsi was due to Cokes’s brand—which activated the higher-order brain mechanisms. These associations, then, and not the chemical properties of the drink, gave Coke an advantage in the marketplace. It is also interesting to consider the ways in which the frontal part of the brain is connected to the pleasure center. There is a dopamine link by which the front part of the brain projects and activates the pleasure centers. This is probably why Coke was liked more when the brand was known—the associations were more powerful, allowing the part of the brain that represents these associations to enhance activity in the brain’s pleasure center. This should be good news to any ad agency, of course, because it means that the bright red can, swirling script, and the myriad messages that have come down to consumers over the years (such as “Things go better with . . .”) are as much responsible for our love of Coke as the brown bubbly stuff itself.

E XPECTATIONS ALSO SHAPE stereotypes. A stereotype, after all, is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has seen before. For that reason, stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent. They provide shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings. This is why we have the expectation that an elderly person will need help using a computer or that a student at Harvard will be intelligent. * But because a stereotype provides us with specific expectations about members of a group, it can also unfavorably influence both our perceptions and our behavior. Research on stereotypes shows not only that we react differently when we have a stereotype of a certain group of people, but also that stereotyped people themselves react differently when they are aware of the label that they are forced to wear (in psychological parlance, they are “primed” with this label). One stereotype of Asian-Americans, for instance, is that they are especially gifted in mathematics and science. A common stereotype of females is that they are weak in mathematics. This means that Asian-American women could be influenced by both notions. In fact, they are. In a remarkable experiment, Margaret Shih, Todd Pittinsky, and Nalini Ambady asked Asian-American women to take an objective math exam. But first they divided the women into two groups. The women in one group were asked questions related to their gender. For example, they were asked about their opinions and preferences regarding coed dorms, thereby priming their thoughts for gender-related issues. The women in the second group were asked questions related to their race. These questions referred to the languages they knew, the languages they spoke at home, and their family’s history in the United States, thereby priming the women’s thoughts for race-related issues. The performance of the two groups differed in a way that matched the stereotypes of both women and Asian-Americans. Those who had been reminded that they were women performed worse than those who had been reminded that they were Asian-American. These results show that even our own behavior can be influenced by our stereotypes, and that activation of stereotypes can depend on our current state of mind and how we view ourselves at the moment. Perhaps even more astoundingly, stereotypes can also affect the behavior of people who are not even part of a stereotyped group. In one notable study, John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows had participants complete a scrambled-sentence task, rearranging the order of words to form sentences (we discussed this type of task in Chapter 4). For some of the participants, the task was based on words such as aggressive , rude, annoying , and intrude . For others, the task was based on words such as honor , considerate , polite , and sensitive . The goal of these two lists was to prime the participants to think about politeness or rudeness as a result of constructing sentences from these words (this is a very common technique in social psychology, and it works amazingly well). After the participants completed the scrambled-sentence task, they went to another laboratory to participate in what was purportedly a second task. When they arrived at the second laboratory, they found the experimenter apparently in the midst of trying to explain the task to an uncomprehending participant who was just not getting it (this supposed participant was in fact not a real participant but a confederate working for the experimenter). How long do you think it took the real participants to interrupt the conversation and ask what they should do next? The amount of waiting depended on what type of words had been involved in the scrambled-sentence task. Those who had worked with the set of polite words patiently waited for about 9.3 minutes before they interrupted, whereas those who had worked with the set of rude words waited only about 5.5 minutes before interrupting. A second experiment tested the same general idea by priming the concept of the elderly, using words such as Florida , bingo , and ancient . After the participants in this experiment completed the scrambled-sentence task, they left the room, thinking that they had finished the experiment—but in fact the crux of the study was just beginning. What truly interested the researchers was how long it would take the participants to walk down the hallway as they left the building. Sure enough, the participants in the experimental group were affected by the “elderly” words: their walking speed was considerably slower than that of a control group who had not been primed. And remember, the primed participants were not themselves elderly people being reminded of their frailty—they were undergraduate students at NYU.

A LL THESE EXPERIMENTS teach us that expectations are more than the mere anticipation of a boost from a fizzy Coke. Expectations enable us to make sense of a conversation in a noisy room, despite the loss of a word here and there, and likewise, to be able to read text messages on our cell phones, despite the fact that some of the words are scrambled. And although expectations can make us look foolish from time to time, they are also very powerful and useful. So what about our football fans and the game-winning pass? Although both friends were watching the same game, they were doing so through markedly different lenses. One saw the pass as in bounds. The other saw it as out. In sports, such arguments are not particularly damaging—in fact, they can be fun. The problem is that these same biased processes can influence how we experience other aspects of our world. These biased processes are in fact a major source of escalation in almost every conflict, whether Israeli-Palestinian, American-Iraqi, Serbian-Croatian, or Indian-Pakistani. In all these conflicts, individuals from both sides can read similar history books and even have the same facts taught to them, yet it is very unusual to find individuals who would agree about who started the conflict, who is to blame, who should make the next concession, etc. In such matters, our investment in our beliefs is much stronger than any affiliation to sport teams, and so we hold on to these beliefs tenaciously. Thus the likelihood of agreement about “the facts” becomes smaller and smaller as personal investment in the problem grows. This is clearly disturbing. We like to think that sitting at the same table together will help us hammer out our differences and that concessions will soon follow. But history has shown us that this is an unlikely outcome; and now we know the reason for this catastrophic failure. But there’s reason for hope. In our experiments, tasting beer without knowing about the vinegar, or learning about the vinegar after the beer was tasted, allowed the true flavor to come out. The same approach should be used to settle arguments: The perspective of each side is presented without the affiliation—the facts are revealed, but not which party took which actions. This type of “blind” condition might help us better recognize the truth. When stripping away our preconceptions and our previous knowledge is not possible, perhaps we can at least acknowledge that we are all biased. If we acknowledge that we are trapped within our perspective, which partially blinds us to the truth, we may be able to accept the idea that conflicts generally require a neutral third party—who has not been tainted with our expectations—to set down the rules and regulations. Of course, accepting the word of a third party is not easy and not always possible; but when it is possible, it can yield substantial benefits. And for that reason alone, we must continue to try.

Reflections on Expectations: Music and Food Imagine walking into a truck stop off a deserted stretch of Interstate 95 at nine o’clock in the evening. You’ve been driving for six hours. You are tired and still have a long drive ahead of you. You need a bite to eat and want to be out of the car for a bit, so you walk into what appears to be a restaurant of sorts. It has the usual cracked-vinyl-covered booths and fluorescent lighting. The coffee-stained tabletops leave you a bit wary. Still, you think, “Fine, no one can screw up a hamburger that badly.” You reach for the menu, conveniently stashed behind an empty napkin dispenser, only to discover this is no ordinary greasy spoon. Instead of hamburgers and chicken sandwiches, you’re astonished to see that the menu offers foie gras au torchon, truffle pâté with frisée and fennel marmalade, gougères with duck confit, quail à la crapaudine, and so on. Items like this would be no surprise in even a small Manhattan restaurant, of course. And it is possible that the chef got tired of Manhattan, moved to the middle of nowhere, and now cooks for whoever happens through. So is there a key difference between ordering gougères with duck confit in Manhattan and ordering it at an isolated truck stop on I-95? If you encountered such French delicacies at the truck stop, would you be brave enough to try them? Suppose the prices were not listed on the menu. What would you be willing to pay for an appetizer or an entrée? And if you ate it, would you enjoy it as much as you might if you were eating the same food in Manhattan? On the basis of what we learned from Chapter 10, the answers are simple. Ambience and expectations do add a great deal to our enjoyment. You would expect less in such an environment, and as a consequence you would enjoy the experience at the truck stop less, even if you had the identical foie gras au torchon in both places. Likewise, if you knew that pâté is largely made of run-of-the-mill goose liver and butter * rather than super special ingredients, you would enjoy it much less.

A FEW YEARS ago the folks at the Washington Post were curious about the same basic topic and decided to run an experiment. 11 Instead of food, they used music. The experimental question was this: can outstanding art shine through a filter of mundane and dingy expectation? Journalist Gene Weingarten asked Joshua Bell, generally considered one of the best violinists in the world, to pose as a street performer and play some of the finest music ever composed * at a Metro station in Washington, D.C., during the morning rush hour. Would people notice that this guy was better than most buskers? Would they stop to listen? Would they throw a dollar or two his way? Would you? If you were like 98 percent of the people who passed through L’Enfant Plaza Station that morning, you would have hurried by, oblivious of the performance. Only 27 out of 1,097 (2.5 percent) put money into Bell’s open Stradivarius violin case and only 7 (0.5 percent) stopped to listen for more than a minute. Bell played for a little less than an hour and made about $32, which is probably not bad for your basic street performer, but no doubt humbling to a man used to making far, far more for one minute of playing. Weingarten interviewed a number of people who passed through the station that morning. Of the people who stopped, one recognized Bell from a performance the night before. Another was a serious violinist himself. Another was a Metro worker who, after years of listening to ordinary, albeit occasionally talented, buskers, discerned that Bell was better than average. Aside from these few—and disturbingly to classical music fans, and Bell’s fans in particular—people did not stop to listen. Many didn’t even look at Bell. When interviewed, passersby said either that they didn’t notice the music at all, or that it sounded like a slightly better than average street performer playing everyday classical music. No one expected a world-class musician to be playing technically dazzling pieces in a Metro station. Accordingly, and for the most part, they didn’t hear one. Sometime later I met Joshua Bell and asked him about this experience. In particular, I wanted to know how he felt about being overlooked and ignored by so many people. He responded that he was really not all that surprised, and admitted that expectation is an important part of the way we experience music. Bell told me that it takes an appropriate setting to help people appreciate a live classical music performance—a listener needs to be sitting in a comfortable, faux velvet seat, and surrounded by the acoustics of a concert hall. And when people adorn themselves in silk, perfume, and cashmere, they seem to appreciate the costly performance much more. “What if we did the opposite experiment?” I asked. “What if we put a mediocre player in Carnegie Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic? The expectations would be very high but the quality would not. Would people discern the difference and would their pleasure be quashed?” Bell thought for a moment. “In this case,” he said, “the expectations would triumph over the experience.” Furthermore, he said he could think of a few people who were not great violinists but received wild applause because they were in the right environment. In the end, I wasn’t convinced by Bell’s nonchalance about his Metro performance. After all, time heals all wounds, and one of the ways time works in our favor is to help us either forget or misremember the past in a way that makes us feel better about ourselves. Besides, not being surprised that people were too busy to notice his performance must have helped Bell avoid the violinist’s version of the old question: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The following day, sitting in the Monterey auditorium, I had the opportunity to listen to Joshua Bell play Bach’s famous “Chaconne”—the same wonderful piece that he had played for his commuter audience. I closed my eyes and imagined that, instead of listening to a great violinist, I was hearing a mediocre fifteen-year-old kid play a Stradivarius. I’m no connoisseur, but I swear I could hear a few off-key patches, and some squeaks of the strings suddenly became audible. Perhaps the squeaks were part of Bach’s composition, just an inevitable part of playing a stringed instrument, or maybe they were a result of playing in an auditorium rather than a proper concert hall. I could easily imagine how an untrained listener such as myself might attribute these sounds to mistakes of a mediocre player, especially if the player is standing in a bustling train station during rush hour. At the end of his performance, Bell got a long standing ovation. Though I had enjoyed the performance, I wondered how much the ovation was a reward for his performance and how much was due to the audience’s expectations. I’m not questioning the level of Bell’s (or anyone’s) talent. The point is that we don’t really understand the role expectations play in the way we experience and evaluate art, literature, drama, architecture, food, wine—anything, really.

I THINK THAT the role of expectations may have been captured best by one of my favorite authors. In Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 comic novella Three Men in a Boat , the narrator and his two traveling companions are at a party at an inn. The discussion happens to turn to comic songs. Two young men, outsiders who lack the aristocratic manners of the other partygoers, assure them that a song by the renowned German comic Herr Slossenn Boschen is the funniest of all, and that Herr Boschen happens to be staying at the very same inn. Perhaps he might be persuaded to play one of his songs for them? Herr Boschen is quite glad to play for them, and since only the two young men understand German, though everyone else pretends to understand it, the rest of the audience take their cues from them. As the two young men shriek with laughter, so do they. Some members of the audience go a step further and from time to time laugh on their own, pretending to have understood a bit of subtle humor missed by the others. In reality, it turns out that Herr Boschen is a renowned tragedian and is doing his best to deliver a dramatic, emotionally laden song—while the two young men laugh every few notes in order to fool the rest of the guests into believing that such is the style of German comedy. Confused, Herr Boschen presses on. But when he finishes singing, he leaps up from the piano and pours a stream of German obscenities over his listeners. Ignorant of German and Germany’s musical conventions, the audience members do the next best thing and follow the purported expertise of the two outsiders, laugh on cue from them, and believe that the whole performance, including Boschen’s temper tantrum, is uproariously funny. Overall the audience enjoys the performance a great deal. Jerome’s story is exaggerated, but in truth, this is how most of us navigate the world. Across many domains of life, expectations play a huge role in the way we end up experiencing things. Think about the Mona Lisa . Why is this portrait so beautiful, and why is the woman’s smile mysterious? Can you discern the technique and talent it took for Leonardo da Vinci to create it? For most of us the painting is beautiful, and the smile mysterious, because we are told it is so. In the absence of expertise or perfect information, we look for social cues to help us figure out how much we are, or should be, impressed, and our expectations take care of the rest.

T HE BRILLIANT SATIRIST Alexander Pope once wrote: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” To me, it seems that Pope’s advice is the best way to live an objective life. Clearly, it is also very helpful in eliminating the effects of negative expectations. But what about positive expectations? If I listen to Joshua Bell with no expectations, the experience is not going to be nearly as satisfying or pleasurable as if I listen to him and say to myself, “My god, how lucky I am to be listening to Joshua Bell play live in front of me.” My knowledge that Bell is one of the best players in the world contributes immeasurably to my pleasure. As it turns out, positive expectations allow us to enjoy things more and improve our perception of the world around us. The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get.