someone else’s subjective experience to guide our chosen experiences.
Orgasms and eating are two of the great pleasures in life, whether you live in Tokyo, Toronto, Toulouse, Tehran or Timbuktu? I doubt any healthy human adult would debate this. What can be debated is what counts as the ultimate orgasm or food experience. It can be debated both among friends and inside our own minds, influenced by personal experience and our knowledge of what else is available, or might be.
Consider potato chips. As a snack, potato chips generate a revenue in the United States of about $6-7 billion dollars each year, relying on the slicing and frying of about 2 billion pounds of potatoes. These facts make clear that most Americans love potato chips, and are motivated to consume them. Like other salty snacks, it is hard to eat just one. The American psychologist Carey Morewedge and his collaborators ran an experiment to find out how much people love potato chips, and whether their anticipated fondness for this delicious crisp changes in the face of other options. Subjects sat at a table in front of a bowl of potato chips and an alternative food that was visible, but out of reach. The alternative was either a highly undesirable snack such as sardines, or a highly desirable one such as Godiva chocolate. After subjects contemplated what it would be like to eat each of these foods, they then rated how much they would enjoy them. This is like the study I described in the pleasure section where subjects rated how much they would enjoy different vacation destinations, but without the comparison between one clearly good and one clearly bad spot. Both focus on the anticipation of a pleasurable experience.
Subjects’ ratings of potato chip deliciousness soared when sardines were on offer, and plummeted in the presence of chocolate. Context matters. What is clearly delicious when there is nothing else on the table, loses or gains in deliciousness when the table fills up with other delectable or disgusting alternatives.
What’s happening to our pleasure detector, and especially our anticipated reward system, in the potato chip experiment? Are we incapable of understanding what makes us happy, unable to figure out what is or is not delicious, or are we fickle? What Morewedge’s experiment reveals is that deliciousness, like ugliness, stubbornness, and obsequiousness, is a judgment, judgments are always relative or comparative, and as such, based on some standard that is either present in the moment, stored away in our memories, or anticipated in the future. When Estelle Reiner uttered her famous line, she was using Meg Ryan’s orgasmic expression of delight as a comparative metric. When we compare food items or wine or pretty faces or sporty cars, we recruit our brain’s resources, especially the circuitry involved in attention, emotion and memory. Whether we say that potato chips are the best snack, or better than sardines, we have made a comparison that requires our attention, our capacity to keep at least two items in memory, and a way of emotionally tagging each of the items. This comparison-shopping taxes our
mental resources, recruiting them away from the job of evaluating one snack, and leading to a distorted
Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 67
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