Decoding Love Read Online Free Page A

what they liked or disliked about the five posters. Afterward, all of the students were allowed to choose one of the posters and then take it home.
     
    A surprising thing happened when students were asked to write the brief essay: after doing that, they preferred the funny posters. When researchers called the students a few weeks later, those same students were less satisfied with their choice than the students who hadn’t written essays. So what was it about writing a brief essay that both altered the students’ choices and also made them more dissatisfied with those choices? According to the researchers, what we can find words for is not necessarily what is most important. In this case, describing what we find alluring about van Gogh is a lot harder than explaining why we find one poster funnier than another. We think we are coming up with legitimate reasons why we prefer the funny poster, but what we are doing is coming up with reasons we can articulate. The mind, though, works its black magic on our decision so that we believe we are coming up with our deep, heartfelt convictions. That’s why the students who wrote about their preferences ended up taking the funny posters home with them. But those written reasons didn’t capture their deeper feelings. Once time had passed, and the students had forgotten about their written responses, their unarticulated preferences had a chance to reemerge, explaining why those students were also the ones who felt more dissatisfied.
     
    Maybe you think that posters are too abstract—a representation, rather than the real thing. Well, it turns out that even something as concrete as our taste buds can be flummoxed when we are forced to write about why we like the way something tastes. Two scientists gathered a group of college students and had them sit down and sample five different brands of strawberry jam. Now, one thing that most people will confidently claim is that they know their own taste preferences, so you would think that selecting a favorite jam would be a simple matter. But the study threw in a twist. One group of students was simply asked to choose which jam they liked best. Another group was asked to analyze the reasons behind their choice. When the two groups had their preferences compared to the judgments of expert taste testers, the group who simply tasted and chose came the closest to matching the preferences of the pros.
     
    The question is, why? Shouldn’t thinking carefully about a judgment lead to more accurate judgments? Sad as it is to say, the answer is no. Our minds can do worse when forced to “think rationally.” In the case of the group asked to provide reasons, the students came up with reasons all right—only those reasons shaped the eventual choices that they made. In other words, they did not think about things in the order that we would suspect. You would imagine that they would taste the jams, pick a favorite, and then try to figure out why it was their favorite. But most of us aren’t expert food tasters and aren’t trained to think in terms of the qualities of similar foods. So, instead of tasting, choosing, and then analyzing, the students found reasons that they could articulate and only then chose jams that would fit with their reasons. And this isn’t simply a jam problem—it applies to a variety of foodstuffs. The results were replicated by another study involving chocolate-chip cookies. Actually, it applies to a whole range of things. Whenever people are asked to describe something verbally that is typically not put into words, the process of putting it into words appears to screw up their thinking. When people are forced to describe a color, they later have more difficulty remembering it. When they are forced to describe a face they have been shown, they are less able to recognize that face on subsequent tests.
     
    Of course, we would like to believe that the poster study or the jam study has nothing to teach us about our love