Edward Bernays, Context and Choice Blindness

As if we needed more evidence that we don’t really know why we want what we want, Jonah Lehrer takes a look at a couple studies showing just how few people can recognize the differences between the choices they make, even immediately after they make them.

“What’s most unsettling, however, is that we are completely ignorant of how fallible our perceptions are. In this study, for instance, the consumers were convinced that it was extremely easy to distinguish between these pairs of jam and tea. They insisted that they would always be able to tell grapefruit jam and cinnamon-apple jam apart. But they were wrong…We are all blind to our own choice blindness.”

Which reminded me a bit of the old Edward Bernays documentary, The Century of Self: Happiness Machines. Bernays, the nephew of Freud and so-called Father of Public Relations, helped to establish the cigarette craze among women, apparently by re-dubbing the cigarette a torch of freedom as a symbol of masculinity. (the first few minutes of this video covers it)

But I do wonder if the important bit was really all that much about the positioning and more about visibility more generally. Yes, the cigarette has the enduring sense of rebelliousness, but the degree to which the ready-made tagline mattered versus the fact that the cigarette was exposed in a different context, I don’t know. It is possible that the staged protest was only a proxy, giving the journalists fodder to chew on while the real work was done simply by other women seeing the right women lighting up.

Which is all to say that what we like isn’t just the thing, but the context of that thing, too. So if we’re talking different types of jams in some study, perhaps the confusion is simply because the methodology made these things equal. And it was that equality that made them interchangeable and easily confused. Which, as always, means we’re spending too much time finding a good one-liner and not enough time on all the associations that make that one-liner meaningful.