You May Also Like Quotes

“We all have wanted, at one time or another, to appear as an idealized self. "I'm actually a quite different person," as the playwright Ödön von Horváth wrote, "I just never get around to being him.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Guilty pleasure” is a curious concept. There is a question of causality: Does the pleasure cause the guilt, or does it in fact stem from it? Would guilty pleasures be pleasurable without guilt? Or does the guilt come because we are not feeling any guilt for indulging in the pleasure?”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Consider “the 11th Person Game.” This is an “admittedly objectifying” thought exercise devised by the interaction designer Chris Noessel. The next time you are in a public place, point to a random doorway and ask a friend to choose one of the next ten people who walk through the door as a potential romantic partner. There are two rules: You cannot return to any previous person you passed up, and if, when the tenth person comes through the door, you have not chosen anyone, the eleventh becomes your de facto choice.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“What ever-sharper, real-time data about people’s actual listening behavior do is more strongly reinforce the feedback loop.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“The adoption of tastes is driven in part by this social jockeying, this learning and avoidance. But this is not the whole picture. Sometimes tastes change simply because of errors and randomness.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“As much a search for novelty, new tastes can be a conscious rejection of what has come before—and a distancing from those now enjoying that taste. “I liked that band before they got big,” goes the common refrain.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“If obedience to fashion consists in imitation of an example, conscious neglect of fashion represents similar imitation, but under an inverse sign.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“When there are too many choices, or the answer does not seem obvious, it seems better to go with the flow; after all, you might miss out on something good.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“the hipster effect occurs, he suggests, when people try to make decisions in opposition to the majority. Because no one knows exactly what other people are going to do next, and information can be noisy or delayed, there can also be periods of brief “synchronization,” in which nonconformists fail to be “disaligned with the majority.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“This machine is driven in part by the oscillations of novelty and familiarity, of hunger and satiation, that curious internal psychophysical calculus that causes us to tire of food, music, the color orange. But it is also driven in part by the subtle movements of people trying to be like each other and people trying to be different from each other.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Let me let you in on a little secret,” he writes. “If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“We spend time with a painting to try to understand it, but how much time we spend with a painting is driven by how much we understand of it.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“The psychologist Robert Zajonc argued that the way we feel about something, rather than coming on the heels of cognition—that is, “before I can like something, I must have some knowledge about it”—actually accompanies and may even precede it.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Art experts are said to have a “good eye.” What they really have is a good brain. It is less that they spot things that others do not; it is that they know where to look;”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“One thing that is known is that they do not look at paintings very long.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“How you feel about something, she said, is there before you detect the stimulus;”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“The power of liking or disliking, or what psychologists call “affect,” should not be underestimated: It not only informs what we feel about something like art but influences how we see it.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“During a period of life when most of us do not have fancy watches or cars, music becomes a cheap, socially important signal of distinction. We are trying on, like silk-screened T-shirts, various identities.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“If we really felt bad about a book we had read and liked... we would feel shame, not guilt.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“What makes a good judge? Confidence for one. An expert, in Shanteau's view, is someone good at convincing others he or she is an expert. Good judges may make small errors, but they will "generally avoid large mistakes." When they encounter exceptions, experts are good at making"single-case deviations in their decision patterns." Novices, meanwhile, tend to stick stubbornly to the rules, even when they are inappropriate.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“The anxious positioning Bourdieu had noted could be felt in a tweeted "humblebrag," an attempt to claim cultural capital without looking as if one were doing so.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Experts are people who have the same opinions as other experts.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“But we should be wary of people reeling off ornate wine or coffee descriptions: Our ability to correctly identify particular odors in a complex, blended mixture, for example, begins to hit a “ceiling” at three. Beyond that, tests have shown, people become worse than chance at picking out correct aromas. As”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

“Gut feelings help us filter the world, and what is taste, really, but a kind of cognitive mechanism for managing sensory overload? But”
― Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice