Working behind a bar for many years, I will be looking into a strange phenomenon that has baffled me time and time again. No, not why strangers feel comfortable reveling so much gossip and personal stories while drinking. That could be interesting too, but instead, the phenomenon I am about to investigate is why people taste things that they should not be tasting at all in their drink! I would go even further and point to the numerous people who swear they remember something tasted a way that it never was. This may all sound crazy, which is fine, but what do you know about the Mandela Effect? A strange phenomenon where people remember events that never happened. Sound familiar? My focus will be on what people are experiencing and how perhaps a number of factors give them legitimate divergences or outright lies/hallucinations.
Based on observations and a chain of events that seem to link things together, I hypothesize that people will be primed to taste a flavor you mentioned, even if false, if you suggest it right before they taste it, when compared to people who are left to taste something without any suggestions of what they are about to experience beforehand. This is a starting point; however, I expect this will not be my ending point as I gather more information.
While simple at a glance, I believe this will turn out to be a rather muddied and nuanced topic. Humans are extremely nuanced when it comes to biology and genetics. I therefore might find trends but may not find a clear one answer fits all genetic dispositions. There are a variety of other factors that I also am considering that adds additional layers of complexity to this. Below are a handful of sources that I will start with in hopes of building a paradigm. I have come across what may already be articles in contradiction with one another, with at least one arguing for subjectivity in tasting and another potentially alluding to subjectivity being misused to explain things. I even found an angle I was not expecting where sound your voice, can affect the likelihood of influence someone when selling something bitter and a different pitch to sell something sweet. I look forward to an evening in a library with access to academic papers and going down the rabbit holes.
For kicks, it might be fun to perform live experiments upon the class. I expect this will yield more muddied results however. Although I am considering how to best turn my classmates into lab rats how is a rather important question. Perhaps brown bags of different juices? Perhaps food dye for further bafflement? If I tell them it is a test will that effect the test? I need to think more about how I want to not intrusively introduce an experiment into class.
Below are the supporting branches of this proposal; 9 factors I have considered as vectors for investigation, phrased as topic questions to use as headers to organize the 11 sources I have come across so far. Each Source listed has next to it a quote from the source which also serves as the reason it was chosen relevant to the context or lens of its header. For example, it could be a genetic issue; I have listed two sources that talk about taste in the context of genetics, and quotes from the articles that lead me to believe it is relevant to the Perseptive I am investigating it from. Or maybe it could be a viewed from social problem lens. There is a strange thing people do where they lie about a knowledge of a band, or a topic, or whatever, for social reasons. As you will notice below pursuing that angle was not fruitful. You can think of this as intent, as you can see my perspectives and what I hope to gain out of each.
Do people lie to see about what they have done or know? Why? A primal fear of social rejection?
A lot of results with keyword “lie” and “rejection” that is not in the context of my query. May need a different approach.
What role does advertising play in influencing people’s opinion? What advertising techniques are at play? What role does images play in influencing people?
{“…the current research examines the new congruency of a visual design element (i.e., color) and a verbal design element (i.e., message type) and explores how color may facilitate the persuasion of taste-focused versus health-focused advertising messages.” How Color Affects the Effectiveness of Taste- versus Health-Focused Restaurant Advertising Messages: Journal of Advertising: Vol 49, No 5 (tandfonline.com)}
{“The results show that the participants were likely to exhibit greater buying intention toward both sweet and sour food when they listened to higher-pitched (vs lower-pitched) voiceover advertisements.” A Sweet Voice: The Influence of Cross-Modal Correspondences Between Taste and Vocal Pitch on Advertising Effectiveness in: Multisensory Research Volume 32 Issue 4-5 (2019) (brill.com)}
What role does psychology play in to taste? Is it possible for our minds to lie to us?
{“Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.” ‘You Are Not So Smart’: Why We Can’t Tell Good Wine From Bad – The Atlantic}
{“Now, food scientists are trying to figure out if very faint scents can trick your brain into tasting something that isn’t there.” Adding Faint Scents to Healthy Food Could Make it Taste Better | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)}
What role does an authority figure play in influencing people?
My search is overshadowed by social media and computer articles that unfortunately do not relate to my question. May need a different approach.
How do people taste? What is the science? Does this account for variability?
{“We examine this question using a between-subject experiment where participants were either given subjective, objective or no sensory information of a specialty coffee.” Does taste sensitivity matter? The effect of coffee sensory tasting information and taste sensitivity on consumer preferences – ScienceDirect }
{“However, a closer examination of the business of taste and tasting will show us that things are not so clear cut. To begin with, the reasons people offer for saying taste is subjective vary considerably and not all of them are compatible with each other” Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine – Google Books}
{“After all, if these qualities really are present in the wine, why doesn’t everyone taste them? Without an explanation of how normal perceivers can miss certain features in a wine or in their experience of it, and of how knowledgeable tasters can extract more from their experience of the very same wine, social drinkers will harbor the suspicion that in response to similar sensations in the mouth, wine writers simply produce an elaborate brocade of words to decorate and embellish their experience.” Why_Wine_Tasting_is_So_Hard-_FINAL_-libre.pdf (d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net)}
What is up with the random flavors people tell me they experience like cherry in a drink full of cinnamon and no cherries?
{“Sour–bitter, umami–salty, and salty–umami were the most frequent taste confusions.” Factors explaining individual differences in taste sensitivity and taste modality recognition among Finnish adults – Puputti – 2019 – Journal of Sensory Studies – Wiley Online Library}
There is a lot of literature on how the nose and mouth work, a bit on common confusions, but not much on “hallucinations of flavors”. Perhaps look more into flavor confusion.
What does hypnotism have to say about people experiencing things? Is the legend of a hypnotized person displaying a bruise without ever getting hit true?
Overshadowed by using hypnosis in medicine to heal. Can not find anything about imagined damage causing a real bruise.
Humans have evolved. Has taste evolved? Do we have genetic leftover from cavemen? Genetic mutations?
{“Scientists believe that up to 15 percent of adults might have a taste or smell problem” Taste Disorders | NIDCD (nih.gov)}
{“What’s even more interesting, according to the study, women are more likely to detect a soapy taste and dislike cilantro. And African-Americans, Latinos, East Asians and South Asians are significantly less likely to detect a soapy taste when compared with Europeans.” Love It or Hate It — The Great Cilantro Debate (clevelandclinic.org)}
Does gut bacteria / biome influence what we taste/like?
{“Further, bacteria metabolites interact with specialized receptors cells expressed by gut epithelium leading to taste and appetite response changes to nutrients.” Do Gut Microbes Taste? – PMC (nih.gov)}
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
B&C, you haven’t asked for feedback, so I spent just a minute cruising your descriptions of the sources. You’ve obviously discovered already that even our best efforts to narrow the scope of study expand outward to take in unexpected regions. I’ll follow this effort with interest.
Since it’s at the top of the blog, and I’ve read the first line several times, may I suggest a usage correction?
Participial introductory phrases such as “Working behind a bar for many years,” create anticipation that you obligate yourself to satisfy.
In this case, past tense at a minimum, perhaps a continuous or perfect past.
When you follow with the future, we’re confused before we get started:
“I will be looking into a strange phenomenon that has baffled me time and time again.”
Select one of several possible fixes for this.
It would take too long to explain how I got here but here is my output on revising:
I have bartended for many years. I would argue that it is a good way to pay for college while gaining valuable experience. Despite all the things I have learned, there is something that has baffled me. Why do people taste things that do not exist? I think such a question is fascinating and is the inspiration for my hypothesis:
I hypothesize that people will be primed to taste a flavor you mentioned, even if false, if you suggest it right before they taste it, when compared to people who are left to taste something without any suggestions of what they are about to experience beforehand.
Not only have I encountered people who have tasted things that do not exist in their drink, but I have also had people swear their drink was sweeter now than 5 years ago. Of course, in reality nothing had changed. This may all sound crazy, which is fine, but some of this reminds me of the Mandela Effect. Or that strange experience where you go back to watch movie you use to like, and now you think it is worse than you remember it.
My focus for this project will be on what people are experiencing and how a number of factors give them legitimate divergences or outright lies/hallucinations. This is a starting point; however, I expect this will not be my ending point as I gather more information.
That is funny you point that out! I actually went through several revisions of that opener going back and forth like a squirl crossing the road; I wanted to stay intentionally vague while providing value though context. Cleary, I missed the issue with tense you have pointed out. I will take another swing at this paragraph to make things congruent and satisfying.
And yes, scope-creep is real and is an enemy! It makes projects overdue and overbudget. Within the context of the brainstorming phase, lots of leads is fine, however like in books or movies, I expect half of my sources will be cut for not “staying on message”, or just being dead ends. Once I see the “real thing” using college library to obtain these research papers, I can properly parse though things for relevance.
Now I am meta-analyzing everything I type. Don’t point out the mistakes I made in my previous message in reply to your comment. (Yes, I read it numerous times before posting. I don’t know why I magically see it now that it’s in blue but not before.)
I can take a hint. 🙂
Your wine-tasting example from The Atlantic sent me down a rabbit-hole prompted by my remembering a scandal about wine magazine reviews that made quite clear the practice of rating highly and promoting wines by advertisers to the detriment of producers who did not advertise. The obvious conflict of interest inherent in having wineries as advertisers bolsters your own instincts about expectations.
Customers will choose more highly-rated wines to the degree they trust the idea that experts will guide them objectively to superior products. But then, as the Atlantic article cleverly details, the expectation is self-fulfilling.
Does anyone suffer when good reviews actually make crap wines taste better? Sure. The superior small vintner who can’t afford to pay to play. But the customer? It’s hard to say she’s having a bad experience or that she paid too much for it. The bottle and the rating gave her all the enjoyment she needed.
Oh, that I did not know. What a timeless scheme.
So yes, customers trust wine experts to rate wine out of 100 the way customers trust experts to rate baseball cards out of 10. Though perhaps there is something less objective about using taste as opposed to sight.
PSA will check off boxes: bent corner, yellowing of paper, a scratch; and like a science use these imperfection check boxes to give a card a lower grade as it gets further from the original appearance.
Wine judges are to grade, but there is not the same checkbox system in place. There is no specific original item to compare it to. There are simply lot of similar juices, which taste a little different because each recipe is a little different.
While most people agree that too much of something in a recipe can make it taste horrible. What is too much in relation to other ingredients? Eating a pound of sugar? Gross. But within the context of other ingredients that form let’s say chocolate cake, the flavors are dispersed and balanced. You can now ingest a pound of sugar and not notice.
But what is “too much” or “balanced” to an expert? How about when compared to a different expert? How much of this is just “how the juice naturally is”, the wine maker’s intervention, or the judge’s own personal preference? There have been headlines here and there about fooling these experts with “gotcha moments” and making them contradict themselves.
Also, as you point out who is hurt? I remember one person asking (on a podcast maybe?) something along the lines of what is the difference between someone who is happy, and someone who thinks they are happy, and the answer was that they would be indistinguishable.
I think If I could get an angel where I could show someone is being hurt, maybe I could make this personal to the audience. Like the “headlines” example you showed on YouTube. However, I think I suffer like the “polio” example where it’s just not serious a topic for people to care if someone tells them their wine smells like roses and it doesn’t. After 2 or 3 glasses, nothing is going to matter actually.
Regarding tags, of which you appear to be fond. You’re welcome to use them freely to attract readers to your posts as long as you don’t expect them to have any functionality in the course. For us, categories are all that matter.
The website made me do it! I mean it highly encouraged me and ran me though a tutorial. I believe said something along the lines of “Yea yea yea, whatever, let me post this thing, I don’t care, fine, yes, ok, auto generate tags then, there, finally.”