WASHINGTON — Author Tom Vanderbilt says his latest book began with a conversation with his 4-year-old daughter.
She asked him what his favorite color was, and “I quickly gave her an answer: Blue,” he told WTOP. “Because this is what I think is my favorite color.”
But after dropping her off at school, he says, he began to ask himself, “Why do I like blue? Is that actually my favorite color? And when did this liking happen, and could it change in the future?”
The result of his investigations is the book “You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice,” in which Vanderbilt examines preferences in colors, music, films and more, always asking, “Where did my tastes come from?”
As the title implies, Netflix played a part in Vanderbilt’s investigations. He brought his history of viewing and rating to Netflix, and asked them, “Why are you recommending all these films to me that I actually do not like?”
He says now, “The uncomfortable answer was, ‘Well, we were looking at your real behavior, of what you’re actually watching, as opposed to what you say you like. So that’s why we’re showing you these Adam Sandler films.”
That happens across art forms, and even to food, Vanderbilt says. “We all want to present an idealized view of ourselves,” even though everyone has guilty pleasures, Vanderbilt said.
Another illustrative example from Netflix: Vanderbilt says they told him that the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was the DVD that stayed out the longest before being returned. “People wanted to watch that,” Vanderbilt reasoned. “They brought it home — it took them a while to actually get to that; it’s not the most feel-good film.”
So, what did he find out about why blue is his favorite color? It turns out it’s the favorite color of a lot of people. Vanderbilt says it’s because of exposure. Researchers told him that babies’ favorite color is generally a yellow-brown, but that people are influenced by their exposure to natural phenomena such as the sky and water.
“We’re exposed to things we like in the world, and a lot of those things are blue,” he said.
He found that tastes in food change largely due to exposure as well. While people are biologically disposed to like sugar, since it’s a diet essential, it takes kids about 10 exposures to a particular food before they start to like it.
The same goes for adults too. Vanderbilt said he assumed there was some deep biological reason he didn’t like fennel. But after he had some fennel dishes at restaurants and learned ways to cook it himself, “now I like fennel.”
He concludes, “Liking is learning. If we just have more exposures to something, a new way to think about it, we’re going to grow to like it.”
