Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?

“Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.”

While people are very blind with some choices, they are very specific with others. It seems reasonable to say that incentives are the differences (which does not bode well for tests of voter choice blindness).

Strikingly, people detected no more than a third of all these trick trials.

The article doesn’t say how this was ascertained. When I clicked through to the original New Scientist article, it doesn’t fully load but what I read gives no answer.

It makes a difference whether the participants were asked this, or it was assumed from their willingness to defend “their” choice, or they had to volunteer it.

The subjects of this experiment were apparently random (or perhaps self-selected!) shoppers at a supermarket, which means that the experiment was getting about an average distribution of humans according to mental ability; possibly even below average to the extent that they are self-selected.

Could the rationalizations observed in 1/2 to 2/3 of the subjects not be defense mechanisms which average and below-average people evolve in order to hide their mental disadvantage?

I have observed that people whose mental abilities aren’t stellar do try to hide this – by grooming and dressing well and otherwise emphasizing a well-kept exterior; by responding to what they don’t understand either with “wise” silence or with a platitude that they hope will not widely miss the mark; by evading requests for clarification with vagueness.

These all appear to be mechanisms that people develop in order to hide that they’re inept, because showing people how little of the world they understand (relative to a few others who do) might cost them their livelihoods.

It is no wonder, then, that people rationalize – and perhaps even do so consciously and purposefully, trying as they always do to appear confident despite inner confusion.