On pro golf, Lafite and “positive contagion” on wine
If I gave you a putter that I said had been owned by Luke Donald, who is currently ranked the #1 golfer in the world–and if, moreover, I told you he had used it in his spectacular win earlier this year at the WGC-Accenture Championship–would your own golf performance improve, if you used it?
If the answer is “Yes,” that’s called “positive contagion,” or “the belief of transference of beneficial properties between animate persons/objects to previously neutral objects,” in the words of this study, published online. Even if the golfers in the study did not consciously believe that using Donald’s putter would improve their game, it did: they “had better performance, sinking more putts.” This suggests that “perception can be modulated by positive contagion.” Not only that: “Individuals who believed they were using the professional golfer’s putter perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger than golfers without such a belief.”
An astronishing statement, that! Calls into question the nature of objective reality, doesn’t it? We tend to believe that “reality” is something “out there,” solid, concrete and unalterable, as opposed to the squishy world of dreams and imagination. After all, golf holes don’t get bigger or smaller, like Alice in Wonderland, depending on where we’re coming from. They’re 4.25 inches in diameter, period. So how can our golfer who’s using Luke Donald’s putter perceive the hole to be bigger than it really is?
In the discussion part of the article, the authors wonder “how positive contagion influenced putting performance.” One theory is that “priming,” which is “a mental activation of certain stereotypes,” can have an effect on behavior. For instance, if I tell you that a person is a Harvard professor of physics, you might logically infer that that person would be more knowledgeable and intelligent than most, and you might therefore be more inclined to believe him if he instructs you about quantum theory. Research suggests this is the case: students, told that someone was a “professor,” experienced “enhanc[ed] performance on subsequent knowledge tests” on that topic!
I think we can see this same phenomenon of “positive contagion” in wine. It explains how the anecdotal, upwardly mobile Chinese person finds Lafite to be the greatest wine in the world, simply because it is Lafite. His perception of the wine has been exposed to the contagion of what he knows about it. It’s as if he thinks, on some subconscious level, “The fact that I am able to own, display and drink this Lafite, which centuries of Kings, Popes and millionaires have coveted, means I am a better person than I actually am.” If he were to find fault with the Lafite, he would be in denial of his own goodness. It’s a sort of halo effect: From Wikipedia: the halo effect is “a cognitive bias whereby the perception of one trait (i.e. a characteristic of a person or object) is influenced by the perception of another trait (or several traits) of that person or object. An example would be judging a good-looking person as more intelligent.” Or an expensive bottle of wine as better than an inexpensive one.
We see this commonly in the wine world. It underlies much of pricing strategy and marketing (as the Bordelais and Screaming Eagle understand quite well). It’s also why blind tasting is the only ruthless and efficient way of doing away with such bias. To revert to the golfing example, if you were to give our hypothetical golfer Luke Donald’s putter, but you did not tell him, our golfers’ game would not be impacted. There is nothing special about Luke Donald’s putter: it does not possess magical qualities that mysteriously flow from it into the mind and body of its user. The trick only works when the golfer knows he’s putting with Luke’s club. With Lafite, the trick works only when the drinker knows it’s Lafite. Otherwise, it’s just another good red wine.
We should always keep this in mind when interpreting the results of expert tastings of wine. Did they know it was Luke Donald’s putter, or didn’t they? If they did, there’s a good chance their experience was the positive contagion effect, which is not to be trusted.