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There are other caveats. A property may be popular on TripAdvisor because it is cheap, or because it has a lot of reviews—not necessarily because it is the “best” place to stay. As a study in
The Journal of Consumer Research
found, comparing reviews of products on Amazon across various categories, the things that got the best reviews rarely converged with the products deemed best in
Consumer Reports
testing.
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS: Your date doesn’t like contemporary art? Take him to an exhibit by Lucian Freud, whose works like Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (above) are impossible to forget. Mario Tama / Getty Images
Lastly, because of ordering effects, we may simply never find the things that would be our favorites. On a recent trip to a coastal Mexican town, a person pointed me to a low-key fish shack on the beach. It was easily the trip’s most memorable meal. But when I looked for it on review sites, it was buried dozens of places away from the “top” restaurants.
So what to do? Use TripAdvisor and its ilk sparingly. Glance at the overall rating, and number of reviews, but don’t wade too deep into the thicket of reviews—you will become quickly confused by the conflict between varying peoples’ expectations and experiences. Ignore one or five star reviews, and focus on the action in the middle, where people are more authentically grappling with how they felt. Look at user-submitted photos more than reviews, so you can draw your own conclusions. Finally, look to other sources. The wisdom of the crowds is not always good at seeking out the lesser-crowded places.
When I am at a restaurant, I always seem to spend a long time trying to decide what to order, to the annoyance of friends. How can I make a choice I’ll feel happy about, and, in general, how can I get the most pleasure out of a dining experience?
A few quick heuristics might help. The economist Tyler Cowen suggests ordering the least appetizing sounding thing on the menu, at least at nicer restaurants—if it sounds so bad, there must be a good reason it’s on the menu. The psychologist Paul Rozin offers this tip: If you want to experience more pleasure before the meal, order something you have had before; you can access your memory of that pleasure. But if you want to create new memories—more pleasure in the future—order something new. And don’t think too much about the meal beforehand. Research has shown that merely thinking about a certain food can invoke the phenomenon of “sensory-specific satiety,” whereby our liking for that food begins to decline the moment it is in our mouth (and apparently beforehand).
“Choose well,” counseled Goethe. “Your choice is brief and yet endless.” This is an easier proposition when we dine alone. Making a food choice in a group, as psychologists Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav have found, can lead to less satisfaction, because we often order something else than we might want because someone else at the table ordered the thing we wanted. Research conducted at a restaurant in France found a sort of tipping point: When roughly 85 percent of people in a party began choosing an option, other diners began looking for variety.
