Friday, November 10, 2006

Triangle Taste Test: Verona vs. Yukon

On Thursday evening, a group of about fifteen Mountain View Blink fans enjoyed themselves discussing Blink over coffee and pastries generously provided by Chris and James at Starbucks (Middlefield&N.Rengstorff). Starbucks was a wonderful environment to relax and chat in small groups about priming, thin-slicing, implicit attitudes, facial expressions, dirty bedrooms, and other interesting topics from Blink.
Then came the triangle taste test. First James taught how to taste coffee (like wine tasting!). Each cup was inside another cup to hide if it had "V" (for Verona ) written on the bottom. The triangle test is like that old Sesame Street game -- "One of these things is not like the others." Given three cups of two coffees only about 5 of the 15 people could distinguish Verona from Yukon , so that jells with what Gladwell says in the book (1/3rd of people can distinguish Coke from Pepsi in a triangle test.)

--Dhananjay (DJ) Ragade

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Jody Shumaker said...

Random guessing will get it right 1/3rd of the time as there are only 3 possible combinations. The 5 who got it right were likely no better than the 10 who got it wrong at telling the difference. Rather interesting as it highlights that in reality none of them could really distinguish it correctly.

I guess if you ran the the triangle test several times and they consistently got it right every time then you could consider it skill.

7:27 AM

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