"I Ordered a Tall, Not a Grande!"

This blog post was written back in my graduate school days, and was originally published in July of 2009. I've kept "real-world 'aha!' moment" posts like this to a minimum on this blog, but I decided to post this one to gauge whether it's something I should write more of this summer.

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"I Ordered a Tall, Not a Grande!"

Last week Wednesday I woke up at 5:00am to finish an assignment for school. As usual, I enjoyed one-and-a-half mugs of Starbucks Verona coffee, made with a French Press. But by the time I got into Penn Station at 9:45am, the caffeine had started to wear off, and I knew I needed a little something extra to stay alert in class. I decided to stop by the Starbucks in Penn Station to remedy the situation.

I was aware that ordering coffee would load me up with more caffeine than I could handle, so I decided on my favorite non-coffee drink: a tall, no syrup, skinny green tea latte. I figured it was just what I needed: a hot drink with minimal sweetness and minimal caffeine. I specifically ordered a tall (12 fl. oz.) rather than a grande (16 fl. oz.) because (a) I wasn’t in the mood to drink such a large quantity of a sweet beverage, (b) it wasn't worth consuming the extra calories, and (c) I didn’t want that much liquid sloshing around in me for the remaining 40 minutes of traveling to school.

As you might imagine, the Starbucks in Penn Station is extremely busy. Although they are usually quite professional, they messed up my order and gave me a grande green tea latte instead of a tall. I told the barista, “I ordered a tall, not a grande,” but she said, “Go ahead and take it. It was our mistake, so your drink is on the house.” I protested, but she shook her head and told me that it would take a while to prepare a new drink, and they’d have to throw this one away anyway. So I took it.

Then something unexpected happened. As I started to drink, I noticed my desire slowly changing. In spite of my initial desire for a tall and my three reasons for rejecting the grande, I sensed my appetite sneakily adapting itself to the new reality of the larger beverage in front of me. I didn’t want to want the grande, but my desire didn’t obey my will! 

Not only did my desire increase, but I started to automatically make excuses for it, saying things like: “Wow, you were lucky to pay for a tall and get a grande! How can you let this drink go to waste? Come on – it’s not so bad if you just finish the drink. So what if it wasn't in line with your original plan?” I started to think in terms of “finishing the drink is the right thing to do” instead of “finishing the drink is something I want to do.”

My desire continued to grow as I drank more, and my ability to exercise my free will continued to weaken. Finally, as I crossed the tall/grande threshold of beverage consumption, I forced myself to get up, to walk over to a trash bin, and to throw away the remaining 4 fl. oz. of the drink in order to follow through with my initial decision. After vanquishing the "grande demon," I snapped out of my green tea trance and was happy with my decision.

Afterwards, as I sat on the subway, I began to wonder how often something like this happens to us without our realizing it. How often do we start out with little or no desire, end up into a situation where desire is expected or contextually appropriate, and our desire changes to fit into the pre-established expectation?

This reminded me of a pair of experiments I heard about, conducted by Brian Wansink. The following is a summary of the experiments and their findings, excerpted from the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (pp.43-44):

In many situations, people put themselves into an "automatic pilot" mode, in which they are not actively paying attention to the task at hand ... Eating turns out to be one of the most mindless activities we do. Many of us simply eat whatever is put in front of us. That is why even massive bowls of cashews are likely to be consumed completely, regardless of the quality of the food that is soon to be arriving.

The same is true of popcorn - even stale popcorn. A few years ago, Brian Wansink and his colleagues ran an experiment in a Chicago movie theater in which the moviegoers found themselves with a free bucket of stale popcorn. (It had been popped five days earlier and stored so as to ensure that it would actually squeak when eaten.) People were not specifically informed of its staleness, but they didn't like the popcorn. As one moviegoer said, "It was like eating Styrofoam packing peanuts." In the experiment half of the moviegoers received a big bucket of popcorn and half received a medium-sized bucket. On average, recipients of the big bucket ate about 53 percent more popcorn - even though they didn't really like it. After the movie, Wansink asked the recipients of the big bucket whether they might have eaten more because of the size of their bucket. Most denied the possibility, saying, "Things like that don't trick me." But they were wrong.

The same is true of soup. In another Wansink masterpiece (2006), people sat down to a large bowl of Campbell's tomato soup and were told to eat as much as they wanted. Unbeknownst to them, the soup bowls were designed to refill themselves (with empty bottoms connected to machinery beneath the table). No matter how much soup subjects ate, the bowl never emptied. Many people just kept eating, not paying attention to the fact that they were really eating a great deal of soup, until the experiment was (mercifully) ended. Large plates and packages mean more eating; they are a form of choice architecture, and they work as minor nudges.

Many of us were told as children, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach." Well, sometimes the stomach rises to meet the demands of the eyes. The Sages concisely identified this phenomenon in their statement (Tanchuma 15): 

The heart and the eyes are the spies of the body, and are responsible for a person's sins. The eyes see, the heart desires, and the limbs complete the act.

That pattern is exactly what happened to me: my eyes saw the grande, my desires changed, and my body began to carry out my newly awakened desire. 

So next time you order a tall and they give you a grande, ask yourself whether you really want to finish it, or whether you're finishing it because your appetites have caused you to rationalize that this is the "right" thing to do.