Blinded by taste.

October 13th, World Sight Day. It’s lunchtime at comOn (our user marketing agency) and people are gathering together in SHOWHOOD. Something different is about to happen as lights go off and the 18 participants on this experience put their blindfolds on. They were about to have lunch without the ability to use their sight.

After months learning a lot about empathy, we decided it was time to upgrade our empathy gym. Thus, we introduced new forms of exercise our muscles because, as Wispé (1986) said, empathy can only be achieved by “an inner kinesthetic imitation in the mind’s muscle”.

For this blind lunch, we asked 18 people to exercise their ability to eat with no sight at all. As if they were wearing a blindman’s shoes. By doing that, we forced them to enjoy their meal using the other 4 senses, which are typically underused in daily life.

Lights went off, blindfolds were put on and meals started being served. Each person ate 5 courses. For each course, they were asked to guess what the dish was. We were interested in knowing how accurate were their responses.

The Dishes:

#1: Falafel

#2: Bean Burguer

#3: Sea food salad

#4: Smoke Sausage Risotto

#5: Lemon ice-cream with a chocolate muffin.

The Results:

More than half of our participants (61%) said it was really hard to eat with no sight and approximately 75% said it was even harder to identify each dish.

Even though they admitted to underestimate their sense of taste (61%), most people got at least 4 out of the 5 dishes right. But what’s really interesting is the fact that, regardless of this apparent good accuracy, only 50% of the people identified the ingredients correctly. This means that when people lose their sight, they get the gist of what they are eating, but they are less able to recognize the ingredients in it. This was supported by a positive correlation between how much people underestimate their own sense of taste and the number of ingredients identified correctly.

In regards to each dish, our participants had no doubts in identifying the salad and the dessert correctly because, as they said, the salad was made with raw ingredients and the dessert had less ingredients and it was a simple dish.

On the other hand, the plate which offered the most difficulty was the risotto. Less than half of the people (44%) were able to identify it and, interestingly, almost everyone had nothing more than just a bite.

But why? Psychologically, we all have a script of what a meal is: we start with starters, have one or two main dishes and finish with a dessert. In the absence of sight, we have to rely on our mental scripts and we use them to try to understand what’s happening. This is probably why a salty risotto towards the end feels so wrong and an ice-cream dessert at the end is so easy to identify.

Other results also revealed that people identified the most right ingredients in the salad and the dessert (an average of 76% and 82% ingredients right, respectively). Next were the Bean Burger (49%) and the risotto (31%). The falafel was more of a challenge (only an average of 14% ingredients correctly identified).

The conclusion:

Regarding food, we generally use our eyes to make a first assessment, we look at a plate holistically and we are able to identify it most of the times. And we are also quick in deciding whether we like it or not, just by looking at it. Probably, that’s why children don’t like veggies — they are not appealing to the eyes.

When we take this holistic approach we miss on a lot of details (and that’s why people identified correctly barely half of the ingredients). Without sight, we have to find other cues, from the taste, smell or texture, that allow us to identify a plate and activate a mental model. For example, when eating the falafel, if one sensed the roundness and thought it was a meatball, a meatball prototype will be activated in the mind and react according to that.

And if we think about this for a second, this is what we do when we deal with other people — we make holistic assumptions based on colour, gender, etc and react and judge based on previous expectations and stereotypes.

Therefore, from an empathy perspective, bare in mind to avoid the premature activation of your mental models. These might mislead you when interacting with others.