Top Chef's Flawed Design

At Sentient, we examine consumer associations with brands, including corporate and product brands as well as the brands of individual people. For example, Sentient used the Automatic Brand Association (ABA) methodology to reveal voters’ associations with presidential candidates before the 2008 election. The unconscious positive and negative associations with an individual’s brand has an impact on behaviors toward that individual. This impact of the unconscious mind on automatic associations with people was painfully evident in an episode of Top Chef: Las Vegas on Bravo TV last week.
Charlie Palmer, celebrated chef and restaurateur, was the guest judge on this episode’s “quickfire challenge” – the mini-challenge where the contestant chefs battle for money, immunity or an advantage in the show’s elimination challenge.
The chefs were asked to create a dish based on a snack food – specifically, Alexia’s new crunchy snacks. Each chef would be judged on the dish and the winner would ultimately be selected by Charlie Palmer. The interesting twist in this quickfire challenge was that Palmer was already familiar with two of the contestants, Michael Voltaggio and Bryan Voltaggio. In fact, both chefs had worked in his kitchen: one had interned with him straight out of culinary school until he went out on his own, and the other was his executive chef for a year.
Palmer acknowledged that he had worked with both Bryan and Michael but reassured the contestants – and the viewing audience – that he would be totally objective and unbiased with his judging.
Now, a rational mind might truly attempt to be objective in this situation, but behavioral science tells us that we are not rational – our minds aren’t primarily deliberate, conscious and calculating machines – but rather are an inglorious mix of emotions, judgments and automatic associations that attempt to make sense of the world in as an efficient manner as possible. Eliminating the effects of our unconscious associations with people is extremely difficult if not impossible to do, even when we are motivated to try. Palmer, having worked with Bryan and Michael, has formed strong associations with each chef – both positive and negative – and these associations ultimately impact his judgments toward their work. In short, Palmer isn’t able to control the unconscious associations he has toward the Voltaggio’s anymore than the rest of us are able to control our associations with him.
In the end, neither Michael nor Bryan won the quickfire challenge (although Bryan had one of the top dishes), but the viewer is left to wonder…why wasn’t this a blind challenge? How much did Palmer’s unconscious associations toward the two chefs influence his decision? Surely, Bravo deserves no “bravo!” for their design of this challenge. A simple experimental design in the presentation of the dishes would have easily allowed Palmer to judge the chefs’ dishes without knowing who had cooked each of them.
In the end, Top Chef teaches us how just how pervasive the (mis)perception of human rationality is. Not only do we fail to recognize the many unconscious factors influencing our behavior, but even when we do acknowledge the presence of our predispositions we overestimate our ability to control their effects on our judgments. At Sentient, we recognize there are many things that consumers are either unwilling or are unable to tell us, so we develop research design that focuses on teasing out these non-conscious drivers of behavior.