Nudge Wiki

Concept

Sensation Transference

Also known as: Association Transfer

associations branding packaging

A term coined by psychologist Louis Cheskin: the perceived qualities of a product's surroundings — its color, packaging, and other sensory associations — transfer onto how the product itself is experienced, including its taste. People don't judge a product in isolation; they judge the whole bundle of associations around it, then attribute that judgment back to the product.

Cheskin demonstrated this by secretly swapping butter and margarine — dyeing margarine yellow and labeling it butter, and vice versa (see Good Luck Margarine Taste-Swap Study). The "butter" people ate (actually margarine) was rated bland and gloopy purely because it was dressed and labeled as margarine's much-maligned rival category — the association, not the taste, drove the judgment.

A passing example is mentioned without a measured outcome: marble cake counters reportedly outselling wood ones.

Two further demonstrations show the mechanism generalizes well beyond packaging labels. Frederic Brochet dyed white wine red and had 54 trained sommeliers describe it — all 54 used red-wine language, fooled entirely by color (see Brochet Wine-Color Sommelier Study). Japanese researchers found identical soup dyed red was rated hearty and rich, while the same soup dyed blue was rated disgusting (see Hyogo University Soup-Color Study). Brand belief alone can shift a reported experience too: men told a cocktail contained Red Bull reported feeling more intoxicated and confident than men given the identical drink, regardless of what they actually consumed (see Red Bull Vodka Confidence Study).

A fourth demonstration (Episode 90): Dan Ariely found identical coffee rated better served from an elegant container than a plain plastic tub, identical champagne rated more flavourful in a proper flute than a plastic cup, and elaborately-described menu items ("pan-fried sea bass with triple-cooked chips") outselling identically plain listings ("fish and chips") — see Ariely Fancy-Container and Menu-Language Studies.

Rory Sutherland applies the same mechanism to engineered physical experience rather than branding alone: Boeing designed the 787 Dreamliner's cabin lighting, pressurization, and humidity specifically to reduce jet lag, and used a deliberately spacious-feeling entranceway to make a cabin that's actually 16 inches narrower than a 777's feel significantly wider — engineering the felt experience directly rather than just the underlying physical spec, which he calls "psychophysics" (see Boeing 787 Dreamliner Psychophysics Case).

Discussed in

  • Episode 1 — 1- How music affects what we buy
  • Episode 41 — 41- The irrational way we perceive food
  • Episode 63 — 63- Rory Sutherland - Why counter-intuitive thinking wins (Boeing 787 Dreamliner)
  • Episode 78 — 78- Nature vs nurture with Lisa Feldman Barrett (novice-vs-sommelier wine comparison)
  • Episode 90 — How Your Subconscious Calls The Shots (Ariely fancy-container and menu-language studies)

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