Take for example the other night. I went out to my favourite place for dinner: Steakout. Why? Because they have THE most delicious beef ribs I'd ever tasted, cooked to perfection and served on bed of chips drenched in a glorious sauce. They also have hot English mustard. What more could you ask for?!
Well in the case of this dinner, I could've asked for a different serving. You're meant to get 800g of meaty goodness with one of these beasts. Yep - it's a sure fire way to get a sky high cholesterol, but hey- I'm male and I often crave meat. They usually give this amount out in the form of 3 ribs. This time, only one of the three pieces was cooked in that melt-in-your-mouth kind of way that they normally serve. The other 1.5 (0.5 as one of the ribs was...piddly- and that's being generous) was tough. Don't get me wrong- it tasted nice, but it just wasn't on par with what you normally get.
Anyway - my friend and I are friends with the waiters there so when asked "How were the ribs?" we replied with the cursory "Yeah, delicious!" and left. But this is when I started to notice cognitive dissonance kicking in.
Cognitive dissonance, or the "it was on sale" response as I like to call it is a term psychologists use to describe some behavioural...thing. In essence, it's an auto-justify button built into your brain. So when you max-out your 3rd credit card buying that cute pair of shoes to look hot in (even though most guys will never notice!) and when you significant other spews out profanities, you stand your ground and firmly say "but it was on sale" expecting it be a perfect defence - you're using cognitive dissonance.
In my case, a friend I was meant to meet up with later called saying he was about to hit the sack, but he hoped that dinner was nice. In the most enthusiastic voice I've ever been able to muster, I described the scrumptious meal I'd just had and the melt-in-your-mouth goodness. As I was saying this, I realised that the meal wasn't like that at all. It was good, but not that good (like it normally is). But my brain beleived it was anyway.
So back to my original point- maybe this is how Nature laughs at us. It gives us shit- we make ourselves beleive that it's great. Or maybe I should stick to stuff I know about, which is definately not psychology. Next time, I'll leave it to Freud.
Definately NOT the piece of meat I ate last night. And it wasn't served on a guitar. That'd be kind of hard to eat...
1 comment:
"I'm male and I often crave meat". Hmmmm . . . :) I've got to admit the whole idea of a big meat dish doesn't really appeal to me most of the time anyway - give me a pizza over a steak or ribs anyday!
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