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Don’t confuse the facts with the truth
We should be careful not to take our interpretation of the facts as the objective, unequivocal truth.
A good 20 years ago, Frédéric Brochet, then a PhD student oenology (the study of wine), was cataloguing the descriptors wine tasters use for his dissertation. He ran an experiment with 54 undergraduate students at Bordeaux (where else!) University’s Faculty of Oenology, tasting a white ( sémillon and sauvignon) and a red ( cabernet-sauvignon and merlot) Bordeaux wine. The participants were asked to pick from a list of odour descriptors those they thought corresponded with the wines (they could also provide new descriptors themselves). One week later, the same panel was invited to taste the same wine again, with each participant receiving the full list of descriptors he or she produced a week earlier, listed alphabetically and without any indication which descriptor had been used for the red or the white wine. For each of the descriptors, they were asked to indicate which of the two wines most intensely presented the character of the descriptor. There was one twist, though: this time the red wine was in fact the white wine, with the addition of a neutral red dye. Nonetheless, they ascribed the descriptors used earlier for the red wine to the fake red wine, as if it were real. They interpreted the fact that the…
