There is a clear gap between the rational behavior that common sense is supposed to convey and what people actually do. We live convinced of our rationality, but our daily decisions belie that faith in logic. in the book The traps of desireProfessor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely demonstrates: Human beings are predictably irrational, because we systematically repeat our mistakes, which makes our failures completely predictable. Therefore, in a menu with three price options, the most expensive one acts as bait for customers to opt for the middle one, in the same way that algorithms use similar biases to influence our decisions. That illusion of autonomy is the same one that governs much of our digital lives. Social networks, streaming platforms or online shops only take advantage of this predictability. They don’t look for what is objectively best, but rather what maximizes time spent in an application or likelihood of purchase.
The system doesn’t need to guess what we like: it just has to watch us repeat the same pattern over and over again. It then leads us down the shortest shortcut – low-effort, high-predictability paths – to repeating the same behavior. Henry Ford’s famous comment captures the mechanism of our thinking: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Those who know these things say that psychological rigidity derives from the tendency to avoid options in which the probability of success is uncertain, and to prefer those with already proven or known results. This would explain the human propensity to consider the catalog of one’s life closed: they already have the friends they need, the dishes they like, the destinations they repeat every summer. Pure cognitive economy: the brain saves energy and protects itself from the discomfort of the new. Daniel Kahneman translated these deviations from logic into cognitive biases and demonstrated that loss aversion and resistance to the status quo are universal behavior patterns. As Bourdieu recalled, taste is also a declaration of identity and belonging: every preference tells a biography. Therefore, when someone says “I already know what I like and I’m not very inclined to try new things”, they don’t close a door, but reinforce a demarcation.
The problem is that we live in a digital ecosystem increasingly supported by programs designed to learn and prioritize our tastes, shortening search times. By saving ourselves the trouble, we run the risk of closing off any possibility of chance discovery and accidental enrichment in our catalog of individual interests. The real question is: why not use this enormous predictive capacity to go in the opposite direction? Why not instruct AI to, knowing our priority hierarchies, lead us – deliberately and occasionally – down the road never taken? In this reasoning lies the driving force of the idea of the algorithm that inspires Mugaritz’s cuisine.
A pause of inertia, like that of Alice in Wonderlandwhen he said: “If I created my world, everything would be nonsense. Because everything would be what it is not. And then, on the contrary, what is, would not be, and what could not be, would be.” A way of thinking and creating outside of routine; far from the predictable, raising questions and destabilizing certainties, taking research as a method. In contrast to the assumed formulas, they propose a poetic intelligence of doubt, where each dish is a hypothesis, a question served. Ultimately it is an ethic of curiosity: cooking not to be right, but to continue searching; to awaken the hunger for discovery.
Gastro Special from ‘El País Semanal’
This opinion article is part of the Gastro Special prepared by ‘El País Semanal’ and EL PAÍS Gastro.
