The reason a long queue makes food taste better

Two people eat the same bowl from the same pot. One walked in and sat down; the other stood for fifty minutes in drizzle. The second reliably rates it higher, recommends it more warmly, and defends it if contradicted. The bowls were identical, so the difference was manufactured somewhere after the eating.

What everyone sees

The queue is read as evidence about the food — all those people cannot be wrong — which makes the higher rating a rational inference from other diners’ behaviour. That reading is available, and it is not the whole mechanism, because the effect appears where the wait was caused by something the diner knows had nothing to do with quality, such as a broken till.

What is actually happening

Aronson and Mills found that participants who underwent an unpleasant initiation rated a deliberately dull group discussion more favourably than those admitted easily, establishing that expended cost is recovered by revaluing the object. Kruger, Wirtz, Van Boven and Altermatt isolated the same move as an effort heuristic: told that a painting or a poem took longer to produce, judges rated its quality higher, with effort standing in for merit. Giebelhausen, Robinson and Cronin found that waits can raise satisfaction rather than lower it when the wait is attributed to something creditable about the provider. Note what is deliberately excluded here: several widely circulated food-laboratory demonstrations of this effect were retracted, so the claim rests on the effort-justification and effort-heuristic literatures rather than on those studies.

Why it stays hidden

The revaluation hides because it operates on the taste itself and not on the reasoning about it. The diner does not think, I queued, therefore I shall report enjoyment. They experience enjoyment, then explain it with the food. Nothing in the experience is labelled as an adjustment, so the adjustment is indistinguishable from the flavour.