Eriq Gardner writing about taste and identity in the September/October issue of Psychology Today:
Our choices in books, music, art, and design go to the core of who we are. “Taste can offer us a doorway into people’s lives,” says Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. “Taste reveals a lot about what someone values and needs to fill their life with meaning.”
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But we also make choices about art based on a desire to carve out identities for ourselves–to articulate the stories of our lives. By the same token, we look for those stories in others. We also feel intiutively that we can judge others by their tastes.
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In a sense, [Giovanni] Escalera was using his taste-hunting abilities to forge an identity. This is the inmost layer of taste formation–using our artistic choices to articulate the story of our lives for ourselves and others. Identity comprises not just the traits that describe us, but also stories about how we became that way, and how we present ourselves to others, explains Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Tastes are among the primary ingredients in these personal stories. “Tastes come up in people’s narratives as a way of signalling who they are,” says McAdams.
