Idolising the Individual

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I've never been to Japan, but I've read that this ⬇️ is commonplace in nearly every Japanese food store.

It's called kao-no-mieru-kankei, which translates to face-to-face relationship.

Walk into most Japanese supermarkets, and the produce section has a local-grower corner with photos of the farmers who harvested the food.

I love it.

It's great to see the individual who picked your food. And strangely, it probably makes that food seem higher quality.

The Evidence

In 2014¹, researchers Smith and Newman showed 222 people a giant sculpture made of 500,000 stacked plastic cups.

The sculpture titled Untitled (Plastic Cups) is breathtaking. Up close it looks like trash, but from a few feet back it resembles a bird’s-eye view of an arctic valley.

Everyone was told the sculpture took 30 hours to build, but different groups were told one, two, three or five artists made it.

Each participant is asked to rate the quality of the sculpture out of seven.

Those ratings dropped in tandem with the number of artists.

With one artist, the piece was rated at 5.87, with two, it’s 5.51, three is 5.39 and at five artists, ratings drop by 11.3% to 5.24.

All participants looked at the same art, but believing it was made by a solo creator made the art appear better in their minds.

Which explains why kao-no-mieru-kankei works so well.

We value things more when we know they're created by a single individual, so tomatoes picked by a farmer called Satō will taste better than one sold by an organisation called Tesco.

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Cheers,

​Phill​