Tomatoes, marriage, and how your brain messes up big decisions

What a viral video about tomatoes teaches us about cognitive biases

In the produce section of a grocery store, a micro-drama unfolds between a couple. The two of them stand in front of a pile of tomatoes. She picks one up, inspecting its shine, its smoothness, its lack of flaws—and, having deemed it worthy, she places it in a clear plastic produce bag. 

While she searches for the next one, her deadpan partner grabs a tomato from the same produce bag and hands it to her. 

She evaluates his chosen tomato—ones she’s already selected. Her lips thin a little bit, and she rejects it. 

Watch the video. It’s hilarious:

Cognitive biases in real time

There’s so much going on here. When I saw the video a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t stop watching it. In 26 seconds, we’re witness to an intricate web of four different cognitive biases—four different patterns that distort our decisions.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll expand on each of them, and how they’re responsible for keeping us in toxic jobs, for marital strife, and for thwarting our happiness. 

For today, though, let’s take a 30,000-foot intro tour to all four of them.

The Endowment Effect: My stuff is always better

There are two types of tomatoes in that pile. You can’t see it. I can’t see it. But it’s true. There are Her Tomatoes, and there are Not Her Tomatoes.

Not that she’d say that out loud. Subconscious biases are subconscious. 

Here’s how it works: Our minds make a subtle shift once we take a decision. Whatever that decision is, we become attached to it. In the wife’s case, a tomato she’s put in the produce bag has become a Her Tomato. 

Simply by choosing it, she imbues that tomato with value. It’s no longer just any tomato; it’s a Tomato She Has Chosen. There’s nothing intrinsically special about it. It’s still the same tomato it was before she put it in her produce bag. 

But qualitatively? It’s changed. Her ownership of it—alone—boosts its perceived value.

This is the endowment effect. We assign a greater value to the things that are ours, merely because they’re ours. 

And that means that once her husband presents her with a tomato—one that she doesn’t know she’s already chosen—that tomato no longer has the shine of ownership. 

She can re-evaluate it more objectively (well, ish…that’s for the other three biases). Flaws she might have overlooked the first time around reveal themselves anew. 

And she can reject it.

Her tomato, his tomato

The endowment effect is one very big reason we stay in jobs, relationships, and cities that we’ve far outgrown. Not necessarily because they’re good, but because they’re ours.

More on that in a future post. For now, on to…

Effort Justification: The myth of meritocracy

Chat, I’ve got to confess something. 

Sometimes I judge you (sorry! I promise it’s a cognitive bias).

Here’s what happens: I struggle to write most posts. As much as I love having this conversation, the writing sometimes feels like pulling teeth. There’s a reason for the saying, “Writers don’t like writing; they like having written.” There are some posts that I toil over for days.

Of course, once they’re written, they’re the ones I love the most. 

Sometimes, you all don’t. 

So when those posts I love only get a couple dozen reads and no reactions, my brain can get judgy. “How come they can’t see it? That post is so good!”

And then there are the rare posts that my brain just dashes off, with so little friction it feels unfair. 

Inevitably, those are the ones you all like the best. 

Of course, I’m the problem. It’s me.

I like the hard posts, because they were hard. How much I like a post, how proud I am of it, is directly proportional to how hard it was to write. 

Ever wonder why fraternities have such strict initiation procedures, why exclusive clubs are so expensive, why the most coveted clubs have the most rigorous entry requirements? 

Because you love the things you work for. It’s a bias called effort justification: the tendency to value something more, the more you worked to get it. 

What’s that have to do with tomatoes? Well, she worked for those. She evaluated them. She turned them over and decided, yes…this one’s good. 

A tomato that’s just handed to her? Low value.

Attribution Bias: It’s not me. It’s definitely you.

If you’ve ever watched Jeopardy! you’ve fallen victim to attribution bias.

When he was alive, it always felt like Alex Trebek was the smartest person in the room—and maybe even in the entire world. He always knew the answer to a question, and, more than that, he could often riff on some obscure fact or other. 

Meanwhile, the contestants—sure, they were smart. But they didn’t know all the answers. They were smart, but they weren’t Alex Trebek smart.

Except—Trebek had all the answers. No doubt, the man was smart, but he had something the contestants unequivocally did not. We know this, intellectually. And yet it’s hard not to see Trebek as fundamentally different from the contestants.

Lee Ross, who first proposed this bias, called it the fundamental attribution error: when we evaluate others, we downplay their circumstances and attribute what we see to something inherent about them.

But.

We only display the fundamental attribution error for others, not for ourselves. 

If you’re in a relationship, think about the last difficult fight you and your partner had. Maybe you snapped at each other, maybe hurtful things were said. 

How strong is the temptation to excuse your behavior based on circumstances—bad day at work, it’s been raining 7 days straight, you didn’t sleep well last night—while simultaneously attributing their behavior to their personality flaws? 

It’s deeply unfair (obviously), and that unfairness has a name: the actor/observer bias. We attribute the actions of others to their person, while our own actions are due to our circumstances. 

And that finally gets me to… 

Psychological Reactance: Don’t tell me what to do!

A part of us never grew out of our Terrible Twos. That’s the part of us that immediately bristles when someone tells us what to do, no matter how good their idea is. 

That’s because of a deeply human urge to protect our autonomy. Doesn’t matter how subtle the curtailment of that autonomy might be, Terrible Two Us resists it anyway. 

Jack W. Brehm, who pioneered reactance theory in 1966, demonstrated that when people perceive a loss of freedom, they instinctively push back. The threat doesn’t have to be big, and the pushback doesn’t have to be rational. Even minor perceived threats can prompt strong resistance.

That may explain the fact that the wife rejects 100% of the husband’s suggested tomatoes. Those suggestions may have been subconscious triggers. 

After all, she should have liked those tomatoes—she picked them herself. But, when her husband (re-)presents them, he subtly signals a threat to her tomato-deciding autonomy.

How These Biases Keep Us Stuck

Am I making a bit of a mountain out of a tomato hill? Am I making a meal of a single viral video?

Maybe. But, y’all, these cognitive biases are super powerful. They go a long way in explaining why midlife is so hard, why leaving a job feels like death, why breakups are so existentially crushing. Stick with me these next four weeks, and we’ll talk about how they might be keeping you stuck too.

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