The Fried Chicken Insight: Why Status Signals Distort How We Judge Performance

Perhaps my kids aren’t the biased ones. I am.

They don’t like seafood. They like fried chicken, the kind that comes out of the bag still crackling.

A lot of kids seem to feel the same way.

“Their taste buds haven’t fully matured,” a friend explained.

“The school feeds them chicken all the time. They’re just more used to it,” a mom said.

Maybe.

But what if we’re looking at it backwards?

Did we develop a stronger taste for seafood because our taste buds matured?

Or did we first learn that lobster is expensive, oysters are sophisticated, and certain fish are rare, and then begin to experience them as tasting better?

Different cultures offer a clue.

One culture treasures fermented fish that another finds unbearable.

One considers strong cheese a delicacy while another thinks it smells spoiled.

Some people experience intense spice as pleasure. Others experience only pain.

The food may not have changed. The value system surrounding it did.

And once people adopt that value system, they don’t merely tolerate the food. It can actually begin to taste good.

As adults, our perception is crowded with signals of value: price, scarcity, status, reputation.

Kids haven’t absorbed nearly as many of those signals.

They are still free to ask the simpler question:

Does this taste good?

That made me wonder whether experience sometimes makes us less objective, not more.

Maybe we don’t perceive something first and assign value to it afterward.

Maybe what we value helps shape what we actually perceive.

The same thing happens in management.

When I evaluate someone’s performance, I have to strip away the adult equivalents of price and scarcity:

Title.

Years of experience.

Credentials.

Compensation.

Personal friendship.

How confidently they speak.

What everyone else thinks of them.

These things can contain useful information. But when they substitute for observing the work itself, they can change the performance we think we see.

Only then can I ask the questions that still matter:

How engaged are they?

How clearly do they think?

How much do they actually improve the outcome?

Sometimes the hardest part of management isn’t learning how to evaluate performance.

It’s unlearning all the things that have taught us what we’re supposed to value.