Why so saucy?

The work of Howard Moskowitz was thoroughly illustrated by Malcolm Gladwell in his lecture "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce." Gladwell used multiple stories from Moskowitz's career life to demonstrate that people don't actually know what they want. Moskowitz experimented with diet pepsi to find the "perfect pepsi"... what is the sweet spot? Gladwell then moved on to talking about Prego and how Moskowitz had the same goal... finding the perfect sauce! M. made a variety of sauces and tested them out by having people rank the "goodness" from 0-100. M. took the results and congregated the ranked sauces into categories--plain, spicy, and extra chunky. Chunky sauce ranked the highest...why? Because it was something new and different from the traditional sauce! 

Gladwell describes both natural and synthetic happiness in this lecture. Natural happiness is created when people get what they want. Synthetic happiness is created when people settle for something else because they couldn't get what they originally wanted. People created this type of happiness, synthetic happiness, when they had the normal, runny sauce. Natural happiness started being expressed when people had more choices to choose from. They could pick what their tummies desired instead of settling for what was available to them. People didn't know what they actually wanted until more variety was introduced. Not only did Howard Moskowitz reinvent spaghetti sauce... he reinvented feelings of happiness for the saucy eaters out there!