How is taste developed?
Taste is not mysterious instinct. It is trained attention, comparison and the ability to explain a choice.
Written Jun 2025 · Updated Sept 2026
We often talk about taste as if some people were born with it.
They know good music. They dress well. They choose the right furniture, films, food and people. They can look at two similar things and say one is better.
The rest of us are meant to trust them.
I do not believe taste is that mysterious. I think it is trained attention.
You see enough. You compare carefully. You learn the words for the differences. Then you notice things that were always there but were previously invisible to you.
Exposure changes what you can see#
The first time I enter a new field, most of it looks the same.
Two cameras. Two wines. Two typefaces. Two tennis serves. I may have a preference, but I cannot explain it and I cannot tell whether I am responding to quality, familiarity or presentation.
With repeated attention, the field separates.
Research on perceptual learning describes this as differentiation: things that were once difficult to distinguish become psychologically distinct. Experts do not necessarily have better eyes or ears. They have learned which differences carry information.
That means exposure matters, but only if I am awake during it.
Consuming one hundred films while checking my phone is not the same as studying ten scenes and asking why each cut was made.
Familiar is not the same as good#
There is a complication.
Repeated exposure can make something feel more pleasant simply because it has become familiar. This is useful—we need familiarity to enter difficult work—but it can also fool us.
The song I heard first may become the standard. The food I grew up with may feel correct. The design style used by every startup may start to look like the only professional one.
So taste cannot be built by repetition alone. It needs contrast.
Do not only listen to more jazz. Listen to three recordings of the same piece. Do not only visit more buildings. Compare how different architects solved the same constraint. Do not only ask whether you liked a book. Ask which sentence, structure or decision produced the feeling.
Comparison makes the preference visible.
Vocabulary sharpens attention#
Language gives the eye somewhere to look.
Once you learn kerning, negative space, pacing, texture or balance, you can see those things more clearly. The word is not the taste. It is a handle for the distinction.
This is why good criticism is useful. A critic does not only announce that something is good. They show you what happened.
I can then disagree with the judgement while keeping the new way of seeing.
Taste is not a ranking system#
There is a bad version of taste that is mostly social sorting.
The object becomes valuable because the right people recognise it. The opinion becomes a password. In that version, taste is less about seeing and more about being seen to know.
Some of this is unavoidable. Taste is shaped by class, culture, access and the people around us. What I get to experience affects what I can learn to notice.
But I do not want taste only as a way to rank things or people.
I want it because making anything requires selection. There are always more possible words, colours, sounds, hires and ideas than the final work can hold. Taste helps decide what belongs.
With people, I would be more careful with the word. People are not products to rank. What we can develop is a better understanding of character, compatibility and the qualities we want around us. That also comes from paying attention, but it should come with humility.
A practice for developing taste#
For something I care about, I can do five things:
- Collect deliberately. Save examples that move me, not everything that is popular.
- Compare close neighbours. Put similar work beside each other so the difference cannot hide behind category.
- Name the reason. Write what I think is working, even if the language is clumsy.
- Make something. Production exposes preferences that consumption lets me keep vague.
- Return later. If I still like it after my eye changes, I have learned something.
The point is not to arrive at perfect taste.
Taste should keep changing because attention keeps changing. The danger is not having an unfashionable opinion. It is borrowing an opinion so completely that I stop looking.
Taste is not knowing what to like.
It is being able to notice, choose and explain—then remain open enough to choose differently later.