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In another experiment, Mussweiler and Damisch gathered a group of experienced German gymnastics judges and showed them clips of two low-vault routines. Judges were broken into two groups: One saw a high-quality routine, the other a low-quality routine. Then everyone saw a “moderate”—pretty good—routine. The groups were split another way: To one group of judges, the gymnasts in the two routines were both presented as “Australian.” But another set of judges saw “Australian” gymnasts followed by “Canadian” gymnasts (in reality the same gymnasts in both clips). The researchers noted a curious effect: When both gymnasts were “Australian,” the following gymnast benefited, scorewise, by following the good performance, but when he followed the “poor” performance, his score was actually brought down. Being Australian connected him, in the judges' mind, to the previous performer—good or bad. But when the second gymnast was thought to be “Canadian,” the reverse pattern was found:
Now the “Canadian” gymnast got a
lower
score when he followed a good “Australian” score—and better when he followed a poor one. In other words, the same performance was judged differently depending upon what came before—and how those things were connected by the judges. As much as by the strength of their routines, the gymnasts were being subtly compared by nationality, and they were either suffering or benefiting by the comparison.

The German gymnastic judges were judging even before they were judging by deciding how similar the two gymnasts were.
Even if the fact of noticing the gymnasts' “different” nationalities was not intended
as a qualitative judgment, merely making the observation seems to have influenced how the judges felt about the performance.

Humans seem to operate under a “similarity bias,” a kind of presumptive desire that people we meet are more like us than not. When we think things are similar, they literally become more similar.
In what is known as the “cheerleader effect,” a person asked to rate the attractiveness of individuals gives them a higher score when they are in a group versus when they are alone. Any idiosyncrasies that, in isolation, might trigger someone's dislike seem, in a grouping, to be averaged out, or less noticeable.
For similar reasons, people are rated as more attractive when they are seen in videos versus a static image—because the judgment is not based on one make-or-break image.

These effects do not show up only in contests. We are making comparisons all the time, and these influence how we feel about things, even ourselves. We seem to make comparisons even when we are not aware we are doing so. In another study by Mussweiler, students were asked “to reflect upon their athletic abilities” for one minute. As they did, images were subliminally flashed on a computer screen for about fifteen milliseconds. While the students did not recall seeing the images of Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, or others who were shown, the answers they gave on their own athletic ability seemed directly influenced by whom they were unwittingly comparing themselves with. The more “extreme” the comparison—that is, Jordan—the worse they got. But a subconscious glimpse of someone like Bill Clinton seemed to turn them into better athletes. “
Participants compared themselves with potential standards,” wrote Mussweiler, “even if they were unaware of them.”

What we are comparing things
with
matters. A study by Tversky offered subjects a choice of six dollars or an “elegant Cross pen” (he never mentions the value, but assume it's more than six dollars). Nearly a third of subjects opted for the pen, with the rest taking the cash. A second group could pick from the Cross pen, the cash, or a second pen that was “distinctly less attractive.” Only 2 percent of the subjects wanted the cheaper pen. Suddenly, though, more people were clamoring for the Cross pen. The presence of the less attractive pen made the more attractive pen even more attractive. The reverse can happen as well.
Research of actual speed-dating trials showed that potential daters (men, it turns out) became less interested in dating a woman, no matter
how attractive she was perceived to be, when she followed a more attractive woman in the dating rounds.

The
way
we are making comparisons also matters. As mentioned earlier, when people are looking for the good things that distinguish each successive option in a list of choices, the later items fare better. But when they are making comparisons based on what is uniquely
bad
about each choice, suddenly the early option looks better.

One study presented subjects with a list of attributes of potential blind dates. When the second choice presented had positive qualities that were not shared by the first candidate, the subjects preferred the choice that came later. But when the second choice had
negative
qualities that were different from the first, they actually preferred the first. As the study's authors described it, qualities that are shared by the candidates are essentially recalled with equal clarity and thus cancel each other out. What is
different
about the second candidate suddenly stands out in memory. So what is uniquely good about the second candidate seems better than what is uniquely good about the first; conversely, the negative qualities of the second candidate seem worse than those of the first, so we reverse our preference.

As the authors of a Carnegie Mellon University study note, “
Judging one experience can unduly influence our judgment of subsequent events and thus ‘color' the entire sequence of experiences.” What we might think of as our fairly hard-set preferences are often subtly manipulated on the fly, like some kind of “choose your own adventure” game.

Consider “the 11th Person Game.” This is an “admittedly objectifying” thought exercise devised by the interaction designer Chris Noessel. The next time you are in a public place, point to a random doorway and ask a friend to choose one of the next ten people who walk through the door as a potential romantic partner. There are two rules: You cannot return to any previous person you passed up, and if, when the tenth person comes through the door, you have not chosen anyone, the eleventh becomes your de facto choice.

This is, as you might have noted, a serially judged competition; the fact that you cannot “go back” makes it different from most contests. In fact, as the psychological work on judged competitions shows, it is often hard for judges to “go back” and honestly reevaluate earlier
candidates in the face of later ones. It gets even more difficult as the list grows longer and as each new entry “resets” the comparison standard.

In the beginning of the 11th Person Game, Noessel noted, players tend to robustly reject people. But over time, as the potential eleventh person looms, and choices begin to dwindle, players stop looking for flaws in each new person and start looking for “what's
right
about a given person.” The slightly awkward grin becomes an entrancingly winning smile.
A person's preference set, and search strategy, are suddenly reordered by the structure of choice.
Standards change
.

In Paris, Moormann was well aware of the potential pitfalls in making comparisons between cats, particularly among a host of entrants that might be, to the average eye, virtually indistinguishable. The first task is to group them into levels: good, very good, excellent. This is a natural “chunking” exercise that helps memory and discrimination. But merely grouping them might make them more similar to each other than they actually are. As Tversky notes, “
Similarity serves as a basis for the classification of objects, but it is also influenced by the adopted classification.” That is, the best “good” cat may not be that qualitatively far from the worst “excellent” cat, but each may be pulled “down” or “up” by being placed in a grouping with others.

What if there are a number of very good cats that are quite similar? “It is not very easy,” Moormann said with a sigh. Cats are awarded weighted points for various features. The “subdimensions” of one cat, he has written, “
are simultaneously compared with all the subdimensions of all the other cats within a group of cats.” This is a “gigantic mental enterprise.” Cat shows occur in real life, with cats that move, owners that kvetch, spectators who gawp, with all the bedlam of the show humming in the background. When one inspects cat after cat, “it seems likely the average judge cannot handle more than three dimensions simultaneously.” Some judges, he suggested, might make choices on “the type of head alone.”

Hovering over it all is the standard. This is the written description laying out, at formidable length, what each breed should actually look like. As Moormann says, judges are looking for universal qualities—“whether the cat is pleasing, whether the lines are good”—but each breed has its specific qualities. Throughout the afternoon, I paged through the breed standard book by Moormann's side. This is a curious
document. There are achingly specific aesthetic prescriptions: The Chausie may have “some flecking or speckling” that “may occur on the stomach” but, it warns, “not to the degree of belly spots.” With the Burmese, the guide admonishes, “there should be no evidence of obesity, paunchiness, weakness, or apathy.” “Long, whippy tails” are bad for some cats, good for others.

The longer I paged through the breed book, the more the questions flowed. “
The ideal Bombay,” the guide notes, “has an unmistakable look of its own.” But shouldn't every breed at a cat show? Otherwise, why bother with breeds? How does one actually judge a “sweet expression”?

“
Don't believe everything that's written,” Moormann warned me. “In the cat world, they love fantasy; they love stories.” Moormann tells me that the “bird world”—yes, this apparent polymath has also judged birds—is “much more scientific.” In the cat world, he said, “they love their frills and feathers.” And anyway, he said, sternly, “The standard does not make the cat.” But what makes the standard?

A simple, if not always so obvious, fact about cats is that they are a creation of human preference.

As soon as humans began to settle in the Fertile Crescent, some ten thousand years ago, mice and other vermin came calling. Wildcats came calling soon after, because where there were people, there were mice and rats. But humans wanted cats that were not too big (that is, dangerous). Here was our first selectively pressuring “like.”
As the writer Sue Hubbell has noted, rats got bigger in the company of men, but cats shrank.

Perhaps, some speculate, we liked the way they looked: the big round eyes, the large foreheads.
But unlike dogs, which were bred for a variety of different tasks, cats already did what we wanted them to do—catch mice—with great efficiency (and, let us be honest, they probably did not have much inclination to take on any other tasks). And so the only selection pressures apart from size, as Leslie Lyons, a professor of veterinary medicine, notes, were aesthetic. Like looking through nature's version of the J. Crew catalog, we agonized over the color and length of the coat we desired.

Curiously, while a handful of different types of cats were long described, breeds only came to the fore with the nineteenth-century
rise of the animal “fancy” in Victorian England. The word signaled that people were breeding animals not to serve some function but to their liking. From the first cat show, held at the Crystal Palace in 1871, a huge enterprise arose to create and determine ideal cat breeds. As Harrison William Weir, the artist, poultry breeder, and “father of the cat fancy,” among other endowments, wrote in his 1889 book,
Our Cats and All About Them
, “
Now that [the cat] is becoming ‘a fancy' animal, there is no prophesying what forms, colours, markings, or other variations will be made by those who understand what can be done by careful, well-considered matching, and skilful selection.”

But what made a good cat? What was careful, well-considered matching, and who decided, when not nature itself, what selection was skillful? Fanciers like Weir, sounding at times like interior decorators, laid out the aesthetic principles. For the “short-haired white cat,” for example, he declared, “the eyes should be blue; green is a great defect; bright yellow is allowable…Orange gives a heavy appearance; but yellow will harmonise and look well with a gray-white.” These “points,” as they were called, carried “
all the authority of a revelation,” as the naturalist Walker Van Riper wryly observed.

With form essentially freed from function, breeders had a
tabula rasa with a tail. The pedigreed animal, once more or less beneath notice, was a new lifestyle accessory exhibiting the anxious tendencies of the Victorians, with society in flux, to make granular class distinctions; animal breeding was a four-legged corollary of the “
judicious mating” of humans called for by Francis Galton and other eugenicists (
with dogs at times seeming to do double duty as proxies for human race theories). A dog could make the man, but man could also make the dog, with canines “up-bred” into class-appropriate companions.
Take the bulldog. Far from noble sidekick, notes the historian Harriet Ritvo, it was darkly viewed as a fighting, “bullbaiting” dog with a “thirst for blood,” “possessed of less sagacity” than the hounds. This formerly suspect breed could be genetically reformed, through careful breeding—even at the expense of its once functional traits—into a respectable member of polite canine and human society, the very hallmark of the English gentleman.

Then, as now, the animal fanciers argued over not only what made a certain animal a good example of breed X but what breed X actually was. In the case of the late nineteenth-century bulldog, as Ritvo writes,
“almost any feature of the animal was open to debate.” The “Dudley,” or flesh-colored nose, was seen by some as the height of bulldogness. For others, it was an unbulldogly abomination.