Why Older People Shouldn’t Try New Restaurants

Ok, ok.. I really don’t care if older people try new restaurants. And, yes – many people enjoy the adventure of trying a new restaurant and use it as a social catalyst within their community. But there IS a statistical defense to the countless “neophobes” (those with a fear of new things) who like going to the same restaurant(s) they’ve been going to for years.

For the sake of this discussion, we’re going to skip some of the more arcane arguments about the decline of sensory abilities over time and focus on one of the most important pieces of any statistical argument: Sample Size.

Sample Size is the element of statistics that refers to how many pieces of information you have when testing a hypothesis. For example: If I have a hypothesis that I am the tallest person in California and support this claim by visiting a pre-school and noting that I am taller than everyone there, it is not a well-defended claim, since 1) the pre-school is hardly a representatively random group of Californians and 2) the group is too small to extrapolate a conclusion for a state of 37 Million people. The more people I sample where my claim stands up, the more credible that claim is. So, if I travel to L.A., Sacramento, San Diego, and a dozen rural communities and randomly evaluate 1000 people in each place and determine that I am STILL the tallest of all the people I evaluated, my claim gains more and more credibility.

Let’s extend this example to restaurant-testing and take 2 people: “Oldie” is a 60-year-old man who has tried over 1000 restaurants in his life and thinks that “FastBurger” is the best restaurant for him. “Youngie” is 20-years-old and has tried 100 restaurants in his life and thinks that “QuickyBurger” is the best restaurant for him. Since Oldie’s sample size is substantially larger (meaning that he has tested his favorite restaurant against far more restaurants than Youngie has), his hypothesis that any new restaurant won’t dethrone FastBurger as his favorite restaurant has a good deal of credibility to it. And when his nagging wife insists that he try something new once in awhile, besides from his psychological need to be right, that new restaurant will probably not satisfy him as much as his favorite. Youngie, on the other hand, hasn’t tried as many restaurants and stands a much better chance of having his favorite dethroned.

So if you’re over 30, the next time you want to try a new expensive restaurant, think twice. The odds are that it probably won’t break into your top-10 restaurants list and there’s a decent chance that you won’t like it at all. Instead, why not head on down to your old favorite and get something you know you will enjoy. Trying a lot of new restaurants doesn’t show you’re adventurous – it shows that you’re mathematically challenged!