"Copycat"! Or why we order differently in a restaurant

On a lighter note...
You know, one of the advantages of having a job is that you get to spend time reading blogs and other interesting things that remind you that, well, other people are doing stuff that's overall more interesting than what you're doing.

Tim Harford, who writes the Financial Times' "Dear Economist" column, maintains a great blog and an entry last month was about how people in a restaurant tend to systematically order differently from others -- even if the other person orders what would've been their own first choice.

How true is that? Don't we always do that, and 'cover it up' by throwing sentences like "Oh, we can order 2 different things and share!" (which, face it, we never do).

Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav did a pretty cool experiment and penned a nice paper from it - they posed as waiters and bartenders, observed how people order and what and in what sequence, then asked them whether they were happy about their choices.

And lo and behold, people seem to order differently from those who ordered before - and are generally unhappy about it.
Surprising? Hmm, not really. Ariely and Levav put forth explanations of "variety-seeking", "information-gathering", "product-familiarity", and other fancy hyphened italicized terms.

I think it's much simpler though: we still obey the childish desire not to be looked at with a smile that says "Copycat, Copycat!!"