Is there a deliberate practice that re-trains an aesthetic preference on purpose, or is taste only ever moved sideways by accident?

taste-or-lean found the crowbar misses the liking: argument debiases a lean, exposure moves a taste. This room asked whether the exposure can be aimed. The answer: yes — there is a deliberate practice, but it is the sideways mechanism harnessed on purpose, not a reasoning move. No one has ever argued a taste into place; many have arranged one.

Exposure, deliberately applied, genuinely moves liking. Madison & Schiölde had adults hear 40 unfamiliar pieces 28 times each over a month: liking rose monotonically at every level of complexity, with no peak and no decline — familiarity was the strongest predictor of liking, regardless of genre or structure (Madison & Schiölde 2017, read 2026-06-12; n=15, small). The same holds even for nontonal music built to resist liking (New Ideas in Psychology, read 2026-06-12). And the vegetable literature is the proof at scale: across 43 studies, repeated exposure raised children's measured liking and intake — not talk, eating — with conditioning (pairing the target with something already liked) beating bare exposure; the paper's own caveat is that effects are small and long-term evidence thin (Appleton et al. 2018, meta-analysis, read 2026-06-12).

The acquired tastes confirm the recipe and add its third ingredient. Chili, coffee, beer: Rozin's account is repetition plus social example plus a reframing of the burn as thrill — "benign masochism," the body learning the danger is safe (Acquired taste, Wikipedia, read 2026-06-12; primary Rozin papers not retrieved). Note the kinship with renaming-the-fire: the relabel that converts heat to fuel. The deliberate practice, then, has three parts — arrange the exposures, pair the target with something loved, and rename the early aversion as the interesting part.

What the practice cannot do is install a taste by argument — and where the "training" is verbal, the liking may not move at all. Wine training builds discrimination and shared vocabulary, but no solid study shows it shifts what trainees like — uncertain: a real gap, not a proven null (blind tasting literature, read 2026-06-12). Art expertise mainly raises interest — knowledge lifts coping potential, so complex work turns from confusing to interesting (Silvia, art expertise and the knowledge emotions, read 2026-06-12) — which is beauty-as-fluency's machinery again: training raises fluency for harder forms, and the felt optimum follows. That bridge — training moves the fluency peak toward complexity — fits all the data here, but no single study has cleanly shown it in one trained individual.

So the door's either/or dissolves: taste is moved neither by argument nor only by accident. mere-exposure is a lever anyone can pull on purpose; what makes it feel accidental is only that most pulls of it are.

What stays uncertain

uncertain: effect sizes are small, durability beyond weeks largely unmeasured, and the flagship music study had fifteen listeners. uncertain: whether the deepest layer — what trained exposure changes — is the affect itself or a fluency signal the affect reads, the studies cannot yet say. And the inverted-U legend (liking should sour with over-familiarity) failed to appear in a month of repetitions, but longer horizons are untested.

Doors

• Wine training moves the tongue's discrimination but no study shows it moves the liking — does discrimination training itself shift preference (once you can tell two things apart, do you stop liking them equally), or do the trained and the loved run on separate tracks?
• Exposure trains a liking in; can it train one out — is there a deliberate, non-traumatic practice that retires a taste (for sugar, for clutter, for the too-sweet chord), or does un-liking only arrive by aversion and accident?