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Adding eggs saved the cake mix
The mix that failed
General Mills made the mix, packing all the ingredients into a packet so that a mother only had to add water and put it in the oven. Baking a cake was tedious work then, and mothers treated it as a gesture of love and devotion for their families. Cakes from the mix almost always came out delicious.
General Mills hired psychologists to find out what was wrong with the product, and nothing was. Mothers took the mix as an insult to their efforts, and they came to feel that using it meant deceiving their husbands and children.
The harder version
So General Mills built a second version that was harder on purpose. Mothers had to add eggs and a few more ingredients, which made the process more tedious and gave them the sense of putting real effort into the cake. Sales skyrocketed.
The psychologists concluded that when a person has put effort into producing something, that person values it enormously, no matter how inefficient the system, how tedious the work, or how bad the product.
Why did an easier cake mix feel like cheating?
In the postwar United States, a home-baked cake was widely treated as a gift of the homemaker's time and skill. A mix that removed nearly all the work removed the part that carried the meaning. Food historians such as Laura Shapiro have written that early cake mixes ran straight into this tension between convenience and the labor that made a cake feel like love.
Who came up with the add-an-egg fix?
Accounts differ on who deserves the credit. The consultant and motivational researcher Ernest Dichter is often named in marketing histories, while other accounts credit the in-house teams at the companies selling the mixes. The early mixes used dried egg, and the revised versions asked the baker to crack in fresh ones. Many boxed cake mixes sold in the United States today still call for fresh eggs.
Why does effort make us value results more?
In 1959, the psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills ran an experiment in which women had to pass an embarrassing screening test to join a discussion group. The women who went through the harsher test rated the group, which turned out to be dull, as more interesting than the women who went through a mild one. Psychologists explain this as effort justification: the harder someone works for something, the more the mind adjusts to treat the result as worth it.
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