Our Brain Betrays Us As Consumers

It turns out that price may be more important than taste when it comes to having a pleasurable wine experience. That's the conclusion of a group of researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology.

They say that people trick themselves into enjoying an expensive wine more than an inexpensive one -- regardless of the actual taste. They served a group of people the same wine, but told them that some glasses of it cost a lot more than other glasses.

The group voiced significantly more pleasure in the glasses of wine they were told were expensive (even though the same wine was in all of the glasses). It seems that an expectation of quality triggers activity in the part of the brain that registers pleasure (medial orbitofrontal cortex), even though this part of the brain has nothing to do with taste.

I kind of wish they hadn't done this study. It just tells marketers that the easiest way to improve the perception of quality is to raise the price -- the more the better. Goodby, inexpensive wine!