You can increase a person’s enjoyment of wine simply by increasing its price, so says a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Antonio Rangel, who led the study, asked 21 volunteers to sample five different bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon. The blind taste test offered no information about the wine other than its price.
The result?
Subjects ranked a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5. They ranked a different wine priced at $90 higher than the same wine priced at $10.
In addition to collecting ratings of the wines, Rangel scanned the subjects’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI).
He found that when sampling a higher priced wine, more blood and oxygen was sent to the medial orbitofrontal cortex - an area of the brain believed to encode the pleasures related to taste.
Says Rengel, “If you believe that the experience is better, even though it’s the same wine, the rewards center of the brain encodes it as feeling better. People’s beliefs about the quality of a wine affect how well it tastes for the brain.”
In other words, spending more money on wine may actually result in greater pleasure and enjoyment.
5 comments ↓
Of course, this registers the happiness one gets from drinking expensive wine FOR FREE. I am assuming no one had to pay $90 to taste for the experiment. I am always happy when I think I am getting something expensive for free - not so much when I actually have to pay for it.
So the bottom line is that it’s actually in the customer’s best interest to charge them more.
This is essentially how placebos work. A $100 placebo always works better on your pains that a $1 one.
It would be useful to understand the mechanism behind this phenomenon.
I’ve always been amazed that research spends a lot of time focusing on how a med does better than a placebo instead of saying, “Holy crap this placebo does a pretty good job! How can we make use of this?”
foodette - Good point. I imagine it is difficult to control for the ‘free factor’ in a laboratory setting.
Robin - There are multiple forces at play. I think one of the most powerful is cognitive dissonance.
“Cognitive dissonance is a theory of human motivation that asserts that it is psychologically uncomfortable to hold contradictory beliefs or cognitions. The theory is that dissonance, being unpleasant, motivates a person to change his or her attitude or behavior.”
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful motivator which can lead us to change one or other of the conflicting belief or action. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts. To release the tension we can take one of three actions:
• Change our behavior.
• Justify our behavior by changing the conflicting cognition.
• Justify our behavior by adding new cognitions.
Our belief that costlier things are better may ultimately shape our perception of the object - in this case, how enjoyable the wine is.
If our perception did not change, we would have to deal with the uncomfortable notion that we are throwing our money away.
great discussion - check this article out http://www.vinography.com/archives/2008/04/does_expensive_wine_taste_bett.html
it’s very interesting how people would choose the less expensive based on taste, not knowing prices — and yet on the other end they say the more expensive wine tastes better when knowing the price
the latter issue, as you said, is explained by congitive dissonace, but it’d be interesting to explain why people would choose the inexpensive wine in the blind taste test. you can say train your palate, but what does that actually/chemically mean?
Fascinating. This reminds me of a story my grandfater used to tell:
When he was growing up on the Lower East Side, the man who sold coffee would take one big bag of coffee and divide it up into three smaller bags. One would be priced at 1 cent, anther 2 cents, another 3 cents. The middle coffee was always sold out first, followed by the most expensive. Talking about only buying for the price!
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