The feel of quality: The study found that people's beliefs about the quality of a wine affect how good it tastes.
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CHICAGO: In a demonstration of the power of marketing, researchers in California show you can increase a person's enjoyment of wine by just sticking a higher price on it.
Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at the California Institute of Technology in the U.S., led a team to test how marketing shapes consumers' perceptions and whether it also enhances their enjoyment of a product.
Blind taste test
They asked 21 volunteers to sample five different bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and rate their taste preferences. The taste test was run 15 times, with the wines presented in random order.
The taste test was blind except for information on the price of the wine. Without telling the volunteers, the researchers presented two of the wines twice, once with the true price tag, and again with a fake one.
They also passed off a US$90 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon as a $10 bottle, and presented a $5 bottle as one worth $45.
Aside from collecting the test subjects' impressions of the wines, the researchers scanned their brains to monitor the neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex – an area of the brain believed to encode pleasure related to taste, odours and music.
The study found that inflating the price of a bottle of wine enhanced a person's experience of drinking it, as shown by the neural activity. The volunteers consistently gave higher ratings to the more "expensive" wines.
Brain scans
Brain scans also showed greater neural activity in the pleasure centre when they were sampling those "pricey" wines, indicating that the increased pleasure they reported was a real effect in the brain.
"It's a common belief among scientists and economists that the quality of the experience depends on the properties of the product and the state of the consumer; for example, if a consumer is thirsty or not," said Rangel. "But what this study shows is that the brain's rewards centre takes into account subjective beliefs about the quality of the experience."
If you believe the experience is better, even though the wine is the same, the brain's rewards centre encodes it as feeling better, he said. In other words, "people's beliefs about the quality of a wine affect how well it tastes."
The study appears in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Reverse snob
It would be interesting to see what happens with the "reverse snobs." My father feels his cheap home made wine is best and activly scoffs at higher priced wines. For him, cheaper indicates better. As such, one would expect he would give result opposite the rest of us.
Incidentally, I can scientifically state that his wine is cheap and nasty...