Consumer misbehavior: Charge more, your wine will taste better

Researchers at CIT and Stanford have found that people enjoy the same wine more if they believe it’s more expensive. So does that mean that if Trader Joe’s three-buck-chuck was actually $15, I’d like it more? Because three-buck-chuck is pretty damn good as-is.

 We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks.

Further proof that all you need is a good $6 bottle of cab.  

Original post on the venerable Consumerist