Researchers from CalTech and Stanford University have shown that, to some people at least, expensive wines taste better because of the price rather than the taste.
In the study, twenty subjects (normal weight, ages 21-30, 11 males & 9 females, right-handed, liked and occasionally drank red wine) were given samples of five wines ranging in price from $5 to $90. Only three wines were, in fact, used — two of the three were used twice and given false (i.e. higher) prices.
The subjects consistently thought that the supposedly more expensive wines tasted better:
In addition, the researchers found via fMRI scans that the subjects who experienced that the more expensively priced wines tasted better had greater activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) areas of the brain:
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. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates. [link]
The medial orbitofrontal cortex is associated with “the monitoring, learning, and memory of the reward value of reinforcers” while the rostral anterior cingulate cortex is usually active when an error has been made and seems to indicate an “error response function.”
These results are reminiscent of Read Montague’s Coke versus Pepsi neuromarketing study, although Montague found increase activity in the medial prefrontal cortex:
There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: October 26, 2003(…)
In the series of TV commercials from the 70’s and 80’s that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn’t taste any better…?
He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain’s ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.
In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke’s image, its ”brand influence,” by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What’s more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink — in a word, its brand — to shape their preference….
For more on the wine studies, see Expensive Wine Tastes Better and Neuromarketing Research: Wine and Price.