Consumerism and the brain
The Economist has an article reporting an experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging that shows that the price of wine really does affect the taste.
The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. For example, when one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. Moreover, when the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.
Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results.
First, I note that this effect has diminishing returns. The wine with the $90 price tag only tastes twice as good as the same wine at $10, not nine times as good.
The article suggests a couple of explanations. One is that there is a survival value to using price as a proxy for quality. In other words, “you get what you pay for” is generally a good rule. The other is that what is being measured is not the enjoyment of the wine itself, but the enjoyment of the status display, the conspicuous consumption of the wine.
I suggest a third explanation, that we have internalized the relentless bombardment of advertisements for consumer products; in other words, that television commercials have rewired our brains. I’d like to see the experiment repeated with subjects who have isolated themselves from consumerism, people who have instead internalized the values of simplicity and frugality, people who have been deliberately socialized against status display. The Amish, for example. (You’d have to run the experiment with grape juice or some other non-alcoholic beverage.)