If I give you two glasses of wine and tell you that one costs $50 a bottle and the other $10 a bottle, which one are you more likely to say tastes better? As plenty of studies have shown, the $50 wine is probably going to win the taste test, and that’s true even if both glasses are really the same wine. A new brain imaging study shows that this is more than a matter of preference – our brain is wired to fall for the trick.
Study volunteers were first shown bottles of wine with the prices clearly marked, and then given a small amount to drink while they were in an MRI scanner. For each wine, they were asked to rate the taste on a nine-point scale. The wine prices shown to the participants ranged between 3 – 18 euros (the equivalent of about $4 – $22), but in reality all of the wine was the same and cost about $14.
As predicted, the volunteers rated the allegedly higher-priced wine as tasting better than the allegedly cheaper wine. The MRI scan showed that when those evaluations were made, two parts of the volunteers’ brains experienced greater activity: the medial pre-frontal cortex and the ventral striatum. That’s important because those two areas are especially involved in evaluating expectations and seeking rewards. When we see a higher price, our brain links the price to greater expectation of reward, which changes our perception – in this case, taste.