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Last Updated: Oct 3, 2008 - 8:11:42 PM |
MONDAY JAN 14, 2008 (Foodconsumer.org) -- Wine drinkers tend to more enjoy wine that demands a higher price regardless of its taste, according to a study by California researchers.
Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found the higher prices make people believe pricey wines are of higher quality and more enjoyable than their less expensive competitors.
The study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that higher expectation of quality does not influence the part of brain that judges taste, but directly affects the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure.
In the study, 20 adult testers tasted a number of samples of the same wine, but were told that they were brought for different prices. The panelists reported they experienced more pleasure when drinking the wine that was said to carry a tag of high price.
Monitoring of brain activity revealed significant activity in the part of the brain responsible for pleasure when the testers used a high priced wine.
"We have known for a long time that people's perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price," Reuters reported, quoting Baba Shiv, coauthor and an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as saying.
"Marketers are now going to think twice about reducing the price," Shiv said. But a foodconsumer.org researcher who did not participated in the study said some marketers have been using this trick for years to lure consumers into buying cheap wine and other products.
The message of the study is that some factors associated with wine or any other products affect the consumers' perception of the products and their purchasing decision. For consumers, the message is that paying more does not always mean getting higher quality.
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