High price increases wine pleasure 15 January 2008

Neuroscience study might encourage aspirational pricing

Hubristic local wine producers who confidently price their darling wines in the hundreds of rands in a fit of what is called ‘aspirational pricing’ can draw support from a new study just published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

A study by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which asked volunteers to taste cabernet sauvignon with different prices and to choose their preferred bottle, showed that most chose the most expensive bottle. Tasting the same wine as from a cheaper bottle, but with different, higher price on the bottle led to the latter one being preferred.

Published under the academic title ‘Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness’, the paper by Caltech economist Hilke Plassmann shows that the brain is a snob. (Good news for those local high-price tag producers.)

Researchers passed off a ten-dollar cabernet sauvignon to the amateur sommeliers as one that would cost 90, and led then to believe that one of five was worth 45 dollars. Volunteers were brain scanned to verify the activity of the frontal cortex, the brain area associated with choosing and with taste, and it was noted that both areas were more active when the volunteers tasted the wine they thought was the most expensive one.

Antonio Rangel, who led the Caltech team, said many people believe that the quality of the experience only depends on the objective facts, but ‘what the study shows is that expectation also effects the quality of the experience’.

• A summary of the PNAS paper can be found here.