Your brain is a snob

Oh, great. According to a bunch of eggheads, our brains trick us into liking stuff just because it's expensive:

The more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes, a study by California researchers has found.

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones.

Their study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected.

While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.

The researchers said that when 20 adult test subjects sampled the same wine at different prices, they reported experiencing pleasure at significantly greater levels when told the wine cost more. At the same time, the part of the brain responsible for pleasure showed significant activity.

"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," said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and one of the authors of the study.

"Marketers are now going to think twice about reducing the price," Shiv said.

I don't know about that. While people like stuff that's expensive, in my experience, they also enjoy getting discounts. After all, what's better than an expensive bottle of wine? An expensive bottle of wine for half price, that's what.

Anyway, I'm not sure I believe the results, seeing as how this study was conducted at a low-quality institution like Stanfurd. (Go Bears!)