Study says that people prefer expensive wines

A scientific research claims that the human brain attempts to trick us into thinking that the higher the price of wine the better it tastes.

A survey was conducted at the University of Bonn and INSEAD Business School, where a group of people were given the same ¤12 wine repeatedly, but told them that they were being served three different wines costing three, six and ¤18 respectively. The participants’ brain activity was then monitored on a nuclear spin tomograph. The subjects, who were men and women from different age groups, were given just one millimetre of wine at one go through tubes that directly went into their mouths. “As expected, the subjects stated that the wine with the higher price tasted better than an apparently cheaper one. However, it was not important whether the participants also had to pay for the wine or whether they were given it for free,” said Hilke Plassmann, a professor at INSEAD Business School, who is one of the lead authors of the study.

However, researchers weren’t able to gauge how much one can change the dependency of the brain on the price if one tries to train it.