Price, Expectations, and Brain-Supported Lies

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of the Sciences by Hilke Plassmann and colleagues starts with this abstract:

Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Essentially, students were placed in an fMRI scanner and drank wines that were similar in price but were told that some wines were more expensive than others. The result? Participants rated the “more expensive” wines are better, and their brains responded appropriately! Orbitofrontal cortex was activated more in response to the more expensive wines, indicating a heightened emotional response (pleasure).

The impact of this is simple: if a product is more expensive, people will gain greater pleasure from purchasing it. This is not a previously unknown result, certainly. People will often justify their more expensive purchases, but this research shows that the brain responds differently to pricier (and therefore “better”) items. Even if you have to lie to yourself that the more expensive product is better, your brain will likely reflect the reality that you’ve constructed. Mind you, this experiment is not testing that, but it is a reasonable hypothesis to draw.

This research is relevant to a big debate going on right now in the home theater world. I just bought a flat-screen TV and have been outfitting my home theater with lots of high definition content. I’ve needed new cabling to accomplish all this, and I can either buy the $100 (!!!) Monster Cables from Best Buy or $5 cables from the Internet. The question that’s been brewing online is which cables are better. Apparently, some audiophiles can’t even tell the difference between a coat hanger and $100 Monster cables, yet people still buy the expensive cables, enjoy them, and claim to be able to hear better sound. Why? This research explains why.

Can you tell the difference?