Expensive Taste

To say you have "expensive taste" means less and less these days. Recently two studies have come out showing that price is the best predictor of whether something is desirable or "effective". Showing once again, that you don't get what you pay for, but you only believe you are getting what you've paid for (uggh that's a horrible dangling participle--you get that for which you have paid is much better).

The first involved a hyper placebo-effect. Some researchers at MIT made up a codeine-like drug called Veladone (or something similar). They even made pens and brochures about the drug. So they asked subjects to take the drug and then they subjected them to electric shocks. If they told the patients the pills cost $2.50/pill, they subjects reported that they felt less pain than without the drug 85% of the time. If they told them that the pills cost $0.20/pill, the subjects reported that the drugs were effective only 61% of the time. (I might be slightly off on the numbers here--I heard it on NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87938032). The researchers hypothesized that drug companies exploit this effect by upping the prices on drugs.

The second story involved the price of wine. This was a Cal-tech study that offered test subjects the opportunity to taste wine and then performed MRIs of their brains to detect which wine activated their "pleasure sensors" more. (I don't know about you, but I think I would rather be a test subject that got to taste wine, than one that was given electrical shocks--but that's just me). The results showed that even if the subjects were given the exact same wine, but were told it was different and had a different price--their brains would find the more expensive wine more pleasant. Full text article here--http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/emplibrary/jobmarket_paper_plassmann_final.pdf. I wonder about the demographics of the test subjects. Did they test people that shopped at Trader Joes? I'm pretty sure that I would find the less expensive wine more pleasant because I would know that I could afford to buy more.

So what does this all mean? That we're stupid? That we're being cheated out of our money by marketers? or that we can now giggle at "wine snobs" who tell us that you can't possibly get good wine at trader joes?