February 26, 2008
The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity
SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.
The experiment was even more unusual because it was conducted inside a scanner - the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes - that allowed the scientists to see how the subjects' brains responded to each wine. When subjects were told they were getting a more expensive wine, they observed more activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure.
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Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:19 AM | Permalink
Comments
Isn't it obvious? It's called the "placebo effect".
Posted by: Jared | Feb 26, 2008 10:37:42 AM
I am extremely dubious about this test now, with the added detail of how it was conducted: the wines were sipped "via a network of plastic tubes."
i.e. plastic straws.
What wine tasting in the world is conducted with plastic straws? Everyone knows that red wine is best served in a wide-aperture, spherical glass because it allows the wine to aerate and thereby mature and gain depth and complexity. And everyone knows that one's sense of smell it crucial to the sense of taste. Did the wine tasters swish the wine in their mouths, chew the wine as one is directed to in standard tastings? Or did the wine hit the middle of the tongue (where the fewest taste buds are concentrated), as it normally does when you suck a liquid through a straw?
In other words, the test was designed to flatten and minimize the differences in taste between a fine expensive wine and an adequate but cheap wine.
Sure, it confirms the standard assumptions of our capitalistic and luxurious era, that "expensive" is automatically assumed to be "better" and "more pleasurable" -- presumably so that producers, manufacturers, and marketers can safely justify higher prices for their goods. But until this study is conducted in the way real people drink good wines, I will place little stock in the scientific validity of it.
Posted by: David | Feb 26, 2008 11:56:54 AM
Results-skewing incompetencies in the wine-tasting protocols of this experiment notwithstanding, these findings certainly go a long way towards explaining the weirdness of gender, race, class and physical-appearance value judgments in general... not to mention the innate unreliability of human interpretation of scientific data. I suppose we'll have to wait for a generation of computer-programmed computer-programmers before we get some objective Truth on these matters...
Posted by: Steven Augustine | Feb 26, 2008 1:48:52 PM
de gustibus non est disputandem.
Need I say more?
Posted by: Jim H. | Feb 26, 2008 5:37:00 PM
What work exactly is the brain scan equipment doing here? These people report higher levels of happiness when they think they're tasting a more expensive wine. Unless they're lying, of course the brain scans will say as much.
If lying (say to achieve the "right" answer) is indeed what the researchers were worried about, it seems like a simple polygraph test would be cheaper, more accurate and easier to interpret than measuring blood flows to different brain parts.
Posted by: D | Feb 26, 2008 6:50:34 PM
One more "study" in the great tradition of profound psychological research proving what we know already. Wow!
Posted by: JonJ | Feb 26, 2008 9:26:05 PM
"One more "study" in the great tradition of profound psychological research proving what we know already. Wow!"
As Nabokov said, psychology is the "third class carriage of human thought".
Posted by: Jared | Feb 27, 2008 9:19:33 AM
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