Higher Prices Make Wine Taste Better

from Mind Hacks:

A new brain scanning study has supported what we've suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to.

Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study, shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where volunteers were asked to taste and rate five different wines, each individually priced.

What the volunteers didn't know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occasion it was described as costing $90 a bottle, on another as costing $10 a bottle.

The volunteers rated the 'more expensive' wine as significantly more likeable despite being identical to the 'cheaper' wine...

Although, mightn't people just say they liked the expensive stuff more because they didn't wish to appear unsophisticated, not because they actually thought it tasted any differently?