Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness
Plassmann and colleagues gave people wine to taste inside a brain scanner, telling them the prices. The prices were invented and some of the wines were repeated under two different labels, so the same liquid was presented as cheap and as expensive. People reported the expensive version as more pleasant, which is the familiar part. The finding that made the study famous is what happened underneath: activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region associated with the experience of pleasure rather than with judgments about it, also rose with the stated price. That matters because it undercuts the easy explanation, that people are simply reporting what they think they should say. On this evidence the marketing changes the experience rather than only the verdict on it. The sample is small, as brain imaging samples of that period were, and the finding concerns expectation rather than wine in particular. This vault cites it for the claim that price is an ingredient of taste.
Plassmann and colleagues gave people wine to taste inside a brain scanner, telling them the prices. The prices were invented and some of the wines were repeated under two different labels, so the same liquid was presented as cheap and as expensive. People reported the expensive version as more pleasant, which is the familiar part. The finding that made the study famous is what happened underneath: activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region associated with the experience of pleasure rather than with judgments about it, also rose with the stated price. That matters because it undercuts the easy explanation, that people are simply reporting what they think they should say. On this evidence the marketing changes the experience rather than only the verdict on it. The sample is small, as brain imaging samples of that period were, and the finding concerns expectation rather than wine in particular. This vault cites it for the claim that price is an ingredient of taste.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
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Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008). “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.” PNAS, 105(3), 1050-1054.
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- The Candle Never Changes, Why We Look
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0706929105
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0706929105