The wine delusion

For the sake of justification
Do people like what they like, or do they like only what they expect to like? How
much of our preference is already decided even before the first sip? The behavioural
economist Dan Ariely asked the question, ‘Do we dislike what we expect to dislike?’ Dan
Ariely’s team tested beer with a dash of vinegar on college students. When the students
were told about the vinegar before they drank the beer, 70% didn’t like it. When the
students were told about the vinegar after they drank the beer, more than 50% liked it. The
test tells us that expectations not only change what we think we should enjoy, but
significantly changes our experiences itself (Ariely et al., 2006; Berdik, 2012). Marketers
spend billions on advertising to craft emotional appeals towards brands. But prices are just
numbers. People assume that expensive stuff is better. Behavioural economists call this
principle, ‘price­quality heuristic’ (Berdik, 2012). Berdik (2012) feels that people use price
as a guide. That is, if something is expensive, then it is likely to be of higher quality than
something that is cheaper. Hence, people tend to justify a pricey product. Basically, they
follow the crowd, and end up paying for the premium like everybody else does. Quality
expectations may be fairly accurate on products with available objective measures of
quality. For experiential goods such as wine, the price­quality rule is less accurate (Berdik,
2012).
The unnatural
Unlike many of our basic consumer biases, the belief that price signals value isn’t
evolutionarily natural. The American economist Laurie Santos has done years on research
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