How Expectations Bias Wine Taste - Leonard Mlodinow

[Lupitamihita]

Yay, two buck chuck! Go Mlodinow. Does this mean I need to go to wine tastings with a blindfold?

[NikkoDusseldorf]

Wow very nice video m are you coming to PROWINE 2011 in Germany , dusseldorf is the city to be

[DerrenBrown100]

This is the guy who made Deepak Chopra look like an ass.

[wmg111]

The notion that the arbitrary price of a product can actually, and measureably, force our brains to respond accordingly answers a lot of my questions regarding the apparent inability of society to forego transitory personal gratification in order to further the common good.

[RoGhrianadh]

How transitory of an effect is it if it is (as is apparent) measurable, though? Perhaps the gratification, and improved mood would be worth the extra price, even if it was simply due to a psychological effect.

[fatmanprime]

Perhaps, but I am against ripping people off for placebos.

[Ralajer]

What questions did it answer? Also, I don't understand why society can't have both.

What is the common good in your mind? I consider the common good to be the ability of people to act freely on their own behave.

[PlateauEast]

while that may be true to some extent. this man's entire understanding of wine and how to compare them, and the fine details of the various categories of wine is completely and embarrassingly skewed, and seemingly, so are the studies that he cites. the price of wine is not necessarily only tied to how "good" it tastes. that would be like saying that the price of fine art is priced simply on how "beautiful" it is.

[plimbuff]

@PlateauEast, you are misunderstanding.  Nothing you've said disproves the experiment.

The MRI doesn't measure "taste", it measures enjoyment.

The test proved that people consitently enjoyed the exact same bottle of wine more simply because it it was priced higher.

[PlateauEast]

@plimbuff i'm not trying to disprove the experiment, but i am pointing out that the experiment itself is pointless. he could have been talking about chocolate - expensive or not. oh wait... it's easy to discern the differences in quality in chocolate. it's not as easy with wine. there is a lot to know. test some dumb ass university students as they did proves nothing but that the students were ignorant about wine. anyone who knows, knows that price never tells the whole story.

[plimbuff]

@PlateauEast , it wasn't just students.

Wine EXPERTS were tested too. They rated the same white wine as being sweeter simply because it had red food coloring in it, making it rose' colered.

Do you really think wine experts can't be fooled?

If you do, you really need to take psychology 1A.

[PlateauEast]

@plimbuff even if it were experts being tested, it still proves nothing... the test itself misses the point completely. if the wine is red, you judge based on the fact that it's red wine. and shows what you know! being that red wine is not sweeter than white. if it is a sweet white wine and they put red food colouring in it, it seems logical that the wine experts would discuss the sweet quality of the wine. you know nothing about wine, and clearly neither does that guy speaking in this vid

[plimbuff]

@PlateauEast, it wasn't dyed to look like red wine. It was dyed to look like Rose'.

Sorry, but the test proves that experts rated the SAME wine as sweeter, simply because it LOOKED like Rose'.

lol They must have been so embarresed.

Also,

You are EXACTLY the kind of person that will enjoy a twenty dollar bottle more, simply because it has a fake 100 dollar price tag on it. We ALL are. It's called basic psychology.

Just take a basic psychology class. I can also recommend some text books.

[franksvenatra]

Uh, no it doesn't. Maybe you *expected* it to :) But it doesn't.

[RoGhrianadh]

When he was talking about the price switch, the testing was taking place on people who did not have developed palattes, so they likely had no idea what sort of tastes they were actually observing. In that case, it becomes a placeebo effect.

[PlateauEast]

agree. and also, if a bottle is 90 dollars, it isn't necessarily priced that way simply because it tastes good. there could be many reasons for it. the real test should have been two wines: both from the same region, same year, same grape, and ask the people which is better the 10 or the 90. that would be an honest experiment, in my opinion.

[RoGhrianadh]

I think he should have done more research into the tastes of wine before undertaking his experiments. The first thought I had when he talked about people rating wine as sweeter when a white was dyed to look like a rose is that the people doing the rating would be thinking about a typical rose sweetness. White wines are generally sweeter than rose wines, so of course they'ed rate a white that has been dyed to look like a rose as a sweeter rose. It is a matter of scale in many cases.