Scientists pinpoint spot in brain that declines FOSS in favor of proprietary solution

[Sporkman]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080114/ts_alt_afp/ussciencemarketingwine_080114162325


Wine price test shows marketing at work in brain

1 hour, 58 minutes ago

CHICAGO (AFP) - In a demonstration of the power of marketing, researchers in California showed you can increase a person's enjoyment of wine by just sticking a higher price on it, according to a study released Monday.

Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at the California Institute of Technology, led a team to test how marketing shapes consumers' perceptions and whether it also enhances their enjoyment of a product.

They asked 21 volunteers to sample five different bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and rate their taste preferences. The taste test was run 15 times, with the wines presented in random order.

The taste test was blind except for information on the price of the wine. Without telling the volunteers, the researchers presented two of the wines twice, once with the true price tag, and again with a fake one.

They also passed off a 90 dollar bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon as a 10 dollar bottle, and presented a five dollar bottle as one worth 45 dollars.

Aside from collecting the test subjects' impressions of the wines, the researchers scanned their brains to monitor the neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex -- an area of the brain believed to encode pleasure related to taste, odors and music.

The study found that inflating the price of a bottle of wine enhanced a person's experience of drinking it, as shown by the neural activity.

The volunteers consistently gave higher ratings to the more "expensive" wines.

Brain scans also showed greater neural activity in the pleasure center when they were sampling those "pricey" wines, indicating that the increased pleasure they reported was a real effect in the brain.

"It's a common belief among scientists and economists that the quality of the experience depends on the properties of the product and the state of the consumer; for example, if a consumer is thirsty or not," said Rangel.

"But what this study shows is that the brain's rewards center takes into account subjective beliefs about the quality of the experience.

"If you believe that the experience is better, even though it's the same wine, the rewards center of the brain encodes it as feeling better."

In other words, "people's beliefs about the quality of a wine affect how well it tastes for the brain," he concluded.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[bufsabre666]

theyve done things like this for a long time, people feel everything is better if they pay for it, why else would people enjoy mac and say mac is better when its just as bad as microsoft but you pay more for it

penn and teller did an expriment like this on their show B*llsh*t
i dont know if its on you tube but look up penn and teller the best

[moderatelymodest]

I guess that's why I keep reading all this stuff about cedega being better than pure wine, then. ;)

[Tristam Green]

I'm assuming that the study was performed in the States.

*GENERALIZATION ALERT*

We have an ingrained notion that Price = Value here. Something more pricey means more status, thereby meaning that it must invariably be more "valuable" in terms of the quality. This and every other study prior to it just proves the exact opposite in a roundabout way.

[Het Irv]

I think that part of the Wine test has to do with the fact that people have "Pay more Higher Quality" hard wired into their brain. This is also known as "You get what you pay for"

I have always thought of it like this, pay a crapload of money...you might get crap.

[Tristam Green]

I love that sentiment. I've used it on my purchases of automobiles.

[bufsabre666]

I guess that's why I keep reading all this stuff about cedega being better than pure wine, then. ;)

ive always had better success with cedega than with wine alone though

i didnt pay for it but... i mean... i dont advocate piracy at all ever

[kvonb]

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[bufsabre666]

PS the "flying spaghetti monster" still makes me laugh :)

please sir, do not laugh at my deeply deeply held beliefs

[Sporkman]

please sir, do not laugh at my deeply deeply held beliefs

Seriously. Apparently bigotry is ok when directed at the FSM faithful. :(

[23meg]

The thread title is misleading, since FOSS isn't always free in the monetary sense, and proprietary software can be.

[bufsabre666]

true but still people think if they pay for it that its better

like suggested in another thread im ganna try and sell a copy of ubuntu for $1000

[Jonne]

Basically they've uncovered Apple's business model.

[macogw]

theyve done things like this for a long time, people feel everything is better if they pay for it, why else would people enjoy mac and say mac is better when its just as bad as microsoft but you pay more for it

penn and teller did an expriment like this on their show B*llsh*t
i dont know if its on you tube but look up penn and teller the best

OSX is better than Windows. It at least has some semblance of security and contains a LOT of open source software (BSD, not GPL, but it's still OSS, if not FS).

[Sporkman]

The thread title is misleading, since FOSS isn't always free in the monetary sense, and proprietary software can be.

I know, I was just trying to be funny. :)

[bufsabre666]

OSX is better than Windows. It at least has some semblance of security and contains a LOT of open source software (BSD, not GPL, but it's still OSS, if not FS).

its more closed than windows, it had closed source and closed hardware, thats worse than windows in my book, at least i can drop in a new component into my computer with windows

[conehead77]

true but still people think if they pay for it that its better

Its a marketing concept. Companies sell one product at a high price and the same product with another packing for much less.
So their product gets bought by people who only buy cheap stuff and by people who buy appl... err... overpriced products at the same time ;)

[bufsabre666]

Its a marketing concept. Companies sell one product at a high price and the same product with another packing for much less.
So their product gets bought by people who only buy cheap stuff and by people who buy appl... err... overpriced products at the same time ;)

and alot of us know which ones are the good ones at a low price so they dont buy appl.... i mean... said over price stuff

[Tundro Walker]

I bought a Black-n-Decker food processor today. Brought it home, set it up, tossed veggies into it and...BAM...it ground them right up. I was so amazed that it worked like it was supposed to.

The underlined statement, in and of itself, is what is wrong with American Capitalism these days...

[bufsabre666]

I bought a Black-n-Decker food processor today. Brought it home, set it up, tossed veggies into it and...BAM...it ground them right up. I was so amazed that it worked like it was supposed to.

The underlined statement, in and of itself, is what is wrong with American Capitalism these days...

you mean things dont work like theyre supposed to most if not all the time?

WAHHHH!!!! /me runs away crying

[Praadur]

I had one of those random thoughts that I tend to have when reading this thread, and it went something like this: When did the consensus of a goal being more worthy if one works harder for it change to a goal being more worthy if one pays more for it? Is a goal really justifiable if it's achieved by throwing money at it, and is it affected by variables such as class status?

I know I often fall back on gaming-based examples but that's because they work so very well, and I have one right now. There are MMOs out there which allow paying for perks or working for them, the same goal but one person spends time 'working' in the game and the other simply throws money at the solution in order to get the same end resut. The person throwing money at a problem might also consider it a worked for goal if they did work for it, as opposed to if they were well off in the first place.

As some of you will no doubt know (as it's at the top of each of my posts), I'm from Wales. I'm also getting on a bit now so I remember the miners, and I remember being told tales about miners in my youth. They were a hard-working sort and got little in the way of reward for their work, what they had they really had to break their backs for, so to speak. I admired these people in my youth and therefore I've had their values ingrained in me.

The end result is that I feel that a goal is more worthy if I put some work into it myself than if I throw money at it to have an end product where some other poor sod has done the work for me. I'd rather personally edit the source of, gather the dependencies of, configure and then compile (and even manually patch) a program than take a more sanitised approach where I wouldn't have to do that.

Similarly, this is why I also prefer local farm foods over big name products and likewise why a local farmhouse jam tastes 'better' to me than an expensive, big name jam would.

The conclusion of my ramblesome post is I can see that subjectivity has an effect on the mind, and it's a fair point. I can see that the researcher isn't just talking of a person enjoying something subjectively because it costs more or whatever else, but that someone is going to enjoy partaking in experiences that more resemble their culture and ways of thinking. Then it has to be said that what you enjoy reflects the kind of person you are.

You are what you eat.

[Dimitriid]

You would get the same result if me if you told me the bottle of wine used to belong to Karl Marx: of course the objectification of things caused by money causes a reaction, its completely pointless since any number of things can attach value to objects, value that they do not have, not just consumerism.

Its the exact same principle as sentimental value, if anything it shows you how pathetic wine-loving snobs really are.

[-grubby]

Oh I thought you were talking about WINE and I got all confused. But yes it is true that things that are more expensive seem better

[kvonb]

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[bufsabre666]

I'll drink a beer to that one brother:lolflag:

like i need an excuse to crack a frosty one

cheers

[FranMichaels]

“A fool and his money are soon parted.” -- Thomas Tusser

Anyway, Free software has value counted and contributed to in a different manner. If someone doesn't understand what rights she gets, or how the software is built, it just looks like freeware I suppose. She wonders if there is a catch or gimmick...

Sigh...

[CCNA_student]

I wonder why so many people here like to bash Mac OS X. It generally works. I see no point in constantly saying other OS's are worse. What does it accomplish?

Sin Cere,

CCNA

[bufsabre666]

I wonder why so many people here like to bash Mac OS X. It generally works. I see no point in constantly saying other OS's are worse. What does it accomplish?

Sin Cere,

CCNA

its no better than windows yet always claims to be better, there for it deserves the bashing

[some_random_noob]

I wonder why so many people here like to bash Mac OS X.

Um... bashing Mac - in this thread? You must mean the guy who said "Looks like they've just uncovered Apple's marketing strategy". That's not bashing, that's a true statement. I couldn't agree more with that guy! :D It's so true - Mac users think Macs are great, merely because they cost more (Apparently the more something costs, the better it is).

It's stupid to assume that philosophy.

[kvonb]

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