why people get fooled

                  why people get fooled

The holiday season is fast approaching, and that means gift buying. With each passing season, finding the perfect gift for loved ones seems to become more and more difficult—a phenomenon not unrelated to the seemingly exponential growth in buying options each year.

So how do we do it?

Many of us would like to believe that our decision-making is based in logic and objectivity. Studies have shown, however, that our preferences are highly biased, based on our expectations.

For decades, psychological research has supported the presence of inherent bias in human perception. A 2001 study titled The Color of Odors examined the effect of color on odor and taste perception of wines. In the experiment, wine experts were presented with two glasses of wine: one red and one white. Each was asked to describe the wine as they experienced it. The experts used words like citrus, flower, lemon, and honey to describe the white wine, whereas they used words like clove, musk and crushed red fruit to describe the red.

However, all of the experts had been unwittingly duped: both glasses actually contained the same white wine, the only difference between them being a little red food coloring in one glass. Not a single expert was even able to identify that both glasses contained white wine, and they all described the colored white wine as they would have a red. This classic study reveals the power that expectations have on how we perceive the world.

While this and other studies have revealed a lot about the underlying motives of human judgment, they rarely touch on the neuroscience behind these phenomena. A 2008 CalTech study, however, began to shed light on how preconceived notions and labels influence our thinking.

In this study, subjects were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and presented with two glasses of wine, one labeled $5 and a second labeled $90. However, the subjects were not told that the wine in each glass was actually the same $90 wine. They found that the average self-reported experienced pleasantness (EP) score was greater for the wine labeled $90 as compared to that labeled $5. More important, the higher EP score corresponded to an increased blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the brain, meaning that this area was more active when tasting the wine labeled as more expensive. The frontal lobe of the cortex is an area of the brain important for high-level cognitive function and top-down processing. It has been shown to be essential for decision making, planning for future events, and reward comparison.

This study revealed that the mPFC did not respond to the wine, per se, but rather in accordance to whether or not it had received the better wine. An earlier Stanford study revealed that the mPFC responds when the outcome of a reward comparison is revealed and the mPFC is active only after a reward is gained. Therefore, the activation of the mPFC is not directly tied to true sensory signals or inherent quality, but to the markers and labels—signals of quality. The mPFC performs at a higher level of abstraction than brain areas that objectively sense the world around us. In fact, in studies involving the insular cortex—the area of the brain that perceives taste—no difference between the two wines was detected.

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