There’s a study that comes back around every few years, and every time it does, a certain kind of person shares it with the caption “this is why I don’t drink expensive wine,” and then goes right back to drinking expensive wine. The study is simple and a little humiliating. You give people the same wine twice. You tell them one glass costs ten dollars and the other costs ninety. They don’t just say the ninety-dollar one is better. Their brains agree. The pleasure centers (the actual meat behind your forehead) light up more for the wine you were told cost more. It is the same wine. Your tongue was never consulted.
I love this study because it quietly demolishes something we all believe about ourselves, which is that we can tell. That we, personally, are hard to fool. That our taste is a finely tuned instrument reporting objective facts about the world, rather than what it actually is, which is a rumor we repeat to ourselves based on the price tag.
Here is the uncomfortable engine underneath it. You are not, most of the time, buying the thing. You are buying the story about the thing, and then experiencing the story. The perfume in the hundred-dollar bottle is about two dollars of liquid. The rest is a small novel about who you’ll be when you wear it, and you pay (gladly) for the novel. The watch keeps the same time as your phone. None of this is a scandal. It’s just the machinery, running in broad daylight, on you.
And before you get smug, because I can feel you getting smug, this is not a story about rich people and their ninety-dollar wine. It’s a story about the software, and everybody’s running it. The guy who sneers at luxury and pays a premium for the “authentic” hole-in-the-wall taco is buying a story too. His story is called “I’m not the kind of person who buys stories.” That one’s my favorite. I own several.
What gets me is where this goes once you follow it past the wine aisle. Because the same wiring that makes a ninety-dollar label taste better is the wiring every con artist in history has plugged into. The mark doesn’t get fooled despite being smart. The mark gets fooled by his certainty that he’s too smart to be fooled. The expensive thing must be good, the confident man must know what he’s doing, because look at me, I can tell. The words “I can tell” have bankrupted more people than any weapon.
We want to believe value is a fact sitting inside the object, waiting to be measured. It isn’t. Value is a feeling that happens inside you, and the feeling can be moved, and everyone from Chanel to the guy running three-card monte on a folding table is in the business of moving it.
The good news, if you want it, is that the trick runs both directions. The same brain that overpays for the label can decide, on purpose, that the ten-dollar wine is plenty. That the watch you own tells lovely time. That you don’t need the story this month.
But you have to catch yourself in the act. And that’s the hardest thing a person can do, because the one doing the catching is the same one doing the act.
See you next week.