Marketing Messes With Your Head
Posted January 14, 2008 - 10:11 by Catherine Shaffer
A new study out today in PNAS confirms what we always suspected was true. The higher the price you pay for a product, the greater your subjective experience of pleasure in the product. For a tightwad like me, that's a no brainer. Of course people think that expensive stuff is better. Most of the time, I feel a smug satisfaction knowing that I can enjoy the same quality for a fraction of the price, or free. But here's the kicker. That pleasure experience is real, according to Caltech researchers Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel. At first I felt that this was clearly the devil's work, but as I was polishing the cobalt blue enamel on my Aga range this morning, I had a change of heart. Maybe, sometimes, pleasure is worth the price we pay for it.
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