The Frontal Cortex

According to a new study in the Journal of Marketing, foods that we think are healthy taste worse. In one experiment, subjects were offered a mango lassi, an Indian yogurt drink that has the consistency of a milkshake. Subjects that were told the lassi was "unhealthy" liked the drink significantly more than those who were told the drink was "healthy".

This shouldn't be surprising. As I noted here, many experiments have now demonstrated the omnipresence of our subjectivity. If we expect a food to taste worse, then it will taste worse, even when compared to an identical product. Our imagination corrupts our experience.

Baba Shiv, a researcher at Stanford, has conducted an experiment that neatly demonstrates the way our expectations become reality. Shiv supplied volunteers with "energy" drinks that are supposed to make you feel more alert and energetic (they contain a potent brew of sugar and caffeine). Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. The participants were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. To Shiv's surprise, the people who paid discounted prices consistently solved fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price for the drinks. He repeated this simple experiment three different times, and yet he always got the same result.

Why did the cheaper energy drink prove less effective? According to Shiv, we always get what we pay for. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin, or why wine tastes better when it comes from an expensive looking bottle. "We have these general beliefs about the world - for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality - and they translate into specific expectations about specific products," said Shiv. "Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior."

So how can companies make healthy food products taste better? The answer is simple: raise the price. One bias can cancel out the other.