re: Piling on Wine - Is Wine bullshite? (link)

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I actually agree with the study.. Not because I have a problem with wine drinkers, but because I think humans are easily "fooled" by our preconceived beliefs.

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It appears that a lot of these studies are conducted by psychologists to show just how big a role perception plays with respect to making judgments. I don't think these psychologists are out to punk the so-called wine experts as much as they are trying to show that, in general, experts are fallible and many have track records that aren't any better than flipping a coin. Too often people blindly follow what "experts" say and pay them a lot of money for sub-par information/advice. I think one reason that psychologists study wine experts because a lot of people enjoy wine tasting; it's something they can relate to, whether they themselves enjoy tasting or have that snobby friend whom they can't stand drinking with.

In a different study, a bunch of radiologists were given a series of chest x-rays and told to give diagnoses based on these images. However some of the x-rays showed up multiple times (just like the wine study), and some of these radiologists gave different diagnoses each time the same x-ray image came up.

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But I'd bet if you told someone a $7 glass of wine costs $50, they would have a much higher opinion of it than if they knew the real price. It's fairly blatant to me.. We are all susceptible to this.

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This is very true. Another study involved two different bottles, one cheap and one expensive, but they both contained the same wine. This time the subjects were hooked up to brain scanners to measure brain-wave activity while tasting. The result was that brain-wave activity was more intense while the subjects were tasting the "more expensive" wine, although both wines were the exact same.