Mr. Show’s Worthington Law Applied to Wine Sales

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Mr. Show or the Worthington Law? No worries. Just consult this handy explainer video and then continue reading my post.

Researchers at CalTech and the Stanford Graduate School of Business co-authored a Neuroscience study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. Although I would always recommend reading the original papers, the abstract explains the hypothesis and subsequent findings. In essence, subjects were offered wines from different price ranges; they were, however, purposely told that the wine being sampled was of a higher/lower cost in order to see the effects on enjoyment of each wine. The metrics involved functional MRI scans of how much blood and oxygen the sensory perception of each wine sent to the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a section of the brain which reflects sensations of pleasure.

The results? I would have never guessed! I am both shocked and awed! Gee Golly…Is that true mommy? Can a really insecure, belligerently ignorant individual’s hopelessly simple physiology of pleasure be fooled by an elevated price and possibly reading about the wine in shiny magazines boasting cover-to-cover Hummer ad saturation? Surely, nobody goes out to sheepishly buy some “specifically made-for-[insert X foreign market here]” wine from Tuscany ticketed at $80 that no actual Tuscan would want to swallow just because their friends might think better of them and shriek “yummo!”, right?

The results simply reaffirm every reason why I ever conceived of a personal, online journal meant to document and share intelligent value wines that rarely and barely reach the flighty attention spans of the insecure and overly impressionable. Who would’ve never expected this type of result?

Seriously though…How many of us have a mischievous anecdote with an outcome that elicited similar results to that of this study?

I wonder if similar studies with comparable or even more interestingly, contradictory results have been published…