In a comment to my previous post on the wine study (you may want to read that first), Daniel Goldberg helpfully links to this post at Marginal Revolution, where Alex Tabarrok argues that the wine study seems like a waste of money: we can just do a behavioral study and ask people their blinded preferences about wines when they're uncertain or misled about wine prices.
I agree that the study has gotten so much attention because people find the behavioral results interesting. And, if you're a marketer, I can understand why that would be your focus. But if you're a neuroscientist, you may be interested in the results because they add to a body of evidence about the brain.
Now, they're appears to be a suggestion in the paper that people's expressed preferences (as discovered in behavioral studies) may diverge from the actual qualitative experience of wine drinking that we might discover through brain imaging. This involves a thorny problem in neuroscience and neuroethics research related to interpersonal comparisons of utility. Our evidence for what the brain is doing comes, at some level, from behavioral observations. It takes some rather powerful theories about brain function to get us to favor neuroscientific evidence that, in some sense, contradicts or diverges from the sort of behavioral evidence that led us to develop our neuroscientific theories in the first place. But if you believe that it is possible to develop theories of brain function that would lead us to favor those theories over behavioral data (which seems at least plausible to me), well then, we've got to start somewhere.
Comments