STOP THE PRESSES! Scientists have just discovered that cost affects perception

Scientist Antonio Rangel and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that if you tell people the cost of a wine is more expensive than another wine, people will believe the taste of the more expensive wine is better. They showed this to be the case even when the two wines were identical (aside from the price). According to Rangel, "We were shocked. I think it was because the flavor was stronger and our subjects were not very experienced."

Okay, ground-breaking study aside, here's why I'm talking about it. It is not ground-breaking, nor is it an indication that they've discovered something new. This is called priming, which has been around psychology and communication for a very long time. In this study, they "primed" the subjects by telling them that one wine was expensive, and thus, it resulted in a response that sees the more expensive wine as a higher quality wine. Not really all that surprising.

This is one of those things about science that really bugs me. It happens all of the time. An example: Every five years or so, some science report comes out that they've discovered planets around another sun, and suddenly, it's the first time this has ever happened. They'll use a different method (or sometimes the same method but from a different telescope or radiation emitter), and suddenly the news reports this as groundbreaking because "it's never happened before."

We see this with drug breakthroughs. A pharmaceutical company comes out with the new drug that is going to cure diabetes, or something like that. Or it will make it so people no longer have to diet, and they'll just melt pounds off their body. But it never comes to light, or it turns out to be a mere shadow of what they claimed it to be.

For the social science problem, I have a few theories as to why this happens. I've seen it by being part of the environment. I think one of the culprits is laziness. People do lousy research when they conduct their literature reviews. It's like observing the research techniques of Ann Coulter who checks Lexis Nexis using a search term and then states "there is no information of this ever happening in the news". The science of "searching" previous studies involves knowing how to search for it. Using a couple of key words or phrases is not enough. Sometimes, you have to do a literature review on the key terms themselves so that you understand what it is you're searching. An example: If I was researching emotional intelligence, it is not enough to look up all instances of emotional intelligence, but I would then need to completely analyze emotional intelligence to understand what other terminology might be used to explain this phenomenon. I'd start with simple things like self-perception and then work myself from that literature to find more obscure processes like personal enrichment or process-driven behavior. Each new study I found would then fuel the next study I found until I completely exhausted the literature that I could find. Then I would start on the next term and continue from there.

That doesn't happen anymore. People do crappy research these days. They'll look up one term and then somewhat hope that no one calls them on their lack of work to completely exhaust the subject. These scientists at CIT really should have covered this subject from a primer effect, to see if there was further value in knocking down this theory, but instead, they did this study and somewhat ignored the obvious studies in lieu of covering what sounded more interesting, like saying they're studying the minds of people rather than the stimuli that effect the minds of people.

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