Mental Health

Why Expensive Meals Will Always Taste Better

By Christine Hsu | Update Date: May 02, 2014 05:54 PM EDT

Dinner at the Four Seasons will always taste better than those scoffed down at a Chinatown hole-in-the-wall, new research suggests.

The latest findings reveal expensive food is more delicious than bargain meals that people will think that meals taste better if they're pricey.

Researchers found that people who pay more for their meals think the food tastes better than if meals are offered at a more economical price.

Researchers at Cornell University explain that the findings show that people really do associate cost with quality. This theory is so ingrained that it can even influence how we taste.

The latest study involved 139 people enjoying an Italian buffet in a New York restaurant.

The price of the buffet was set at either $4 or $8. The customers were then asked to rate how tasty the food was, the quality of the restaurant and to leave their names.

The findings revealed that customers who paid $8 for food enjoyed their meal 11 percent more than those who ate the $4 buffet. Another surprising discovery was that those who ate the "cheaper" buffet felt worse about putting food on their plates and were more likely to feel like they overate. Researchers said this finding is particularly interesting because both groups ate around the same quantity of food in total, according to the Daily Mail.

"We were fascinated to find that pricing has little impact on how much one eats, but a huge impact on how you interpret the experience," lead researcher Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University, said in a news release.

The findings were presented this week at the Experimental Biology 2014 meeting in San Diego, California.

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