Your Brain Knows When You’re Being Ripped Off Before You Do

In the crowded marketplace of modern life, where decisions about value and price bombard us constantly, our brains may be making judgments long before we consciously realize it. Russian researchers have identified a specific neural marker that activates almost instantly when a product’s price deviates from what we expect to pay—with our brains reacting more strongly to inflated prices than suspicious bargains.

The study, published in January in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, provides a fascinating glimpse into the automatic mechanisms that influence our purchasing decisions beneath the surface of conscious thought.

Scientists from HSE University and Neurotrend, a Russian neuromarketing company, used advanced brain imaging techniques to track neural responses as participants evaluated product prices. Their findings reveal that the brain engages regions responsible for reward assessment and learning from past decisions when encountering prices that seem “off.”

“The results demonstrate that when the price does not meet expectations, the brain responds almost instantly. Moreover, the response is linked to brain regions involved in assessing rewards and learning from past decisions. This means that the perception of a product’s value is part of automatic cognitive mechanisms that are activated long before an individual consciously makes a decision,” explains Vasily Klucharev, Head of the International Laboratory of Social Neurobiology and chief researcher on the study.

On a rainy Moscow afternoon in the neuromarketing lab, participants strapped with sensors stared at screens displaying familiar tech products. The researchers showed 65 participants images of mobile phones—iPhones, Nokia, and Xiaomi models—followed by hypothetical prices that ranged from suspiciously low to outrageously high compared to actual market values.

After seeing each phone and its price, participants were shown either the word “expensive” or “cheap” and had to determine whether this assessment matched the displayed price. Throughout this process, researchers monitored brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG)—techniques that capture the electrical and magnetic activity of neurons in real time.

The key finding centers around a specific brain signal called N400, an electrical impulse typically generated when the brain encounters unexpected information. When participants saw prices significantly different from market values, this N400 signal fired strongly—with excessively high prices triggering even stronger responses than implausibly low ones.

This asymmetry makes evolutionary sense: being skeptical of too-good-to-be-true bargains might have protected our ancestors from scams, while being particularly sensitive to overpricing would help avoid wasting precious resources.

Interestingly, the researchers also discovered that brand familiarity influences how precisely our brains judge appropriate pricing. For Xiaomi phones, the range of prices that triggered strong N400 responses was broader, suggesting participants had less certainty about this brand’s “true” market value compared to more established brands like iPhone.

The study originated from a student’s curiosity. “Back when I was in my bachelor’s programme at HSE University, I wondered whether it was possible to determine from brain activity what price a person considers acceptable. Our experiments have confirmed that it is indeed possible,” comments Andrew Kislov, doctoral student at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences and co-author of the study.

Kislov acknowledges ethical considerations but emphasizes their limited scope: “Globally, we are working to develop an objective method for assessing customer preferences. To what extent, in doing so, do we have the right to invade a person’s inner world? This is a good question, but in this project, we simply aimed to determine the maximum price that would be comfortable for people, and this method does not pose any real threat to customers.”

By analyzing the MEG data to map which brain regions activate when encountering non-optimal prices, researchers identified involvement of the frontal cortex and anterior cingulate gyrus—areas known to play crucial roles in decision-making and reward assessment.

The implications extend beyond pure neuroscience into practical marketing applications. Traditional consumer surveys often fail to capture true price perceptions since respondents may give socially desirable answers rather than revealing their authentic reactions.

“Marketers are increasingly saying that conventional consumer surveys don’t provide a complete picture, as people cannot always explain why a certain price seems too high or too low to them. People often say what they think is expected of them,” explains Anna Shestakova, Director of the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and chief researcher on the study.

The collaboration with Neurotrend points toward emerging applications in consumer research. “We discovered that it is possible to examine an individual’s brain and determine whether a specific product price meets their expectations. This approach can help predict how people will perceive the price of a new product even before it is released to the market,” Shestakova adds.

As neuromarketing techniques advance, they offer unprecedented insight into consumer psychology at its most fundamental level. Yet they also raise important questions about the boundaries between scientific understanding and commercial exploitation of how our brains unconsciously evaluate value.

For consumers navigating an increasingly sophisticated marketplace, there may be some comfort in knowing that their brains are already working behind the scenes to identify suspicious pricing—whether it’s that suspiciously cheap online deal or an overpriced cup of coffee. The next time you instinctively think “that’s too expensive,” your brain likely knew it milliseconds before you did.