It's not 'taste perception' that is affected. It's literally taste. People aren't lying or tricking themselves, the pizza literally tasted worse if they knew

It's not 'taste perception' that is affected. It's literally taste. People aren't lying or tricking themselves, the pizza literally tasted worse if they knew it was Dominos in those studies. They've done similar studies with wine. They took professional sommeliers and gave them cheap wine in bottles with expensive labels, and expensive wine in bottles with cheap labels, and had them try them while lying in fMRI scanners. The bottle it came out of had monumental effects on the taste centers of the brain. The book 'How Pleasure Works' goes over a lot of this sort of research and is quite interesting. The 'American Association of Wine Economists' (which isn't what it sounds like) also does tons of research on things like this. It's thanks to them we know that people can't actually tell the difference between expensive patte and wet dog food.