Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

lacked the time and mental energy to finish this esp as it seemed to say in oh so many ways how our society has bought into the marketing of more than any of us will ever need! ( )

Animal Spirits

When I studied economics it was more or less taken for granted that people's spending was based upon the costs of products and the costs of money. Keynes added some subtlety here with his analysis of trust, but basically, people always were supposed to spend.

We never asked ourselves why. Why do people populate shopping areas to buy more clothes, electronic appliances and household goods (and books) than they actually need? And this particularly, as the pleasure of acquisition is usually short-lived at best? Actually, compared to 30,000 years ago, you can ask yourself how much progress we have really made. At that time people worked about twenty hours a week, leisured in small clan groups, and had a life expectancy after surviving infancy of about 70 years with growing respect for the elderly.

Biology offers an answer in this pop-science book. Most of our evolution, we humans lived in small groups where image and status were all important for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children. Nowadays Mr. Miller claims, we ornament ourselves to create that impression. Many products are signals to look good in the eyes of others. Modern people are self-marketing minds feeding one another hyperbole about how healthy, clever, and popular they are, through the goods and services they consume.

In extreme cases such consumerism may get out of hand. Extreme consumerism affects about one percent of the population and is like “narcissism, a deeply engrained pervasive pattern of self-centered egotistical behaviour” that usually begins by early adulthood and that combines an intense need of admiration by others with a lack of empathy for others. A core symptom of such behaviour is that such people view themselves as stars in their own life.

Mr. Miller claims the word "materialism" is misleading, as consumer capitalism is at its heart semiotic. It is not a conspiracy of Chicago school free market prophets, but the combined effect of human nature, current social norms, technology, social institutions and ideologies, historical accident and cultural. His biological approach to human need is vastly more detailed than Maslow's pyramid of needs, which does not always match human nature's need for reproductive success.

Key traits humans communicate are health, fertility, beauty, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to novelty, and general intelligence. Wealth, status, and taste are used to implicate this. Humans and particularly teenagers have unique abilities for finding new fitness indicators. Still, it isn’t always done efficiently. Female fitness indicators like bags are rarely noticed, even though human males are relatively choosy about the women they mate. Mr. Miller claims that marketers ignore evidence from modern biology that people do not only display wealth, status, and taste, but also kindness, intelligence, and creativity: they are hard-wired that way.

Mr. Miller divides the products we buy into two categories: either they are things that “push our pleasure buttons”, or they are things that display desirable traits. The basic needs in life are cheap for modern consumers, but showing off status is always going to be expensive. High costs guarantee the reliability of quality signals. Quoting from Amotz Zahavi’s “handicap principle”, only high-quality animals can afford to waste a lot of time, energy, and resources on issuing costly signals. Human traits that meet these criteria are the face, the voice, hair, skin gait, height, for women breasts, bums and waists, for men beards penises and upper body muscle mass, plus for all maybe language, humor, art, music, creativity, intelligence, and kindness.

Quality signaling makes sense. Signaling beauty and health helps attract care from parents and kin, and solicits social support and sex partners. Tests have shown that men in mating mood spend more and women in mating mood do more charity, particularly if the spending and charity are conspicuous. Women tend to find a man with a Porsche more attractive for a short-term relationship than men with a Honda Civic, although not if these men are considered as marriage partners. Equally, women looking at attractive men intend to spend less money. Quality signaling also applies to nations in the form of white elephant projects. We spend money on luxuries and status symbols to appear more reputable, popular and rich, and the high costs we are willing to pay are an incentive for others to use deception (e.g. fake Rolex watches).

Conspicuous signaling can be divided into the categories waste, precision, and reputation (page 118). Products can fit into multiple categories. Conspicuous waste is simply a way to display the scope of one’s control over resources. The 20th century saw a move towards conspicuous precision, particularly in the Far East and Europe. It reflects a gradual de-materialisation of consumption. Conspicuous reputation is even more abstract. Branded products lead the consumer to feel higher in status, sexiness, and sophistication. Luxury advertisements have 2 audiences: they inform buyers about the products, but also the coveters who cannot afford them about the status these products offer. As such they assure buyers that coveters now.

People also signal their character through various means. Modern psychology accepts six central dimensions to an individual’s character that are hereditary and good predictors of habits, preferences, values, and attitudes: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, intelligence (IQ). People can judge these six traits in just a few minutes. Mr. Miller focuses on intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

IQ’s predictive power is high, as it correlates positively with body symmetry, longevity, semen quality, physical and mental health, mating, and romantic attractiveness for long-term relationships. Universities are inefficient in preparing employees, but signal intelligence (which could just as easily be known from a good IQ-test), conscientiousness, and openness:

Harvard and Yale sell nicely printed sheets of paper called degrees that cost about $ 160,000. To obtain the degree, one must demonstrate a decent level of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness in one’s coursework, but above all, one must have the intelligence to get admitted. (…) The Harvard degree is basically an IQ-guarantee.

Openness has its positive and negative effects, and its appreciation is hence diversified and the mean on the Openness Bell Curve is essentially the best. Conspicuous displays of openness might show mental health (resistance to schizotypy, schizophrenia, and other forms of psychosis). Highly open consumers can be highly profitable, because they can be highly gullible. They are early adaptors and fashion followers. Low openness consumers prefer traditional products that have traditional features and designs. Science has found a negative correlation between openness of countries and parasites. Even within the US there seems proof for collectivism and conservatism (success of the Republican Party) and perceived vulnerability to colds, infections, and commutable disease. It also explains xenophobia rising with age when immune systems grow weaker.

Conscientiousness is primarily the inhibitory self control of the frontal lobes over the impulsive limbic system, leading to integrity, reliability, etc. It matures slowly with age. Conscientiousness is in greater need in modern complex societies. Consequently, a public facade is important for modern adults (Mr. Miller quotes Woody Allen here, who stated that “90% of success is just showing up”). That is why the markets still produce many goods that require regular maintenance. "A single young man with no house plants and no pets is rightly viewed as a poor prospect by young women seeking Mr. Right." His conscientiousness is either untested or it failed the test (Mr. Miller advises to take a dog and walk it regularly). Personal care products and fitness machines are other expressions of conscientiousness, as are objects for collecting. A decent house and car indicate a decent credit rating. Besides credit, a curriculum vitae is one of the best indicators.

Agreeableness, or the capacity for empathy, kindness, benevolence, egalitarianism and social justice is the hope of mankind and "our most persistent source of hypocrisy and runaway self-righteousness". Highly agreeable people are conformists who respect peer-group opinions, fashions, and product choices. Agreeableness is as two-sided as openness. In courtship a man must show low levels of agreeableness (maturity, social dominance, risk-taking and assertiveness), later on high agreeableness (romantic thoughtfulness, kindness, and family values). In tests, mating-primed showed less conformity to the average opinion or consumer products, and mating-primed women more. Religious festivals and traditional gift-giving days are important opportunities for signaling agreeableness. Men are still required to spend about two-months’ salary on an engagement ring. Etiquette, the norms of the local ruling class, often has “the implicit goal to demonstrate that one’s prefrontal cortex can maintain tight inhibitory control over selfish and impulsive behaviours”. Political opinions are considered proxies for agreeableness, as is the trillion dollar global business of church visits.

I liked this book, as it confirmed ideas that I have toyed with myself (e.g. the use of courses in corporate life). On the other hand, Mr. Miller seems very certain in all the examples that he gives. In economics the Invisible Hand can often explain many phenomena quite well at a first impression. However, when you dig deeper, the situation turns out to be more complicated than first expected. The same you see now in Darwinism and genetics. As part of his theory, Mr. Miller claims that men are good at judging other people’s intelligence. It does not match my experience, particularly if it affects attractive members of the opposite sex. Equally, I would not want to reduce religion to signalling agreeableness, but it is an interesting theory for why religion has lost popularity in countries that have embraced conspicuous precision, and the “de-materialisation of consumption”. So although I am not so sure if Mr. Miller is always right, but his book is certainly thought-provoking. It also helped that Mr. Miller has few qualms about political correctness. ( )

The book uses the findings of evolutionary psychology and our compulsion to display our desirability as mates, friends, parents etc to explain how conspicuous consumerism developed, why communism fails, and how conspicuous consumerism is not inevitable. It is written with enough humor that when your own irrational behavior is pointed out, you can consider it without defensive anger. Despite having thought about American consumerism, the book gave me plenty of new examples and new ways to think about it.

When the author turns to solutions or new ways, some of his ideas made my skin crawl but still worthy of consideration. Other ideas sound right and brilliant but unlikely to occur. A population more aware of their hidden motivations would seem to me capable of making some headway towards a more satisfying way to live. ( )