Oh, unfuck you, Business Week
Business Week has a guest post by Geoffrey Miller entitled The New Consumer Reality, in which Miller promotes his new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. As you can guess, the book is about what evolutionary psychology can tell us about our own consumptive habits, and Miller's cures for the various problems he identifies within our culture.
Miller's book is interesting because Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias has been talking about how so many of our behaviors are based on signaling, on what we're trying to say to other tribal members for several weeks now, and Miller's book aligns with Hanson's work neatly. Miller says there are six qualities we try to signal: intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and stability. Miller's argument is that (1) Signaling infuses most human activity, and (2) consumer capitalism marketers trick us into using unreliable signals. Robin calls (2) "schlocky," but I would point out that advertisers have for decades been looking for that golden trick that would encourage us to buy, and there have been thousands of research papers on human attentiveness, willingness to buy, and so forth, where the entire point is to get people to agree. Consider this list of marketer's tricks for getting people to agree, and contemplate how many of them are just subtle changes to behavior to engage the listener's agreeableness.
Miller's book is full of advice on what to change: to move away from impulsive, short-term conspicuous consumption, what Miller calls "positional consumption," in that it signals our position on the class ladder, to more subtle but long-term consumption such as parks, shorter commutes, and better health. Robin dryly notes that this is a form of signalling itself: "At a summer barbecue, maybe he would rather we all sat transfixed by his articulate lecture on the politics of status, without being distracted by the host's shiny new grill."
And some of us have moved to less conspicuous consumption. My tribe talks ironically about "teh shiny" when we buy a new toy, fully aware of its irrelevance. And I have no illusions about what I'm signalling when I talk about gardening, school chaperon projects, cooking, reading to the kids, and so forth: I'm signaling my stability and conscientiousness. When I write about programming, of course I'm trying to get the attention of the Django and Python communities, but I'm also signaling my intelligence.
But my annoyance with Miller reaches its height with this: The highly agreeable buy organic fair-trade espresso to show off their altruism; the highly disagreeable buy the Harley-Davidson 'Fat Boy' motorcycle favoured by the Terminator. The highly intelligent will acquire Stanford law degrees and Lexus hybrids; the less intelligent barely afford a high school diploma and a used Jeep Patriot. The highly conscientious pay bills on time, maintain high credit scores, and qualify for low-interest mortgages; the less conscientious make more impulse purchases of Kate Spade shoes, Gitanes cigarettes, and Trojan Magnum condoms.
Y'know, some of us, for health-related reasons, are restricted to barrier methods of contraception within our conscientious marriages with low-interest mortgages. And some of us, er, need the Magnum size.
Although I buy Avantis, which are just the same size, to avoid latex irritation reactions. And that's a signal, too.
Miller's book is interesting because Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias has been talking about how so many of our behaviors are based on signaling, on what we're trying to say to other tribal members for several weeks now, and Miller's book aligns with Hanson's work neatly. Miller says there are six qualities we try to signal: intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and stability. Miller's argument is that (1) Signaling infuses most human activity, and (2) consumer capitalism marketers trick us into using unreliable signals. Robin calls (2) "schlocky," but I would point out that advertisers have for decades been looking for that golden trick that would encourage us to buy, and there have been thousands of research papers on human attentiveness, willingness to buy, and so forth, where the entire point is to get people to agree. Consider this list of marketer's tricks for getting people to agree, and contemplate how many of them are just subtle changes to behavior to engage the listener's agreeableness.
Miller's book is full of advice on what to change: to move away from impulsive, short-term conspicuous consumption, what Miller calls "positional consumption," in that it signals our position on the class ladder, to more subtle but long-term consumption such as parks, shorter commutes, and better health. Robin dryly notes that this is a form of signalling itself: "At a summer barbecue, maybe he would rather we all sat transfixed by his articulate lecture on the politics of status, without being distracted by the host's shiny new grill."
And some of us have moved to less conspicuous consumption. My tribe talks ironically about "teh shiny" when we buy a new toy, fully aware of its irrelevance. And I have no illusions about what I'm signalling when I talk about gardening, school chaperon projects, cooking, reading to the kids, and so forth: I'm signaling my stability and conscientiousness. When I write about programming, of course I'm trying to get the attention of the Django and Python communities, but I'm also signaling my intelligence.
But my annoyance with Miller reaches its height with this: The highly agreeable buy organic fair-trade espresso to show off their altruism; the highly disagreeable buy the Harley-Davidson 'Fat Boy' motorcycle favoured by the Terminator. The highly intelligent will acquire Stanford law degrees and Lexus hybrids; the less intelligent barely afford a high school diploma and a used Jeep Patriot. The highly conscientious pay bills on time, maintain high credit scores, and qualify for low-interest mortgages; the less conscientious make more impulse purchases of Kate Spade shoes, Gitanes cigarettes, and Trojan Magnum condoms.
Y'know, some of us, for health-related reasons, are restricted to barrier methods of contraception within our conscientious marriages with low-interest mortgages. And some of us, er, need the Magnum size.
Although I buy Avantis, which are just the same size, to avoid latex irritation reactions. And that's a signal, too.