Couple excerpts from one of my favorite books:
"One of my goals is to reveal exactly how evolved human nature engages with our market economy, so we can attach the right relative values to organic adaptations versus artificial products. Fools toast each other’s wealth, whereas sages toast each other’s health.
The most desirable traits are not wealth, status, and taste—these are just vague pseudo-traits that are achieved and displayed in widely different ways across different cultures, and ones that do not show very high stability within individual lives, or very high heritability across generations. They exist at the wrong level of description to be scientifically useful in connecting consumer psychology to evolutionary psychology. Rather, the most desirable traits are universal, stable, heritable traits closely related to biological fitness—traits like physical attractiveness, physical health, mental health, intelligence, and personality. When we really want to find out about someone—as a potential friend, mate, co-worker, mentor, or political leader—these are the traits we are most motivated to assess accurately. Consumerism’s dirty little secret is that we do a rather good job of assessing such traits through ordinary human conversation, such that the trait-displaying goods and services we work so hard to buy are largely redundant, and sometimes counterproductive. This raises the question: Why do we waste so much time, energy, and money on consumerist trait displays?
The whole edifice of consumer narcissism rests on the questionable premise that other people actually notice and care about the products that we buy and display. Sometimes they do, but often they don’t, and we overestimate how much they actually do.
We also underestimate how much attention others pay to more natural forms of trait display that can be judged easily and accurately in a few minutes of observation and conversation.
After we notice people’s key demographic and physical traits, we seek information about their mental traits. We want to know a few basic things about how their brains work. How intelligent and mentally healthy are they? What kind of personality do they have?
Recent research on “person perception” suggests that we are really rather good at judging other people’s intelligence, sanity, and personality from just a few minutes of observing their behavior or talking with them.
Consumerism actually promotes two big lies. One is that above-average products can compensate for below-average traits when one is trying to build serious long-term relationships with mates, friends, or family.
From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, this is how consumerist capitalism really works: it makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits. It deludes us into thinking that artificial products work much better than they really do for showing off these traits. It confuses us about the traits we are trying to display by harping on vague terms at the wrong levels of description (wealth, status, taste), and by obfuscating the most stable, heritable, and predictive traits discovered by individual differences research. It hints coyly at the possible status and sexual payoffs for buying and displaying premium products, but refuses to make such claims explicit, lest consumer watchdogs find those claims empirically false, and lest significant others get upset by the personal motives they reveal. The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion—that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling.
And yet many consumers wind up disappointed with products that promise to enhance their physical appearance. They realize that youth, health, fertility, and fitness are actually very hard to fake, because people have evolved for thousands of years to be very discerning. Our perceptual systems evolved the greatest sensitivity and accuracy in the tasks that were most important to our social and reproductive success, and assessing others’ physical qualities were among the most critical of them. We may not be able to see at a glance which cantaloupe in the produce section is ripe (hence more nutritious and carrying fewer phy totoxins), but we can see which potential mate in the nightclub is “fit” (hence more fertile and carrying fewer genetic mutations). Intelligent adults eventually realize all this, at some level. They stop fooling themselves that body-display products actually increase physical attractiveness, and learn instead that maintaining one’s physical appearance is an effective way of broadcasting one’s personality traits.
There is also an intellectual reason for marketers to overlook the Central Six: well-established scientific theories get boring after a while. Indeed, this is a danger of attending too many meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research: one hears talk after talk about how good old-fashioned measures of good old-fashioned general intelligence predict yet another aspect of human behavior better than any other construct. The same holds true at personality psychology conferences: most talks now identify how the Big Five, yet again, capture most of the human variation in behavior—including the variation that some exciting new measure claims to tap for the first time. Again and again, the Central Six show their reliability and validity in individual differences research—a situation that leaves serious psychologists a little bored, but mostly happy, because we know that we really are making cumulative scientific progress. On the other hand, the stable, ubiquitous power of the Central Six would drive most marketers nuts, because they wouldn’t see the individual glory or corporate competitive advantage in using the same methods to describe consumer variation that everybody else uses, or even the same ones they themselves used last year. They want something new and secret: the radical new way to chop the population into chunks that can be optimally targeted by new product lines and advertising campaigns. The Central Six offer no hope of that, because: they are each continuous normal distributions; they have been well understood by psychologists for twenty years; they can be measured with great reliability and validity by existing questionnaires; and they are common knowledge. They offer no excitement, only accuracy; no trendiness, only solidity.
Whether measured with formal IQ tests or assessed through informal conversations and observations, intelligence predicts objective performance and learning ability across all important life domains that show reliable individual differences.
Conspicuous consumption is a wasteful and ineffective way to display our psychological traits to others. Premise 2: Those traits can be assessed fairly accurately from a few minutes of informal social interaction, but can be assessed even more accurately through formal intelligence and personality tests. These premises suggest an obvious solution, as mentioned in a previous chapter, to the problem of runaway consumerism: encourage everyone to get his Central Six traits evaluated using the best available tests from reputable testing institutions, which could then tattoo the validated trait scores onto the entire population’s foreheads. That way, everybody could see at a glance who they’re dealing with and how they’re likely to behave. This signaling system would obviate the need to display the Central Six through conspicuous consumption.
I would love for doctors, lawyers, architects, car mechanics, house-cleaners, and real estate agents to post their validated IQ and Big Five scores in their Yellow Page ads and LinkedIn Web pages. It would save everyone a whole lot of time, trouble, and money."
