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As UT San Antonio researcher Jill Sundie notes: “The Porsche Carrera GT does not qualify for the Consumer Reports list of ‘best buys.’ The vehicle has very little cargo capacity, has only two seats, gets terrible gas mileage, and is frightfully expensive to repair. Yet for the people who spend over $440,000 to buy one, these considerations are likely irrelevant.” Indeed, somewhere in Eastern Europe, there is a man for whom the pricetag on the standard Porsche Carrera wasn’t high enough – he had his Porsche plated with gold. Now you may not be considering such a purchase in the near future, but here’s another question for you: If your sister or your daughter was thinking about going on a date with a fellow driving a Porsche Carrera, would you think it a good idea? What if she were thinking of marrying him?
In his 1899 classic Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to refer to the tendency to buy and show off expensive goods – with the main goal of impressing others with one’s wealth or status. Although Veblen’s book has been regarded as a critique of frivolous consumer behaviors in modern capitalistic cultures, that explanation has problems with the evidence, reviewed by Veblen himself, that people have flaunted their luxury possessions in many times and places during human history. As Sundie and her colleagues note: “Egyptian pharaohs, for example, displayed their wealth with golden thrones, elaborate artworks, and giant pyramids; Incan potentates dwelled in immense palaces surrounded by gold; and Indian maharajahs built extravagant and ostentatious palaces and kept collections of rare and exotic animals on their expansive estates.” Conspicuous displays of wealth can also be found in feudal Europe and ancient Japan, and among traditional people living in regions as widely separated as Melanesia, Iceland, and Amazonia. Indeed, conspicuous and wasteful displays are not only found across human societies, but are also found in other animals species. So Sundie and her team (me, Vlad Griskevicius, Josh Tybur, Kathleen Vohs, and Dan Beal) reasoned that it might make sense to study conspicuous consumption from an evolutionary perspective, and conducted four experiments to do just that.
Peacocks and costly signaling
The conspicuous displays of animals like the peacock initially seemed to pose a problem for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. By flashing its brilliant tail, a peacock increases his chances of becoming some predator’s dinner; it’s like he’s turning on a neon sign that says “eat here.” If nature selects those animals that are better at surviving, then how can such a display (what biologists now call a “costly signal”) evolve? The answer is that natural selection is not ultimately about survival, it is about reproduction. Every choice in nature involves a trade-off, and any peacock who wasn’t willing to risk a shorter life would not attract females, hence his careful genes would not get passed on. It is usually the male who does the signaling, because females, who invest more in the offspring, are more selective.
Humans are in some ways like peacocks, given the female pays a necessarily high cost to reproduce, while the male could get off with a small investment of sperm. But humans, like some other animals, have more than one mating arrangement, so when the male invests more in the offspring, he is also likely to be selective, and less likely to throw away resources on wasteful displays.
If human conspicuous consumption is a costly sexual signal, it is communicating: “I am healthy and resourceful enough to be able to throw resources away, hence I have good genes, and you should pick me as a mate.” If frivolous spending is linked to mating, it ought to become more prominent when mating motives are active. And such displaying ought to more prevalent amongst males, especially when they are following a low-investment approach to mating.
In one study, Sundie and her colleagues asked people to think of a time when they had witnessed someone engaging in conspicuous consumption. The majority of subjects thought of a man—buying a flashy car or picking up an oversized group tab at a restaurant, for example. Is this because men simply have more money to consume things in general, as one of Prof. Sundie’s reviewers confidently suggested when she submitted the findings to a marketing journal? Not quite. When she later asked a similar group of people to think of the person they knew who most liked to shop, the majority nominated a woman. So people perceive women as liking to spend money, but men as liking to throw it around in conspicuous ways.
To examine the possibility that men’s conspicuous consumption was a form of showing off linked to mating, the team ran several other experiments. In one, they asked participants to imagine they had just received an unexpected windfall of $2,000. The researchers examined how much of their money subjects would spend on purchases that might convey their newfound wealth, such as a $1900 Tag Heur watch, a $139 Ralph Lauren shirt, or taking ten friends out for a night on the town (as compared to shopping more carefully). Before asking subjects how they would spend the money, the researchers put some of the subjects in a mating frame of mind -- by having them look at dating profiles of 8 fellow students who were not only single and available but also highly attractive. Other subjects looked at photos of campus dormitory buildings.
Romantic motivation had a different effect on men than on women. Women’s spending was unaffected by mating motivation. Men in a romantic frame of mind, though, chose to blow more of their newfound two grand on conspicuous purchases. But this effect was mainly found for men who were inclined toward a low-investment mating strategy (who scored as “unrestricted” on the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, meaning they agreed with statements such as “sex without love is OK,” and “I can imagine myself enjoying sex with more than one partner at a time.”) Another study extended this finding, by having participants imagine either a short-term or a long-term romantic relationship. Conspicuous consumption was boosted only among men who imagined a short-term relationship, and who were also temperamentally inclined toward low investment relationships (see the figure).
The final study in the package demonstrates that conspicuous consumption communicates the intended message. Women find men who spend frivolously desirable as short-term dating partners, but not as long-term mates.
These findings illustrate the benefits of integrating ideas from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology. By thinking about humans in evolutionary terms, many behaviors that seem irrational on the surface are seen to manifest a deeper rationality (see my earlier post Deep Rationality for more discussion of how these issues relate to economic psychology). I also discuss these ideas in more detail in Sex, murder, and the meaning of life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature.
Related posts
Deep Rationality: Evolutionary psychology meets behavioral economics
Want to Show Off Your Wealth and Status? Buy a hybrid.
References
Kenrick, D.T. (2011). Sex, murder, and the meaning of life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature. New York: Basic Books. (Ch. 9: "Peacocks, Porsches, and Pablo Picasso," & ch. 11: "Deep Rationality and Behavioral Economics")
Kenrick, D.T., Griskevicius, V., Sundie, J.M., Li, N.P., Li, Y.J. & Neuberg, S.L. (2009). Deep rationality: The evolutionary economics of decision-making. Social cognition, 27, 764-785.
Simpson, J. A., & Gangestad, S. W. (1992). Sociosexuality and romantic partner choice. Journal of Personality, 60, 31–51. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00264.x
Sundie, J.M., Kenrick, D.T., Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J., Vohs, K., & Beal, D.J. (in press). Peacocks, Porsches, and Thorsten Veblen: Conspicuous consumption as a sexual signaling system. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. (Nov 1, 2010, online publication). doi: 10.1037/a0021669.
Source of Gold Porsche picture: http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2008/07/04/the-golden-porsche/
