Darwin, psychology and the way we spend our money

Is Darwin Running Up Your Credit Cards?
by Laura Rowley
Posted on Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 12:00AM
If you're struggling with overspending and don't know where the money's going, Darwin may provide the answer.
In the new book "Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior," evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues humans are instinctively driven to spend money in an effort to display winning qualities and high status to others. And, not surprisingly, that can result in dysfunctional spending behaviors.
Conspicuous consumption "is not an inevitable outcome of human nature, but it's an understandable way that human nature will try to display itself in a market economy," explains Miller, who teaches at the University of New Mexico. "So instead of trying to attract mates and friends by being the best mammoth hunter, we try to be the best lawyer or the most successful entrepreneur, and display success through the goods and services we buy." Miller's book doesn't examine purchases that are merely useful or pleasurable. I buy a certain kind of Nike running shoe because it minimizes the painful stabbing in my left foot (plantar fasciitis), not because I unconsciously strive to signal my fitness to potential mates (which could complicate my marriage).
The Trouble With Marketing
But Miller suggests a good chunk of spending is prompted by unconscious desires that we have adapted over millennia to signal certain traits to others, such as youth (botox), fertility (Carrie Prejean's pre-pageant breast implants) and status (billionaire Larry Ellison's yacht, which at 138 meters, apparently measures 10 meters longer than Paul Allen's). Other core traits humans attempt to display include openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and extraversion, as well as general intelligence, Miller says. "Spent" looks at the historic shift in business from a production orientation to marketing orientation. Instead of selling something and figuring out how to convince you to buy it, smart companies are figuring out what you actually want from your products and supplying it. While it might result in happier consumers, Miller is not sure it bodes well for our collective soul.
"I think on the one hand marketing is absolutely wonderful. I'm really glad that Starbucks figured out that what you want from a coffee shop is not just decent coffee but comfortable chairs, good lighting, magazines, WiFi and a place to socialize and hang out," he says. "But the more seductive those consumer experiences are, the harder it is to save money and avoid debt and jump off the consumerist treadmill. It's an arms race of sophistication between marketers and consumers."
As marketers become increasingly savvy in associating their physical products with desirable display traits, it's easier to lose oneself in narcissism -- flaunting and chasing an endless option of fitness indicators. Consider the person who buys Glaceau Smart Water at $5.20 a gallon -- or 870 times the price of tap -- hoping to show off status and intelligence (now there's an irony).
"Narcissism is a runaway personality disorder where somebody pours too much effort and energy into trait display, and not enough into following up relationships over the long term that may have been started by the effective trait display," Miller explains. "The narcissist will effectively keep investing all his time and energy and money in display and never reap the emotional rewards of long-term relationships that those displays lead to. Narcissists care a lot about getting deference and respect from strangers. but won't cultivate relationships with the strangers worth getting to know. It's exactly what marketers want them to do because it maximizes consumer spending."
Conversation Tops Consumerism
What's somewhat disturbing (or possibly hilarious) about all the money spent on consumer goods in pursuit of desirable trait-display is that most people simply don't notice. "Social psychologists have found we remember someone's age, sex, race, possibly how physically attractive they were or some impression of social class," says Miller. "But we typically do not remember the pants they wore, the specifics about their watch or the car they were driving. Even if you talk to them over dinner, you'll get mostly a general impression about their personality or level of intelligence."
And after relationships are established, we rightly focus on more important matters like character, action and words. "The fundamentalist consumer delusion that products and brands matter, that they constitute a reasonable set of life aspirations, seems … infantile, inhuman and essentially toxic," Miller writes.
Although evolution may be driving misguided materialistic displays in an attempt to communicate our fitness, Miller argues that it doesn't have to be so.
"The cool thing about signaling is it's very non-materialistic -- it's not about taking in energy and matter to support our health as an organism but about sending symbols and signals back and forth to others," he says. "It's also appreciating the full complexity of human nature and romance and friendship, and saying we're not just after fertility or youth, but we also care about moral virtues like kindness, agreeableness and intelligence and seek that in humans we like to hang out with. Evolutionary biology actually tries to offer a vision of human nature that's more consistent with the way mature adults actually socialize -- which is not caring about physical appearance or wealth."
Bottom line, human beings who are aware of their instinctual drives to impress others will recognize that it pays to shop less and talk more. "We already have the most powerful signaling methods evolved in any species, which is language," says Miller. "The added value you get from consumerism is pretty small. People fall in love mostly through conversation. Given the richness of that signaling, what you happen to wear or the brand you favor might add 10 percent to the information which is already conveyed."
Perhaps that's the secret of the people profiled in the classic book "The Millionaire Next Door." Authors Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that many millionaires are self-made businesspeople who live in the first home they bought, drive used cars and are modest in their material displays.
"Those men and women have figured out that attracting mates and friends happens through conversation anyway," Miller suggests, adding that instead of buying stuff to display their wealth, they can talk about their passion for business. "It provides the same information about success as owning all the trinkets, but it's a lot cheaper."