The Social Psychology of Consumer Narcissism

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. This is a deep failure of human social psychology. Under natural conditions, we are generally rather good at doing perspective-taking—imagining other people’s points of view, and understanding what they notice and care about. Although we humans are better at perspective-taking than any other animal, we are far from perfect, especially since we have come to live under evolutionarily novel, unnatural conditions, such as being swamped in consumerism and spoiled for choice amid branded products.

Advertisements for most products converge on one key message: other people will care deeply what products we buy, display, and use. At first glance, this message sounds absurd—socially implausible and easily disproved by talking with others. However, given that we’re exposed to about three thousand ads per day repeating some version of this message, it’s hard to remain skeptical. The result is that we greatly overestimate how much attention others pay to our product displays, through which we are unconsciously striving to show off our key bodily and mental traits. 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.

Seriously, can you remember anything specific worn by your spouse or best friend the day before yesterday? Can you remember what kind of watch your boss wears? The brand of your nearest neighbor’s dining room table? The face of the last person you saw driving a Ferrari? Probably not, unless you have the obsessive consumer fetishism of American Psycho’s protagonist. Mostly, we just don’t care what kinds of products strangers display, except for a few domains in which we have a professional or personal interest: dentists notice your teeth; hobbyist jewelry makers notice your earrings. (We may know what kinds of cars and clothes our friends and mates own, but we’ve already learned about their deeper traits anyway, so their product choices don’t carry much further information.)

In fact, decades of social psychology research suggest that we automatically notice only a few basic traits when we see people: their size, shape, age, sex, race, familiarity, relatedness, and attractiveness. We also notice special states of physiology (sleep, injury, sickness, pregnancy) and emotion (anger, fear, disgust, sadness, elation). Throughout human evolution, these have been the most significant things to notice about people, because they carry the most crucial implications about how we should interact with them to promote our own survival and reproductive prospects. It was always important for females to distinguish between their babies, sisters, boyfriends, and stalkers. It was not so important that they notice exactly what kind of furs, beads, or body paint each individual was wearing, except when they were useful in assessing a stranger’s social status.

Indeed, the traits that are most salient and relevant to people are precisely the traits that remain hardest for purchased products to signal reliably—or to misrepresent credibly. It is very difficult to buy goods or services that can notably alter one’s apparent age, sex, or race, or that can disguise one’s broken leg, oral herpes, or basic emotions. A $15,000 face-lift can make a fifity-five-year-old woman look more like a thirty-five-year-old with regard to facial sagging and wrinkles, but cannot hide other cues of age on the neck and hands. A sex change through hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery (also about $15,000) can transform apparent sex in some ways, but has little effect on height, torso shape, facial bone structure, or the sexually differentiated brain that grew in utero—much less on one’s ability to reproduce as a member of the opposite sex. In each of these situations, our social-perceptual systems for recognizing key human traits and emotions are hard to mislead, because they have been evolving so long to be accurate. They have become very efficient at vacuuming up all the information they can from all the different cues that can be perceived from an individual’s body, face, language, and behavior.

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? What moral virtues do they signal through the political and religious beliefs that they espouse? These, again, are the traits that carry the most predictive information about how to interact with someone. They are also the traits that we have evolved to assess most quickly and reliably through the normal prehistoric modes of interaction: greeting, eating together, and talking. And again, they are the traits that are hardest to fake through bought products—though the rest of this book basically details how we try to do so, in various self-deluded and ineffectual ways.

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. Accuracy can be measured by determining how consistent different personality cues are with one another (“convergent validity”), the degree to which people agree when judging a particular trait (“inter-rater reliability”), and how well the trait judgments predict an individual’s future behavior (“predictive validity”). Accuracy tends to be higher for more visible traits such as extraversion (talkativeness and outgoingness), and lower for more internal traits such as neuroticism (tendency to worry, ruminate, and feel anxious). Accuracy is also higher when we judge a person behaving in a free, unscripted situation that allows individual differences to reveal themselves (as when chatting at a party or living in a small-scale hunter-gatherer group) than in a situation highly structured by social norms that suppress individual differences (as when standing in line at a cash machine or marching in a military parade). Observed behavior also carries more reliable information when the persons in question believe they are alone, and are not constructing a false persona for public approval. This is why the sight of men helping the elderly or rescuing kittens is so attractive to women, especially when the men do not know they are being watched.

The personality psychologist David Funder has summarized many of these effects in his realistic accuracy model of person perception. His model posits that there are plenty of more-or-less objective, reliable behavioral cues available to inform us about most personality traits. Our accuracy at judging those traits depends simply on others’ doing or saying things that express these relevant and informative cues, and on our noticing, perceiving, and judging the cues appropriately. These personality cues can include every aspect of how people talk, move, and dress—everything from how they pronounce “Goethe” to how they discuss Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels; everything from their walking speed to their erotic eloquence when dancing a tango nuevo.

Funder’s model also implies that when personality-relevant information is not readily available about someone we wish to judge, we may often create social occasions in which the information becomes more available. For example, it may be hard to judge a daughter’s boyfriend’s agreeableness (kindness, warmth, generosity) if we meet him in a quiet, air-conditioned steak house. Much better to invite him over for a midsummer extended-family barbecue at which he is in encouraged to drink several beers, and then assaulted chaotically on all sides by children, dogs, footballs, and stinging insects. If, under these more difficult, dis inhibited, and diagnostic conditions, he becomes irritable to the point of throwing the footballs at the dogs and squirting mustard at the children, we know his agreeableness level is rather low (and that he might have a short temper with our daughter’s future babies). Conversely, if he remains calm, cheerful, and helpful as the sweat rolls down his beer-flushed, mosquito-stung, dog-licked face, we know his agreeableness level is rather high. The cultural evolution of such occasions for accurate personality assessment may explain why major social rituals (dates, job interviews, parties, banquets, holidays, weddings, honeymoons) entail such long durations, high stress levels, and disinhibiting drugs such as alcohol. These conditions bring out both the best and the worst in us.

Many mental disorders are also rather easy to detect within a few minutes, on the basis of appearance, behavior, and conversation. People with major depression tend to slump and look sad; they speak softly, slowly, and monotonously; they disparage their lives and prospects. People with schizophrenia tend to be unwashed, ungroomed, and dressed in too many layers of clothing; they have odd gaits and mannerisms; their speech is sometimes incoherent, rambling, and delusional. Other easily observed cues characterize people with anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism, anorexia, narcolepsy, and most personality disorders. Only a few mental disorders are really hard to identify from superficial interaction: psychopathy, specific phobias, sexual disorders and dysfunctions, and some addictions. When it comes to judging people’s sanity, most experienced adults are rather accurate. We may not be able to diagnose each peculiarity using the current psychiatric terms, but the basic difference between normal and abnormal behavior is highly salient. This is especially true when we are making judgments about people who may fill central roles in our lives: potential mates, friends, business partners, and in-laws. Even psychopathy—the disorder that is hardest to detect through short-term individual interaction—can sometimes be detected through gossip about the psychopath’s previous crimes and misdemeanors.

The Fetishization of Youth and Disparagement of Wisdom in Consumerist Social Judgment

The accuracy of person perception tends to improve with age, as we learn, gradually and painfully, which behavioral cues are the most reliable indicators of personality, intelligence, and moral virtues. We learn which situations reveal the most diagnostic information about someone’s true character. We learn how to see through first impressions.

This explains why the dating choices made by teenagers have always seemed appallingly stupid to their parents. Teenagers are overly influenced by the traits that are easiest to assess (physical attractiveness and status among peers). By contrast, parents have decades more experience in assessing the harder-to-discern traits, such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and intelligence, and in appreciating the longer-term benefits that these traits convey in any human relationship. This ability to judge character was considered a major part of wisdom, and a cardinal virtue, before consumerist capitalism made concepts like character, wisdom, and virtue sound unfashionable.

Why was evolution so remiss in failing to arm human teenagers with sensible mate-choice preferences? One answer is that their preferences may be rather well-adapted to getting good genes in the context of short-term mating, even if they’re not so good at finding good partners for the sort of long-term relationships that yield higher social and economic benefits under modern conditions. A second answer is that teenagers reach puberty far earlier today (probably due to higher-fat diets) than they did under prehistoric conditions, when their sexual psychology had more time to catch up to their sexual physiology. A third answer might be that parents always had a fairly heavy influence on mate choices made by their teenage offspring, so evolution focused on shaping the parents’ preferences rather than the teens’.

In any case, by the mid-twentieth century, it became crucial for marketers to convince young people that they could judge one another’s individuality more effectively through consumerist trait displays than their elders could through wise observation. Judgments of one’s peers and dates by the older generation had to be made to seem old-fashioned, uncool, irrelevant, biased, and prejudiced. In this, the marketers succeeded spectacularly, assisted by two key twentieth-century ideologies: (1) the egalitarian rejection of the idea that an individual’s personality, intelligence, mental health, and moral virtues are useful concepts worth evaluating accurately and discussing socially, and (2) the environmentalist rejection of the idea that these traits show stability within individuals (across situations, relationships, and ages) and within families (through genetic inheritance).

Consumerist capitalism has depended on youth’s embrace of these blank-slate ideologies, which were sold as thrillingly rebellious and thoughtfully progressive. Throughout most of the twentieth century, they seemed validated by psychology, social science, progressive politics, and the self-help movement. In popular culture, the blank-slate ideology convinced the young that the purchase of any new product designed to display some personal trait was a heroic rebellion against the older generation’s outmoded belief in the existence, stability, and heritability of personal traits. In the behavioral sciences, the blank-slate ideology biased generations of scientists against trait psychology, personality research, intelligence research, behavior genetics, and any other area concerned with individual differences. Instead, the focus turned to psychological processes that were allegedly similar across all humans: child development, social cognition, neural information processing.

As long as advertising never actually used the old-fashioned terms for traits (character, intelligence, virtue), the young could buy, display, and admire the trait-displaying products, make the social judgments they needed to make about one another’s traits, and pretend that they were living in a radical new post-trait world. The whole discourse of traits went underground, discreetly hidden in the rhetoric and semiotics of branding and marketing. It remained just visible enough for the young to recognize, unconsciously, which products would display which traits, but it was just elusive enough that their anti-trait ideology was never threatened, and the person-perception wisdom of their parents never seemed relevant to their lives. For example, rap music producers such as Dr. Dre realized in the 1990s that the real money lay in convincing white middle-class suburban boys that by buying and playing rap, they could display their coolness, attitude, and street cred (that is, their aspirations toward low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, and high promiscuity). The white boys obliged by pouring billions of their parents’ dollars through the local music retailers’ hip-hop sections, while dissing their parents’ concerns that white girls might actually prefer to date boys who display high conscientiousness, agreeableness, and chastity. But if the parents couldn’t distinguish between DJ Spooky, DJ Spinna, and DJ Qualls, how could they possibly claim that the whole rap music industry was just another marketing-driven set of costly, unreliable trait displays, or that the trait displays their children considered cool were actually repulsive to potential mates, friends, and employers?

Thus, the blank-slate model of human nature, far from challenging the principles of consumerist capitalism, forms consumerism’s ideological bedrock. It makes the trait-perception wisdom of older generations seem outdated and irrelevant, and makes the trait-display aspirations of younger generations seem to require buying the appropriate goods and services, while allowing them to pretend that they live in a brave new post-trait world. Most importantly, it undermines everyone’s confidence that their traits are real enough and visible enough to be appreciated without being amplified and externalized by careerism and consumerism.

The Fundamental Consumerist Delusion

Consumerism depends on forgetting a truth and believing a falsehood. The truth that must be forgotten is that we humans have already spent millions of years evolving awesomely effective ways to display our mental and moral traits to one another through natural social behaviors such as language, art, music, generosity, creativity, and ideology. We can all do so without credentials, careers, credit ratings, or crateloads of product. Our finest, most impressive goods and services have been endowed to us by our DNA, in the form of physical and psychological adaptations that naturally display our virtues and naturally impress our peers. Our ancestors unwittingly invested enormous effort into building up this genetic legacy of accurate trait display through billions of attempts over millions of years to win friends, influence people, court mates, choose mates, raise children, and show magnanimity to one another. This is a core message from evolutionary psychology: the most precious, complex, intricate, and wonderful things in life are the biological adaptations common across all humans—especially the adaptations that signal our individual differences so conspicuously. We already have everything we could possibly need to impress our fellow humans, yet every major human ideology conspires to make us forget this fact—because every ideology seeks power by convincing us that we need something beyond our naked bodies and minds to be socially acceptable and sexually attractive. Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natural human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy—working, shopping, and product displaying—to remember what we can signal without all the products.

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. True, some products can mask personal defects in the short term. For a forty-seven-year-old single woman seeking mates, Botox can paralyze facial muscles to reduce wrinkles, hiding some signs of age. The treatment might lead a thirty-one-year-old single man to ask her for a second date, which he might not have done had her true age been more apparent during a candlelit first date. However, that age will become apparent sooner or later through other, more reliable cues: the appearance of hands and neck in daylight, an introduction to her twenty-five-year-old daughter or fifty-two-year-old sister, the invitation to her thirtieth high school reunion, and so on. The same principle applies to almost every other product that tries to enhance physical appearance, apparent intelligence, personality, or moral virtues. Trait-enhancing products can fool some of the people in the short term, but they can’t fool any of the people in the long term. This is why newlyweds are more often disappointed than delighted to discover their spouse’s true character during stressful foreign honeymoons.

A second big lie that consumerism promotes is that products offer cooler, more impressive ways to display our desirable traits than any natural behavior could provide. Specifically, consumerism assumes that better products are more effective signals. Any technical improvement in product design or features, and any marketing innovation in product branding, is pitched as an upgrade in signal effectiveness. Indeed, if we buy products primarily as signals of our underlying biological traits, their signal effectiveness—especially as carried by brand recognition—is, logically, paramount, while their efficiency in serving their nominal purpose (as a garment, appliance, or vehicle) is only of secondary concern. This fact is perfectly clear to every marketing professional, but it must remain perfectly obscure to most consumers. Advertising must therefore play a coy and subtle game with the consumer: while it must hint at the signaling functions of conspicuous consumption, it must never make quantitative claims about the relative signaling efficiency of different products, or of artificial products versus natural human behaviors.

Such explicit claims about a product’s trait-signaling power could be proven false all too easily. For example, sports car ads aimed at single males must imply that driving the car will result in the males’ attracting more attention from beautiful young women. But the ads must not make that claim explicitly, because it would be too easy for advertising regulators or rival manufacturers to demonstrate empirically that the sports car’s drivers do not enjoy a sufficient increase in attention to justify its price premium, and that a better sense of humor would increase female attention far more effectively than excess horsepower.

Thus, consumerist capitalism must keep the signaling functions of products at the stage’s periphery, in the shadowy netherworld of smoke, mirrors, curtains, veils, video girls, and dream boys. Direct claims that a product will increase one’s social popularity or sexual attractiveness could not withstand the spotlight of center stage, where the quality of one’s performance can be judged all too harshly. Instead, the product’s nominal functions, features, specifications, novelties, popularity, and branding must occupy the consumer’s conscious attention, while the promise of signaling status and sex appeal must penetrate the unconscious as silently and unaccountably as a stealth bomber. Consumers must feel that they uniquely recognize the signaling potential of the product from the subtext of the ad, that their desire for social status and sex appeal is subjectively legitimate but publicly embarrassing, and that they alone can convert the product’s technical excellence into a display of personal coolness that yields social and sexual payoffs. The consumers must feel that they can enter into a signaling conspiracy between themselves, the product, and some hypothetical audience of admirers, and that this conspiracy is racy, transgressive, ingenious, and somehow even subversive of capitalism itself.

Even the consumer rights, education, and protection movements conspire to promote this delusion. While Consumer Reports magazine takes great pains to assess empirically the objective features, functions, safety, and reliability of products, it never assesses their signaling efficiencies in promoting the consumer’s social reputability or sexual success. Given progress in social science and consumer-research methods, that would actually be rather easy to do, through interviews, questionnaires, and focus groups, in which people rate how they would react to specific individuals’ buying, using, and displaying the various products, compared with other competing products, and compared with other possible behaviors.

For example, Consumer Reports readers could complete annual questionnaires asking not just how often their Corvette Z06 has needed brake repairs, but whether the Corvette has actually resulted in any new friendships, business partnerships, dinner party invitations from neighbors, or spontaneous sexual encounters with admiring female pedestrians. Even if male Corvette drivers do manage to attract a little extra female attention, the math doesn’t work out very well for them. Suppose a male driver enjoys an average of one extra short-term mating per year attributable to his choice of car. The Chevrolet Corvette Z06 ($70,000) has a $50,000 price premium over the comparable-size Chevrolet Malibu sedan ($20,000), and both cars are designed to become obsolete in about five years. Rational car-buyers could then calculate that the Corvette’s price premium of $50,000 yields an expected five extra sexual encounters during its five-year product life, or $10,000 per encounter. By contrast, a typical encounter with a professional sex worker costs about $200, or fifty times less. Instead of paying the Corvette’s price premium, which might yield one encounter per year, the driver could just buy the Malibu and, with the cash he saved, have one encounter per week. The prospective male Corvette-buyer must accordingly either be wildly overoptimistic about the car’s attractiveness to women, or be very bad at math, or strongly prefer sexual encounters with amateurs rather than professionals.

Alternatively, the Corvette coveter may be a husband seeking plausible deniability regarding the car’s fantasized role in extramarital sexual adventures—a situation that is probably all too common. Since most consumers spend most of their lives married, the only way to sell products that promise increased sex appeal is to make such pitches below the radar of spousal jealousy. Thus, the Sports Illustrated ad for the Corvette must not say, “This will increase your short-term copulation opportunities” (or “This will get you laid”), but it can list some technical specs and show a female passenger throwing up both hands in ecstatic surrender to the 505-horsepower engine and its master. Gullible wives will worry less, and gullible husbands will fantasize more.

Similar subtexts appear in advertising aimed at female consumers. A recent Vogue ad for a L’Oréal lipstick called Glam Shine Dazzling Plumping Lipcolour touted its “unique micro-crystal technology” and claimed that its “moisture-drenched formula with non-sticky texture delivers full, healthy lips with dazzling dimension and incredible shine.” This breathless techno-sensualism could be rendered more honestly as: “This lipstick will signal your libidinous desperation and imminent ovulation not only to your sexually jaded husband, but to your male neighbors and household servants.” Because such direct language might alarm the casual Vogue-reading husband and teenage children, however, for the sake of marital and family harmony, “tasteful” ads in mainstream media obligingly conceal the diffident status seeking and sexual caterwauling behind most product pitches. Married consumers can thereby delude one another that they are buying premium products for their utilitarian performance (505 hp or micro-crystal technology) rather than their signaling power (to attract thrill-seeking neighbors or sweetly pliable pool boys). As usual, plausible deniability and adaptive self-deception allow human social life to zip along like a maglev monorail above the ravines and crevasses of tactical selfishness, by allowing the most important things to go unsaid—but not unimagined.

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.

That this view is delusional should be obvious to any adult who has enjoyed long-term relationships with relatives, friends, lovers, partners, collaborators, mentors, and students. Long-term relationships grow and endure through complex, ever-shifting sets of partly conflicting, partly overlapping interests. They are what economists call repeated-interaction mixed-motive games. They typically include repeated cycles of cooperation and conflict, trust and betrayal, intimacy and alienation. These cycles are rarely influenced by product purchases, but rather by the kinds of arguments, explanations, apologies, resolutions, and gossip that have driven human social life ever since language evolved a few hundred thousand years ago. In the first few minutes of meeting someone, all the stage sets, props, and costumes of consumption may seem salient, and the ballads and dirges of that three-voiced chorus—wealth, status, taste—may seem momentous. Yet after relationships are established, these fade into the background of consciousness, and our attention centers rightly on the characters, actions, words, and relationships that really matter. We recognize our roles as mutual protagonists striding life-size across one another’s sets and stages. With friends and family, we ride the zeppelins of joy and the barges of duty. We become keenly alive to the social dimension of human existence. In that naturally social state of mind—a state plausibly typical of our ancestors’ every waking hour—the fundamental consumerist delusion that products and brands matter, that they constitute a reasonable set of life aspirations, seems autistic, infantile, inhuman, and existentially toxic.