SUPPOSE I HAVE been right about consumer narcissism—its evolutionary-psychological roots, modern manifestations, and pervasive failures to deliver the trait-display benefits we want? What can we do about those failures, not just at the personal level as addressed in the previous chapter, but at the social, political, and cultural levels?

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that most human action is driven by a “will to power”—we try to thrive as organic beings through dominance, daring, and resource appropriation. His was a vision of lone alpha males gaining existential insights on Alpine peaks, then descending to enjoy the fruits of public acclaim: book deals, harems, and weissbier. In Spent I have argued that among highly social primates like us, who reliably rebel against Hefeweizen-swilling philosopher-kings, the evolved “will to display” (gaining fitness benefits through prestige and status) can be even more important than the “will to power” (gaining fitness benefits through dominance and threats). Consequently, a central question for social policy is this: How can we harness the will to display so it makes us all happier? Strategies to change our runaway consumerist culture can work on many levels, but the least effective levels are often overemphasized in social-policy debates and political activism, while the most effective levels are often overlooked.

Asymmetric Warfare

Opting out of mainstream consumerism is like entering a new world of asymmetric warfare. In traditional symmetric warfare both sides play by certain tacit rules of engagement. You line up your phalanxes, mus ketmen, or tanks, and we line up ours, and both sides fight it out until one concedes or flees, and the other declares victory. In asymmetric warfare, the side that is weaker by traditional criteria seeks victory by using new tactics or technology. The British longbowmen defeated the French knights at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 by firing volleys of arrows from absurd distances, rather than waiting honorably to be squashed by the cavalry charge. The American revolutionaries of the 1770s defeated the British redcoats through guerrilla tactics—cutting supply lines, harassing troops, sniping from a distance, and simply refusing to line up accommodatingly to get shot by the larger British forces. The Vietcong defeated the Americans in the 1960s through similar tactics. Al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 infuriated the Pentagon by hijacking our airplanes, rather than buying their own from our arms dealers (as Saudi citizens are supposed to). Innovations in asymmetric warfare are always initially considered to be treachery and terrorism by the side that believes it is stronger according to traditional criteria. In retrospect, such tactics are inevitably reframed as natural historical progress in the efficient conduct of warfare.

Likewise, every signaling innovation in human culture is at first considered unfair and disreputable, at least by those who excelled at the previous signaling game. Medieval lords were no doubt driven nuts by the minstrels and troubadours who used musical innovations (iso-rhythmic motets, polyphony, even madrigals!) to seduce their wives and daughters, rather than winning them by the traditional methods (physical force, economic oppression, religious indoctrination). Elvis wasn’t playing fair by wiggling his hips and sneering, and Miles Davis wasn’t playing fair by being so damned cool, handsome, and talented. From the viewpoint of social competitors and sexual rivals who “play fair” by getting formal educations, working full-time jobs, and paying full retail prices, any of these alternative ways of displaying one’s personal traits seem like cheating. However, from the viewpoint of rational individuals seeking maximum social and sexual status at minimal cost, all these tactics were wonderfully liberating. Indeed, such signaling innovations seem to drive most of the progress in the technologies, ideas, and institutions that we call civilization.

Why Not Trait Tattoos?

Premise 1: 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.

To people who consider conspicuous consumption more dignified than facial tattoos, such a trait-tattoo system may sound like an outrageous affront to human dignity. To people like me who live in Albuquerque, where many people are poor and many do have facial tattoos, it doesn’t seem so absurd. The question is whether it would work, both technically and socially.

We’ve already discussed the problem that trait tattoos would not be reliable if individuals themselves were responsible for telling the tattoo artists what their Central Six scores were. However, it would be fairly easy to make the trait tattoos technically reliable and hard to fake, given some modest improvements in trait-testing institutions and technologies. The trait tattoos would need to be inscribed by a reputable testing agency, in some sort of conspicuously precise form that would be no easier to counterfeit than currency. The testing institutions would need to be honest, transparent, closely monitored, publicly accountable, and hard to bribe. The tests would need to be objective, reliable, valid, and in the public domain, subject to continuous improvement through open scientific research and peer review. The tests would need to be administered to each individual from adolescence onward at regular intervals, depending on the empirically observed stability of trait scores across the life span. (Studies show that the Big Five become progressively better differentiated, more coherent, and more stable from ages ten to twenty, for example.) If someone doesn’t want his trait scores tattooed on his forehead, he would ask for the scores to be held in private as his personal property, to be revealed only at his request to a potential employer, neighbor, mate, or any other person, who could be sent an unfakeable, electronically authenticated test-score report.

Intelligence researchers already know how to measure general intelligence accurately, and the Educational Testing Service already knows how to make IQ-type test scores hard to fake. It would be more challenging to measure the Big Five personality traits through new objective tests, rather than via the self-report questionnaires currently used. At the moment, the closest things we have to such objective personality measures are certain documents requested by employers: the criminal background check and college transcript as fairly good indicators of conscientiousness; the recommendation letters, personal references, and job interviews as fairly poor indicators of agreeableness and stability. We could, in fact, do much better, using current test theory and methods, plus a little imagination. For example, an individual’s Big Five traits could be assessed quite accurately by averaging anonymized peer ratings from a large sample of that individual’s neighbors, acquaintances, co-workers, old friends, and ex-lovers. These people have observed the individual across a wide variety of situations, states, and moods, and they have unconsciously learned to see through the individual’s ways of presenting a good facade in short-term interactions. By aggregating their knowledge, the information-sharing power of gossip and reputation in small-scale human societies could be replicated at the scale of modern economies. Everyone else in the world could know as much about each individual as that individual’s whole social network already knows.

Reliable personality trait tattoos would make life easier for the virtuous and harder for the vicious. At the moment, the meek and humble often lose out to the assertive and histrionic in competitive employment markets, mating markets, and social clique-formation. Wallflowers would be favored more often if their agreeableness and stability were more visible, and as people learned how useful such traits really are. Conversely, life would be harder for psychopaths, who can be highly charming in the short term, but who make a lot of long-term enemies. Their disagreeableness and unconscientiousness would become all too apparent, and they would be shunned, at least by sensible folks.

Other approaches to objective personality testing could be based on electronic records, brain imaging, or DNA testing. For example, a person’s conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion might be revealed fairly clearly by data from his e-mail accounts, mobile-phone accounts, and social-network sites—such as the number of non-spam e-mails, phone calls, and social-network messages received and responded to per month. As researchers discover which brain-response patterns are most closely associated with each personality trait, it should become possible to assess the Big Five by exposing people to various virtual-reality situations during brain-scanning sessions.

A final option would be to go straight to the genotype. Companies such as 23andMe and Cambridge Genomics already offer “consumer genomics” and “personal genetic testing.” Geneticists are poised to sequence a person’s entire genome for under $1,000 within a few years. I’ve argued in some recent papers that specific alleles (forms of genes) that are associated with personality traits should be much easier to find than specific alleles associated with general intelligence or general health. Some personality-related genes have already been identified; others are being discovered at a rapid rate. It will be quite a few years before brain imaging or genotyping achieves the personality-assessment accuracy that we can now attain using large samples of peer ratings or actual behaviors, yet eventually, using all these methods together should yield good objective measures of the Big Five.

While trait tattoos would be technically feasible as reliable signals of the Central Six traits, would they be socially accepted by the signalers (tattoo displayers) and receivers (tattoo viewers)? If social norms favored having the trait tattoos, everyone would have social incentives to get them, even if they scored pretty badly on some traits. This is one of the most surprising predictions from costly signaling theory. You might think that only people with very high intelligence would volunteer to get their IQ scores tattooed on their foreheads, and indeed that might be true at first: only IQ-150 geniuses would bother. But then, all the people with an IQ between 125 and 150 would want to show that, even if they’re not geniuses, they’re a lot brighter than most of the other non-tattooed folks (whose average might now be about 95), so they would follow suit. Then all the people with an IQ between 100 and 125 would want to show that they’re at least average compared with all the remaining untattooed folks (whose average is now about 90), so they’d get the tattoos. And so on down the whole IQ range; even the mildy retarded (IQ range 50-70) or their guardians might want to show that at least they’re not retarded to a moderate (IQ 40-50), severe (IQ 20-40), or profound (IQ below 20) level. The same reasoning applies even more powerfully to the Big Five personality traits, which don’t have such a clearly value-laden dimension. If people are happy to advertise their levels of openness or extraversion through bumper stickers, they might be equally willing to do so through tattoos.

However, it might ultimately be hard for people to accept the trait tattoos as worthy of attention. The problem here is the way that our perceptual systems are wired up to our person-perception systems. We have evolved exquisite abilities to make unconscious inferences about other people’s psychological traits, by observing their behavior. But those abilities were adapted to prehistoric conditions, and they “expect” the relevant social information to come in certain natural “information formats” through certain perceptual channels. For example, we can easily judge other people’s intelligence if we hear them say very funny and insightful things, or see them produce a very creative and beautiful artwork. We can tell that these perceivable cues of intelligence fit naturally into our person-perception systems because they provoke not just cool respect for that person’s intelligence, but hot emotional responses such as awe, admiration, deference, envy, friendliness, or lust. By contrast, there are hundreds of other perceivable cues of intelligence that may be equally reliable and valid, but that reach our ears and eyes in evolutionarily novel ways that our person-perception systems did not evolve to process so easily. For instance, a complete 3-D MRI scan of someone’s brain might convey as much objective information about his intelligence as hearing him play an awesome drum solo, but inspecting a brain scan just cannot inspire as much social respect or sexual attraction as moving one’s body to a compelling rhythm. Likewise, a trait tattoo might convey more-reliable information about intelligence than a ten-minute conversation, but it cannot spark the emotions that drive social interaction. There seems to be no easy shortcut through our person-perception systems. We have to feed them the kinds of social stimuli that they evolved to expect, and institutionally validated trait tattoos are not among those stimuli. By contrast, our person-perception systems seem surprisingly happy, after just a couple of decades of consumerist socialization, to process information about an individual’s conspicuously wasteful, precise, and/or reputable possessions, and to make personality inferences on their basis.

Although institutionalized objective tests of people’s Central Six traits may never replace more natural forms of information about people, they may still prove useful in some situations. For example, how much would you pay before a first date to get accurate, objective, electronically validated information about a suitor’s true personality traits, based on extensive peer ratings, computer and phone records, brain scans, and genotyping? If I were single, I would buy that for a dollar. If I were a woman who had suffered through too many dates with psychopaths, narcissists, depressives, egoists, and date rapists, I might pay a lot more. When my daughter starts dating, or thinks she wants to marry someone, I will sorely lament the lack of such a service. Also, 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. We wouldn’t need to ask for references from three previous clients if 150 of their friends, relatives, in-laws, neighbors, and ex-spouses have already rated their conscientiousness, agreeableness, and stability. The same sort of consumer feedback that has revolutionized shopping for goods on the Internet (based on percent-positive feedback from customers) could revolutionize shopping for personal and professional services.

One might think that common sense alone would suffice to help people avoid narcissistic dates or disagreeable doctors. But if such individuals were that easy to detect and avoid, those heritable traits would have already been eliminated from the gene pool. The endless co-evolution between our truth-seeking person-perception abilities and our deceptive trait-display tactics never reaches a point where everyone’s first impressions are always accurate. We could learn to use objective test scores to supplement our natural but fallible first impressions, just as we use calendars when planning or speedometers when driving. The result would be mass social transparency at the level of the Central Six traits. At least at a conscious, rational, practical level, everyone could know almost everything worth knowing about everybody else. They might still feel subconsciously attracted to bad boys with psychopathy or goth girls with borderline personality disorder, but they would at least have a chance of sensibly overriding that attraction. Mass social transparency sounds frightening and embarrassing, but it is what humans have been striving for ever since the prehistoric development of gossip, reputation, “face,” and status symbols. It would allow at least some rational people, some of the time, to choose their friends, mates, co-workers, and neighbors more quickly and accurately.

Prerequisites for Buying Certain Products

Trait tattoos might not work socially because they don’t express traits in the right information formats to be processed easily by our person-perception systems. However, there may be more user-friendly or easy-to-learn ways that individuals could display their validated trait scores.

For example, companies could sell certain products only to consumers who have a certain minimum or maximum score on one or more of the certain Central Six traits. Hummer dealers could advertise that the “Party Animal Red Pearl” paint color is available only to customers who score in the top 5 percent for extraversion. Customers who want to display their unusually high extraversion through that bright red color would have to electronically validate their extraversion score at the dealership before they could sign the purchase agreement. In this way, Hummer could guarantee that Party Animal Red Pearl becomes a reliable signal of friendliness, self-confidence, and ambition. Or, Lexus could sell the “Mensa Quartz Metallic” color of the LS 460 only to customers whose validated intelligence scores are high enough for them to join Mensa International (IQ 130+, or the top one in fifty). The more exclusive “Prometheus Glacier Pearl” color could indicate an IQ above 160 (the top one in thirty thousand) -the qualification for joining the Prometheus Society.

Product prerequisites could include not just the Central Six traits, but any information that customers would be willing to divulge by giving the retailer access to electronic records. This information could include age, sex, residence, education, employment, financial records, marriage records, medical records, paternity tests, church attendance, political-party registration, or previous purchase history—any data that might be relevant, and that could be somehow validated. For instance, Durex could sell a “Clean Submarine” brand of motorcycle helmet only to males who have regularly tested negative for all sexually transmitted diseases. Or, the Mormon Church could sell a “10 for 10” model of laptop computer only to members who have paid their 10 percent tithe on gross income regularly for at least 10 years.

Products could even require some socially or sexually desirable combination of traits. The “Mr. Right” model of Sketchers casual shoes could be sold only to single males age twenty-five to forty who have high intelligence, high conscientiousness, and high stability— the “good dad” traits that women seek for marriage. The “Happy Fluffer” jacket from Spyder Skiwear could be sold only to single females age eighteen to twenty-nine who have high openness, high agreeableness, and high impulsivity (low conscientiousness)—the cues of sexual availability that men seek for short-term mating.

How exactly would this system work? Trait prerequisites and a product barcode number would be registered for each of these products with an International Test Score Database, which would also contain test scores for every customer who wants to participate in the system. The test scores would be based on the same sort of objective measures mentioned for trait tattoos—intelligence tests, peer ratings, electronic communication records (for example, number of Facebook friends), perhaps even brain scans and genotypes. At the point of purchase, the customer would present his International Test Score ID card, and the cashier would make sure the ID card photo and biometrics matched the customer. The cashier would scan the product’s barcode into the point-of-sale computer connected to the database, which would authorize the sale if that customer’s trait scores matched those required for the purchase. The database would hire legions of “mystery shoppers” to make sure cashiers were not making unauthorized sales that violated the product prerequisites and thereby undermined the product’s signaling power.

At first glance, the “product prerequisite” system might seem counterproductive. Why would a company want to restrict its potential target market by selling only to customers who have some set of specified trait scores or other background information? Think about it for a minute. This would be by far the easiest way for a new product with a particular brand personality to position itself in relation to customers with certain personality traits and/or market segments with certain demographic traits. The signaling power of the product—and its desirability to consumers, and profitability to marketers—would be vastly increased by such requirements.

The product-prerequisite idea has some clear implications for marketing new services, such as private spaceflight. The astronauts of the 1960s were deeply respected not just because they had orbited the earth a few times, but because they had undergone the most rigorous selection regimen ever imposed on job applicants. If Virgin Galactic makes private spaceflight too easy, passive, and comfortable, so that anybody with the cash can fly, its customers will lose that astronaut mystique, and Virgin will attract fewer customers to its spaceport under-construction near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Far better to emulate the NASA selection system in the private sector, and allow only very healthy, intelligent, and stable candidates to fly Virgin Galactic. Let a lower-status brand, perhaps Carnival SkyCruise or RyanRocket, cater to the octogenarian-billionaire and chubby-heiress set, who want to brag about surviving a low-g liftoff and a few safe low-earth orbits. The space-travel market will be glutted by early entrants such as Planetspace, Rocketplane Kistler, Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, XCor, and Bigelow Aerospace, but after the inevitable shake-out of bankruptcies and mergers, expect only the most selective brands to survive.

A Government War on Bling?

If trait tattoos aren’t socially feasible and marketers don’t yet appreciate the benefits of product prerequisites, how else could people display their Central Six traits without conspicuous consumption? Social scientists often reach straight for the blunderbuss of government policy whenever they see a social problem that needs fixing. The recommended solutions usually create new programs to minimize the problem’s human costs, and new laws to criminalize the alleged roots of the problem. This usually leads to new bureaucracies with vested interests in perpetuating the problem so they can continue to ameliorate its costs and punish its perpetrators. Moreover, individuals and nongovernmental institutions, who learn and adapt far faster than governments can, always end up exploiting the hidden loopholes and incentives structures of the new regime. The transient 1950s Communist threat yielded the permanent Pentagon bureaucracy, and its exploitation by arms manufacturers. The transient 1980s crack-gang wars yielded the permanent “War on Drugs” and its exploitation by purveyors of “Just Say No” propaganda, home drug test kits, and rehab centers. The transient 9/11 Al-Qaeda attack yielded the permanent “War on Terror” and occupation of Iraq, and their exploitation by Halliburton.

The examples could be multiplied ad nausea. Yet, every time a politician or policy wonk develops a new carrot-and-stick program to solve a social problem, and manages to get it implemented in the manageri ally flawed, politically compromised, underfunded way that inevitably occurs in real life, he is always surprised by the harmful side effects of his good intentions. The brilliant new policy’s failures are then attributed to the flaws, compromises, and underfunding, rather than to the dubious conceit that complex social problems can be solved by simple government interventions.

So, I will not recommend new laws to criminalize consumer narcissism, luxury goods, or status symbols as part of some new government War on Bling. History shows that all such attempts to equalize human status by government fiat are doomed to fail. Make people wear Mao suits, and they will compete for status by waving around a newer edition of Mao’s Little Red Book, or beating their teachers with larger sticks during the Cultural Revolution. The instincts for status seeking may have deep evolutionary roots, but the cultural modes of status seeking are far too protean for any government to track. There are much easier and more flexible ways to change human behavior through shifts in the informal, grassroots social norms governing trait display.

A Little Something Called Civil Society

If government can’t humanize consumerism into a more efficient and agreeable system of trait display, what leverage do we have? We Americans may assume that the only alternative to a federal War on Bling is a modest shift in personal lifestyle. As a nation of aspiring plain-tiffs, we assume that if it’s not in the law, it must reside in the private sphere, where personal tastes are beyond public discussion. This is because we have been brainwashed from birth to ignore all forms of social organization and cultural power that exist at levels of description other than the idealized Constitution, the amoral corporation, and the atomized individual.

Educated people elsewhere recognize that well-functioning societies include a few other factors that can shape human behavior rather powerfully: cultural traditions, social norms, customs, habits, languages, memes, etiquette rules, belief systems, and group identities. These systems of behavioral norms constitute a little something called civil society. They are what sociology and cultural anthropology study, albeit using the most obscure vocabulary possible (“ideologies,” “discourses,” “hegemonies,” “lifeways”). They are what make life in north London different from life in North Dakota. They are what make Amsterdam cooler and happier than Kraków or Karachi.

In the late 1980s through the late 1990s, development economists often touted the “Washington consensus,” arguing that poor countries could grow rich simply by setting up free markets, free trade, and stable currencies. After the stagnation of ex-Communist economies, the Asian currency crisis of 1997-98, and the rise of ethnic conflict and religious extremism, it became clear that prosperity requires more than just free markets. First, it requires the rule of law: good governance to enforce fair, stable laws regarding property rights, human rights, and social stability, as evaluated by the World Bank’s Governance Indicators. Second, it requires sociocultural traditions of accountability, transparency, morality, and trust in politics and business. Third, it requires behavioral norms of valuing education, ambition, initiative, hard work, politeness, peacefulness, and social networking—in other words, norms that tend to maximize the Central Six traits of workers and consumers.

These social institutions and behavioral norms provide the “operating systems” and “applications” with which all human institutions run—not just governments and corporations, but marriages, friendships, families, neighborhoods, public spaces, cities, professions, careers, games, leisure activities, churches, clubs, charities, and chat rooms. This has always been true for human groups, especially during the past few thousand years in every stratified society with a complex division of labor. Civil society is where the action is, where reasoned argument and new knowledge can most effectively change people’s lives for the better.

To effect change through civil society, one must understand and accept the informal systems of person perception, praise, and punishment on which such a system relies. People indoctrinated in hedonistic individualism, religious fundamentalism, or patriarchal nationalism—that is, 99 percent of humanity—are not accustomed to thinking imaginatively about how to change society through changing its behavioral norms and institutional habits. Indeed, the more-extreme advocates of hedonistic individualism, such as many classical liberals, libertarians, rational-agent economists, and counterculture anarchists, tend to reject civil-society norms as a basis for changing or sustaining anything at the social level.

A hidden reason for their skepticism is that civil-society norms must rely on fallible personal judgment and a philosophically incoherent notion of free will. Informal social norms only work if individuals make inferences about the personalities, capabilities, and moral virtues of others by observing their behavior. Such inferences are always based on incomplete information, probabilistic cues, and past experiences, so they are always fallible—and open to charges of prejudice, bias, and stereotyping. Likewise, informal social norms work only if individuals are willing to praise or punish others for observed behaviors and inferred traits that must logically be a joint product of their genes, environments, and accidents. We must be willing to act as if people are admirable for personal virtues and culpable for personal failings—as if free will existed, even though we know that, metaphysi cally, it does not. (Does this paradox identify an awkward hypocrisy at the heart of human social life? Absolutely. Is there any way around it? Not that I can see.)

These prerequisites for civil-society norms—fallible person perception and a faith in free will—have led to some notorious madness-of-the-crowd excesses throughout history: Puritan witch hunts, Paris guillotines, Klan lynchings, Hutu versus Tutsi machete killings. True, such episodes pale beside the mass carnage inflicted by totalitarian governments (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe), but they are deplorable nonetheless. Paralyzed by the dangers of fallible judgment and the paradox of free will, many liberals and academics have explicitly rejected informal social norms as a basis for civil society. We espouse the ideologies of tolerance and diversity, which boil down to an unwillingness to praise or blame anyone for any behaviors. The result is that we have no leverage for effecting social change, except through government intervention.

The Power of Informal Social Norms

Recent research in game theory and experimental economics has shown that informal social norms can powerfully influence human behavior and sustain human cooperation. This is especially true for systems of socially distributed punishment, in which many individuals impose sanctions on the few who do not behave properly. When individuals live in true societies, with repeated interactions among locally known neighbors who have the power to reward and punish one another, these sanctions work as very efficient, credible deterrents against antisocial behavior. Punishing bad acts is much easier than rewarding good acts, because there are many low-cost ways to impose fitness costs on people (taking away their resources, status, freedom, or bodily organs), but only a few, high-cost ways to give them true fitness benefits (awarding them longer life, extra sexual partners, and babies).

Social norms sustained by the threat of informal neighborly punishment can solve the problems of cooperation in many “games” studied by game theorists, including the iterated prisoner’s dilemma and the common-pool resource dilemma. These games will sound tiresomely familiar to economists and utterly obscure to everyone else. But they are important, because they reflect the key challenges of human social life in explicit, analyzable ways. If social norms backed up by informal punishment can promote cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, they can also, at least in principle, promote peace and happiness in your life.

This has been a very cautious, roundabout way of saying that it’s OK to treat your neighbor as a villain if he acts like a villain. In fact, it’s your civic duty—in the strict sense that civil society could not function without such informal social punishments and rewards. Rural villages needed busybodies. Modern cities need morally assertive citizens. Formal law, police, courts, and jails have never sufficed to sustain a collective quality of life worth living. Indeed, you don’t need written constitutions, corporate mission statements, or personal catechisms if you have a genuine culture—a set of informal behavioral norms—that is tacitly understood and enforced by most people in a society. The British understand this perfectly well, and find it amusing that Americans whimper with existential vertigo if their national, corporate, or individual values aren’t written down somewhere on paper. Informal norms must do 99 percent of the daily work of shaping human behavior in socially desirable directions. This principle has been clearly understood by every sane adult in every functioning society for thousands of years; Euro-American liberal academic subcultures of the late twentieth century are the singular exception. Until the power of informal social norms is more broadly and consciously appreciated, we’ll continue to overlook the single most potent way that we can change society in general, and consumerism in particular.

What Anticonsumerist Protesters Are Doing Wrong

A clear understanding of civil society and informal behavioral norms can help identify not only points of maximum leverage for changing society, but also tactics that are bound to fail. Ever since the green movement of the 1970s, the traditional strategy for trying to change consumer behavior has been through verbal preaching and admonish- ment. Humans love to talk, especially when we are telling other people what to do. So, we have for decades given one another vague encouragements to respect Mother Nature, consume less, recycle more, buy green, think globally, act locally, be less selfish and greedy, and live simply. In some cases, these tactics have worked surprisingly well, by creating new social norms and expectations. The preaching signals to everyone that there is a new status game in town, and that conspicuously green behavior is the best new way to display one’s conscientiousness and agreeableness. In other cases, such preaching proves futile, because the sinners who most need saving (multinational corporations, military-industrial complexes) don’t have personality traits, don’t care about signaling them, and don’t get any benefits from playing the new green game.

For example, anticonsumerism protesters often target large corporations and international trade organizations. They try to use the usual social-hominid tactics of informal social sanctioning—preaching, public humiliation, ostracism, name-calling, and throwing rotten fruit. But the objects of their wrath are faceless institutions that have no conscience or responsiveness to such sanctions, or institutional leaders and functionaries whose real social lives have no overlap with those of the protesters, and thus who are immune to suffering any real fitness costs from the protesters’ disaffection. The Nestlé and WTO leaders can leave their besieged workplaces in strong, fast cars, drive to their anonymized exurban mansions, and enjoy the evening with their empathic spouses, adoring children, deferential dinner guests, and single-malt whiskies. The protesters are not their neighbors, friends, kin, colleagues, or potential lovers, so their disapproval means nothing. They are the out-group, and informal social sanctions only work within one’s in-group.

The protesters would do better to aim their sticks and carrots at social in-group members who care what they think—and to recognize that their social in-group is much wider than they might realize. For typical college-student protesters, these in-groups include their like-minded, same-aged, protester-subculture friends, of course. But they also include anyone who has overlapping fitness interests by virtue of genetic relatedness, social attachment, economic codependency, spatial proximity, or repeated interaction. That is, their in-groups include all their parents, stepparents, siblings, and relatives; their housemates and neighbors; their workmates, bosses, and customers; their school-mates and professors; their online game-playing companions, chat-room pals, and e-mail correspondents.

As adults most of us have a social network of around 150 people whom we know well enough that, if we met them in an airport, we would be happy to chat with them over drinks. In many domains, we feel comfortable praising or punishing these in-group acquaintances for good or bad behavior. We would commend them for altruism toward family, friends, children, or animals. We would condemn them—with a wince, a scowl, a gentle remonstrance, a pointed question, or an abrupt exit—if they revealed acts of cruelty or infidelity. We might even do so for ideological sins—for derogating minorities, enjoying pornography, or cursing within earshot of nuns. Yet in most developed nations, there is a strange and strong taboo against condemning in-group members for acts of conspicuous consumption. If our airport drinking buddies reveal that they have bought a new Lexus or Stanford law degree, we feel obligated to praise their success, status, and taste. If they see an ad for some new cell phone of grotesquely conspicuous precision on the airport’s propaganda screens (usually tuned to CNN, in the United States), and if they comment that they covet the product, we feel reflexively inclined to assent. I wish instead that we had the guts to say something like:

Yeah, I wanted that phone once, too. But then I thought, I already have a pretty good phone, so why do I crave this thing? It’s just going to cost hours of frustration to set up, and make me stare at little electronic screens even more than I already do, so I have even fewer face-to-face conversations like the one we are having now. I think we unconsciously want these things because we want to show people that we have some attractive personal traits—things like intelligence and conscientiousness—that lead to success as a worker and taste as a consumer. But, you know, I think these products don’t even work that well to show off these traits. For instance, I can already tell that you have these traits just from talking with you for a few minutes. You make interesting, funny comments about meaningful things, so I know you’re intelligent. You got through security an hour before your flight, so I know you’re conscientious. Your virtues speak for themselves. We don’t need to wrap all those costly goods and services around ourselves to get respect. What do you think?

Such mini-sermons might sometimes fail by seeming too direct, offensive, intimate, or weird. But they might often succeed in sparking some new thoughts and feelings, if articulated in a spirit of “Let’s think through this consumerism problem together, as joint victims of bad habits” rather than “I’m a virtuous know-it-all anticonsumer, and you’re a shallow, craven materialist.” Especially in settings as alienating as airports, where personal identity feels paper-thin, and product branding feels thick and hot as lava, a few genuine words of personal contact and consumerist skepticism from an acquaintance can seem momen tously vivid. These words might resonate in the listener’s memory for weeks to come, and resound every time he sees an ad or steps into a mall; they might even be rearticulated when he meets an acquaintance of his own in some future airport bar. (Nothing ever changes for the better without someone’s seeming overoptimistic about other people’s thoughtfulness. . . .)

In fact, these moments of one-on-one consciousness raising, compiled across individuals, in-groups, and history, are probably the main routes by which all social change occurs. They are how civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights got discussed and accepted. To the extent that public protests helped at all, they may have simply provided the news-feed fodder to provoke private discussions among family and friends. They were occasions for airing thoughts about topics that were previously off the radar. Once people’s tacit assumptions and behavioral habits are held up to the arc lamp of thoughtful discussion, they tend to burn out like stalled film stock: flicker, scorch, bubble, whoosh. The German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas made this point already when he wrote about human emancipation through “communicative rationality” in an “ideal speech situation” within civil society—but the point bears repeating, for those who haven’t curled up by the fire lately with his 1981 masterpiece Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung.

Face-to-face discussions of consumerism can often go more smoothly than confrontations about topics like racism, sexism, or homophobia. This is because when you point out that consumerism is a really inefficient way to advertise personal traits, you can praise someone’s traits and tickle their vanity even as you’re cluster bombing the central ideology around which they’ve organized their education, career, leisure, identity, status seeking, and mating strategy. As well-trained consumer narcissists, we are such insecure, praise-starved flattery sluts that a little social validation goes a long way. A friend or lover can imply that we have wasted our lives chasing consumerist dreamworlds and status mirages, as long as he or she reassures us that we still appear intelligent, attractive, and virtuous. (Don’t forget to mention that, or people will cry.)

Another, more subtle way of opening such conversations is through mentioning movies that address consumerism. Most people love to talk about movies, and do so in chummy, open-minded, leisure-chat mode. (By contrast, when discussing books, magazine articles, or TV documentaries, people tend to revert to college-seminar debate mode, and become more intellectually prickly and ideologically defensive.) One can say, “You know, last night I was watching Fight Club on DVD again—have you ever seen it?—and I was thinking about some of its themes. . . .” Or, one could mention American Beauty, or The Matrix, or any of the other movies listed in “Further Reading and Viewing.” These films have a few key features: almost every cultured person has seen at least one of them; they evoke many themes beyond consumerism, so don’t elicit an instant defensive reaction, the way that An Inconvenient Truth or The Corporation would; and they offer intriguing alternative ways to display one’s mental, moral, and physical traits. By starting a chat about a highly rated mainstream Hollywood film, one can slip painlessly past an acquaintance’s political defenses to question consumerist assumptions and habits.

Multiculturalism Versus Local Social Norms

There is a major legal problem with creating and enforcing new social norms in developed nations, and the problem concerns housing law. Humans are still embodied beings who interact mostly with other humans who live nearby. The social norms and trait-display tactics most favored by the local community heavily influence our behavior. However, through antidiscrimination laws regarding property rental and ownership, many countries unwittingly prohibit the development and diversification of cohesive local norms. For example, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development prohibits “housing discrimination based on your race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, or disability.” The laws were passed with the best of intentions, but they have toxic side effects on the ability of voluntarily organized communities to create the physical, social, and moral environments that their members want.

There is increasing evidence that communities with a chaotic diversity of social norms do not function very well. Some of this evidence comes from studies of ethnically diverse communities. I mention this evidence not because I think ethnic diversity is bad, but because it is one of the only proxies for social-norm diversity that has been studied so far.

For example, the political scientist Robert Putnam has found that American communities with higher levels of ethnic diversity tend to have lower levels of “social capital”—trust, altruism, cohesion, and sense of community. He and his colleagues analyzed data from thirty thousand people across forty-one U.S. communities, and found that people who live in communities with higher ethnic diversity (meaning, in the United States, more equal mixtures of black, Hispanic, white, and Asian citizens) tend to have lower:

• trust across ethnic groups

• trust within their own ethnic group

• community solidarity and cohesion

• community cooperation

• sense of political empowerment

• confidence in local government and leaders

• voter registration rates

• charity and volunteering

• investment in common goods

• interest in maintaining community facilities

• rates of carpooling

• numbers of friends

• perceived quality of life

• general happiness

These effects remained substantial even after controlling for each individual’s age, sex, education, ethnicity, income, and language, and for each community’s poverty rate, income inequality, crime rate, population density, mobility, and average education. Putnam did not set out to look for these effects; a great advocate of both social capital and diversity, he seems to have been appalled at these results, and published them only reluctantly. Many other researchers have reported similar findings.

I suspect that these corrosive effects of “ethnic diversity” on social capital are not really an effect of ethnicity per se, but of each ethnicity’s having different social norms—different dialects, values, political attitudes, religions, social assumptions, and systems of etiquette. As Robert Kurzban and his collaborators have shown, ethnicity fades into the background when people feel motivated to cooperate with one another for the common good, based on shared interests and norms. Communities without a coherent set of social norms just don’t feel much like communities at all, so people withdraw from community life into their own families and houses.

Sadly, it has become almost impossible now for like-minded people to arrange to live together in a small community with cohesive social norms. Real norms can be sustained effectively only by selecting who moves in, by praising or punishing those who uphold or violate norms as residents, and by expelling those who repeatedly violate the norms. These are the requirements to sustain the type of cooperation called network reciprocity, in which cooperators form local “network clusters” (communities) in which they help one another. Current laws in most developed countries make network reciprocity almost impossible. Black Muslim property developers cannot set up gated communities that exclude white oppressors. Lesbians who were traumatized by childhood sexual abuse or rape cannot set up male-free zones. Pentecostals cannot exclude Satanists and Wiccans from their neighborhoods. Medical-marijuana users with cancer or glaucoma cannot set up cannabis-friendly zones. Polyamorous swingers cannot exclude monogamous puritans, or vice versa.

So, while modern multicultural communities may be very free at the level of individual lifestyle choice, they are very unfree at the level of allowing people to create and sustain distinctive local community norms and values. This is actually a bad thing, liberal ideologies notwithstanding. It means that the only way to have any influence over who your neighbors are, and how they behave, is to rent or buy at a particular price point, to achieve economic stratification. Antidiscrimination laws apply, de facto, to everything except income, with the result that we have low-income ghettos, working-class tract houses, professional exurbs: a form of assortative living by income, which correlates only moderately with intelligence and conscientiousness.

Moreover, when economic stratification is the only basis for choosing where to live, wealth becomes reified as the central form of status in every community—the lowest common denominator of human virtue, the only trait-display game in town. Since you end up living next to people who might well respect wildly different intellectual, political, social, and moral values, the only way to compete for status is through conspicuous consumption. Grow a greener lawn, buy a bigger car, add a media room. If a Pentecostal lives next to a polyamorist, the only way they can compete with each other is at the default economic level of wealth display. But if all the Pentecostals lived together, they could establish new social norms that renounce such wealth displays, and compete for status through Bible-quoting, speaking in tongues, and spreading the gospel. And if all the polyamorists lived together, they could compete for status through good conversation, great sex, minimal jealousy, maximal affection, and emotional authenticity. In both cases, their local social norms could rein in runaway consumption, and shift their time and energy to other activities that are more congruent with their most fundamental values.

This idea—the freedom to live near folks with shared values—may sound radical to members of the educated Euro-American elite, who tend to take multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance for granted as good things. But it would sound perfectly sensible to almost any of our ancestors from any well-functioning culture in any epoch of history. It’s called choosing your tribe: you have to be able to control who enters your community, and under what conditions they will be exiled. The efficiency and cohesiveness of local social life demands protection against outside threats and internal selfishness. Minimally, this requires that everyone local shares rules of etiquette for avoiding conflict, a common spoken language for resolving conflict, norms governing social, sexual, parental, kin, and economic-exchange relationships, and norms for coordinating group action, especially in emergencies. Strangely, many “communities” in developed nations lack these basic prerequisites for living together. These communities function like computers that have hardware (a physical location and infrastructure) and an operating system (a government, an economic system, and a set of metanorms concerning tolerance and diversity), but no software applications (no specific social norms governing trait display and status seeking in any domains other than wealth).

To a limited degree, people with shared values and lifestyles can sometimes coordinate their movements into particular locations. American gay men often move to San Francisco or New York. Mormons often congregate in Utah. But they are always mixed up with others hostile to their values; they must rub elbows with homophobes or atheists, and they cannot do anything about it. Under some special circumstances, people can create co-living communities with a limited set of shared rules that constrain runaway consumerism: college fraternities and sororities, communes, cooperative housing, condominium governing by internal rules and managerial boards, gated communities with restrictive covenants. However, the antidiscrimination laws still apply—these co-living systems still cannot legally select or expel members on the basis of sexual orientation or religion, which doesn’t help gay men or Mormons create their own communities, and it still leaves wealth display as the default basis for social status.

So, governments should give people the freedom to create local housing communities with the power to sustain their own social norms, as long as a few basic human rights are respected. Adults must be free to move away from a community they don’t like. The punishment for violating social norms must not exceed temporary ostracism or permanent exile. As John Stuart Mill argued, children must not be subject to abuse that is permanently physically or mentally disabling (such as, arguably, circumcision, clitoridectomy, religious indoctrination, or anorexia-inducing ballet lessons). Clearly, it is hard to draw the line between normal acculturation and disabling child abuse, but that has always been true, and I can’t offer a panacea. Civilization progresses in part through people arguing about these issues and reaching the most enlightened, provisional, pragmatic consensus that they can achieve within their culture. At any rate, the government still has a crucial role to play in protecting the oppressed or vulnerable from the tyranny of the majority, even within the most radical of the local communities. However, if the local majority cannot impose some distinctive social norms on our forms of trait signaling, conspicuous consumption will remain the only game in town.

Going Virtual

Apart from new ways of acquiring and displaying real physical goods, human trait display is being revolutionized by three new forms of electronic communication: mobile phones (2 billion active users globally as of mid-2008), social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (each with 120 million users), and massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft (10 million users) and Second Life (2 million users). These are not just new forms of communication and entertainment. Viewed more broadly as part of the “Web 2.0,” they are breaking down the geographical and legal barriers that have traditionally constrained people’s abilities to form like-minded communities. They are allowing new virtual communities to arise with their own social norms, signaling systems, and preferred modes of trait display. They make it possible to live in a social world of one’s own choosing, without regard to one’s physical location.

Parents lament the time their teenagers spend with such technologies. They seem like meaningless, self-indulgent distractions from the proper role of juveniles under consumerist capitalism: (1) studying counterintuitive sciences and irrelevant humanities to display intelligence and conscientiousness, (2) working in part-time minimum-wage jobs to learn humility and even more conscientiousness, (3) participating in extracurricular activities that will look good on college and job applications, and (4) spending money on status goods, fads, and dates.

However, young people have always shown an uncanny knack for allocating their time and energy to emerging new modes of trait display that bring them the highest social and sexual payoffs. Guanxi is where they find it. Maybe they understand something about mobile phones, social networking, and MMOGs that older adults just don’t get. Consider the historical context: every time civilizations develop new social technologies for trait display, the older generation always scoffs at the younger generation for wasting its time on the new technologies and neglecting the development of last-generation skills. The upper-class boys of ancient Greece were sometimes distracted from their proper slave-driving, olive-growing roles by that indulgent new cognitive technology for showing off their intelligence: philosophical debate at Plato’s Academy. Novel reading by young Victorian women was considered a frivolous distraction from hymn singing and husband catching. For hundreds of years, higher education was a self-indulgent form of conspicuous leisure for the aristocracy and landed gentry, until aspiring bourgeois parents began to appreciate its value as an assortative mating market and an intelligence indicator for their offspring. Beatniks talking avidly of existentialism and New Wave film in the 1960s cafés of New York and Paris were viewed as neglecting their duties to international socialism by their Old Left parents. Male hippies, seeking social status and mating opportunities through their conspicuous knowledge of Grateful Dead lyrics and Afghan hashish strains, were castigated for failing to display their fitness in the traditional macho ways: drinking, date-raping, and killing foreigners.

To young people today, mobile phones, social networking, and MMOGs are awesomely efficient ways to short-circuit consumerist conventions of trait display. Instead of spending years studying to get an educational credential, to get a high-paying job, to buy premium products, to display one’s intelligence and personality traits to potential mates and friends, the kids are just displaying their traits directly through the new communication technologies. Why try to display your verbal abilities by getting a Yale degree in postmodern literary theory, when you can write your own blog? Why show off your aesthetic taste by making money to buy second-rate Impressionist paintings when you can design your own MySpace site, with your own graphics, photos, drawings, and music? Why become a pediatric doctor to show off your agreeableness, when you can just be consistently kind in your text messages? Why adopt costly religious conventions to prove your likely sexual fidelity in marriage, when you can just keep your GPS- enabled mobile phone switched on so your spouse can always call you and check your location? In every case, the new communication technology renders obsolete most traditional aspirations, values, skills, and status criteria—that is, most traditional modes of trait display.

This is confusing to the older generation, because they can never quite see how the new trait-display tactics will actually result in friends, mates, and babies. Partly this is because young people are very resourceful at inventing new dialects to hide how they communicate and interact with friends, and at arranging secret sexual liaisons. Partly it is because every generation of parents underestimates its children’s capacity to find a stable mateship and economic niche as they mature in their twenties and thirties. But mainly, it is because every generation forgets how obscure and indirect its own social and sexual relationships appeared to its own parents. Nonliterate parents were perplexed that their children no longer courted in person, but wrote letters—how could mere letters lead to real relationships and real children? Early twentieth-century parents were perplexed that their kids no longer wrote letters, but talked on the phone. How could phone chatter produce grandchildren? Parents always fear that new technically mediated modes of courtship will lead children to forget how to discriminate good mates from bad mates, and that new technically mediated modes of friend making and status seeking will lead children to forget how to find a viable economic niche to feed their own kids. Yet history shows that every new generation of children has succeeded in doing both, despite the endless revolutions in technology and economic roles: hunting, gathering, herding, farming, factory work, corporate careers, credentialist professions, the electronic global economy. This track record of extreme human adaptability in socializing, mating, and parenting suggests that the coming generations will do just fine, whatever their modes of trait display.

As usual, an evolutionary perspective makes our current social concerns look smaller, more transient, and more solvable. It lets us see more clearly what is constant in human nature (the main traits that vary across people, the drive to show off these traits to others, and the drive to assess their traits), and what is variable across time and culture (verbal labels for the main traits, particular modes of trait display and trait assessment, particular forms of status and economic interchange). It reminds us that what we call “reality” today is already 90 percent social convention—our heads are already stuck most of the way up our own culture, most of the time. An evolutionary perspective gives us confidence that each new generation will find its own ways to turn new technologies into new trait-display modes and economic opportunities. It makes us aware that something else will soon replace the current system of consumerist capitalism and its key features: credentialism, workaholism, conspicuous consumption, single-family housing, fragmented kin and social networks, weak social norms, narrowly economic definitions of social progress and national status, and indirect democracy distorted by corporate interests and media conglomerates. These seemingly natural features of contemporary society will seem as alien to our great-grandchildren as mammoth hunting, field plowing, and typewriting now seem to us.

The Grand Social Quasi Experiment

Science depends on comparative experiments to understand causation. If scientists can’t assign different entities randomly to different conditions, and then measure how those conditions affect the behavior of the entities, we can’t infer what really causes the behavior. Psychologists can only claim that factor x “causes” some change in human behavior if we can randomly assign some people in an experimental condition with factor x, and some people to a condition without x, and see what happens. If condition x reliably leads to a change in average behavior across a large enough sample of subjects, we can claim that x causes the change. By contrast, the social sciences have always been crippled by the fact that they can’t assign groups of people randomly to different cultures with different social norms and institutions, so they can’t really infer what causes what. Even the Campbell Collaboration, a great international consortium of social scientists trying to develop the new field of evidence-based social policy, faces a real challenge in making causal claims, and advocates more randomized trials of social policy interventions in crime, education, and social welfare.

We can overcome this problem to some degree by allowing people to form a great diversity of like-minded communities, each of which has cohesive social norms. One huge benefit of legalizing such diversity is that we might learn what really makes communities work. We can compare different criteria of success across different communities and see what succeeds and what fails. The criteria can be as diverse as we like: measured levels of happiness, peacefulness, social connectedness, trait-display efficiency, cultural vibrancy, technical progress, economic well-being, environmental sustainability, whatever. The greater the number of different communities, the more diverse their norms, and the better the data about their outcomes, the faster we’ll learn what kinds of social norms and institutions allow people and communities to flourish.

Of course, we still can’t randomly assign people to communities; that would be unethical. But by maximizing the freedom that individuals and families have to choose their own communities, we can minimize a lot of the usual “confounds” that have made it difficult to interpret cross-cultural differences. For example, in traditional societies, a local population’s culture (including social norms and institutions) is almost always confounded with the population’s genetic composition, demographic structure, level of economic development, and ecological context. If one population is thriving and another is failing, it is virtually impossible to tell whether the outcome is due to differences in culture, genetics, wealth, or environment. By maximizing social and geographical mobility, we can better see the signal of culture through the noise of those confounds. So, we wouldn’t have a true experimental design with true random assignment, but we’d have what behavioral scientists call a quasi-experimental design—not nearly as good, but much better than what we have available now.

To infer causality in quasi experiments, it helps to measure as many possible confounds as possible, so we can statistically control for their effects. To assess how well a community is functioning with a particular set of social norms, it would be crucial to measure the distribution of the Central Six traits among its inhabitants. Almost any community can succeed, regardless of its social norms, if it only admits highly intelligent, conscientious, agreeable, stable people. Almost any community will fail if it excludes all such people. To make fair comparisons across communities, we need to know what kind of people they contain, so we can tease out the effects of the social norms themselves.

The result would be a Grand Social Quasi Experiment. Society itself would become our laboratory, and we would learn much more effectively what makes communities succeed or fail. That knowledge would spread, and in the long run, communities would imitate the social norms, institutions, designs, and aspects of culture that work elsewhere. Successful cultural features would spread, mutate, recombine, and evolve at the social level. Failures would die out. This would lead to an especially fast and effective form of “cultural group selection,” as the anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson call it. One nice thing about cultural group selection is that better cultures can spread from population to population without the people themselves colonizing or killing one another. Another nice thing about cultural group selection is that we do not have to pretend that we already know what kinds of social norms, institutions, and designs work. We don’t have to do social engineering that is centralized, compulsory, or arrogant, like the grand experiments of twentieth-century totalitarianism. We can be humble, let people experiment with their social arrangements, observe the results, and embrace what works. In other words, we can recognize that cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is much smarter than we are.