Conspicuous consumption and volunteering are mate advertising

I read this article in the Economist that summarizes a paper showing that men wanting to attract women spend conspicuously and women wanting to attract men volunteer conspicuously. All I could think about when I read it was, "Well, I guess Veblen was right about something." (I will get to the article at the bottom, but this is an interesting history lesson for those of you who haven't heard of Veblen.)

Thorstein Veblen was a turn of the century economist and social critic noted for coining term conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when you buy something really expensive so that you neighbors will know that you can afford to waste money. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, he flushes out this idea of conspicuous consumption by positing the existing of a leisure class that is the result of a long historical evolution since feudal times. This class bases social status on uselessness rather than utility. Because this class is dominant, he argued, that classes tastes had change consumption habits from useful goods to useless ones. (Veblen was also a total punk-ass by the way. He had a career that amounted to an academic road show where he would move from institution to institution when he had worn out his welcome at the old place.)

Here are some choice quotes:

The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men -- and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure -- much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable attire.

And:

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at hand and seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.

While I think this was probably intuitively appealing around the turn of the century, I don't agree with much that Veblen had to say. 1) He divorces utility completely from value. For him, something is valuable because it is socially desirable. However, no amount of social pressure can make a rock into a three-course dinner, and I think that he goes too far in arguing that utility had no meaning. 2) There really isn't a leisure class anymore. Rich people don't really lay about anymore doing nothing. In fact, if you believe Richard Florida, the movers and shakers in our society now are not the leisure class but the creative class. (An argument for another day...) 3) Veblen seems to operate in a world where evidence is not required, particularly in his description of the historical evolution of the leisure class. I mean, he doesn't really even cite anecdote. He appears to have pulled all this out of his ass.

Anyway, one of Veblen's tenets was that men advertise their virility by conspicuous waste of resources. Some research posed by Griskevicius et al. in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says that he might be right.

Griskevicius et al. wanted to analyze whether altruism or conspicuous spending behaviors in men and women were related to their desire to find a mate and whether there is a difference in strategies between men and women. In the Economist description of the study:

They divided a bunch of volunteers into two groups. Those in one were put into what the researchers hoped would be a "romantic mindset" by being shown pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex. They were each asked to write a description of a perfect date with one of these people. The unlucky members of the other group were shown pictures of buildings and told to write about the weather.

The participants were then asked two things. The first was to imagine they had $5,000 in the bank. They could spend part or all of it on various luxury items such as a new car, a dinner party at a restaurant or a holiday in Europe. They were also asked what fraction of a hypothetical 60 hours of leisure time during the course of a month they would devote to volunteer work.

The results were just what the researchers hoped for. In the romantically primed group, the men went wild with the Monopoly money. Conversely, the women volunteered their lives away. Those women continued, however, to be skinflints, and the men remained callously indifferent to those less fortunate than themselves. Meanwhile, in the other group there was little inclination either to profligate spending or to good works. Based on this result, it looks as though the sexes do, indeed, have different strategies for showing off. Moreover, they do not waste their resources by behaving like that all the time. Only when it counts sexually are men profligate and women helpful.

That result was confirmed by the second experiment which, instead of looking at the amount of spending and volunteering, looked at how conspicuous it was. After all, there is little point in producing a costly signal if no one sees it.

As predicted, romantically primed men wanted to buy items that they could wear or drive, rather than things to be kept at home. Their motive, therefore, was not mere acquisitiveness. Similarly, romantically primed women volunteered for activities such as working in a shelter for the homeless, rather than spending an afternoon alone picking up rubbish in a park. For both sexes, however, those in an unromantic mood were indifferent to the public visibility of their choices.

These two studies support the idea, familiar from everyday life, that what women want in a partner is material support while men require self-sacrifice. Conspicuous consumption allows men to demonstrate the former. Blatant benevolence allows women to demonstrate the latter. There is, however, a confounding observation. The most blatant benevolence of all, that of billionaires giving away their fortunes and heroes giving away (or at least risking) their lives, is almost entirely a male phenomenon.

To examine this, the team did another experiment. They found that when requests for benevolence were financial, rather than time-consuming, romantically primed men were happy to chip in extravagantly. Giving money to charity is thus more akin to conspicuous consumption than it is to blatant benevolence. The primed men were also willing (or at least said they were willing) to act heroically as well as spend--but only if the action suggested was life-threatening. Women, romantically primed or not, weren't.

When I read this I was really suspicious about how clear cut they are making the distinction, so I went and looked up the data. Here is the graph for the first experiment where the compared consumption of good and volunteering between men and women and between situations where they were romantically primed and neutral situations.

Indeed, the results are somewhat clear cut.

Let me add some obligatory caveats.

One, in spite of this data, much of research into the psychological differences between men and women indicate that they are more similar than they are different. Many of the behaviors that people think of when they think of differences between men and women are actually distributions, and they are distributions with large amounts of overlap. Thus, I think we can expect the trait "conspicuous consumption vs. volunteering" to vary with groups of men and women, and these distributions are likely to have some overlap.

Two, whereas most traits between men and women are more similar than different, sexual behavior is one area of clear divergence. This is not particularly surprising if you think about it. If I were to pick some behaviors that were likely to be sexually divergent, differences in how men and women approach attracting a mate would be pretty high on that list.

Those two being said, the interesting part about this article is that they are in essence arguing that mating behavior is penetrating aspects of life that we would not think it would affect. Who would guess that the desire for a mate would affect women's tendency to volunteer? I wouldn't. Given stereotypes about men, the "big spender" trying to attract a woman makes more intuitive sense.

This study shows that in one important regard Veblen was right. Evolutionary influences on how men and women attract mates permeate our behavior, even our economic behavior. I guess we really do live in a sex-obsessed society.