Spent: sex, evolution, and consumer behavior
New York, 2009
Abstract
Modern consumerism is an extension of biological signaling mechanisms evolved to navigate ancestral social environments. Humans utilize goods and services primarily as fitness indicators to advertise desirable psychological and physical traits to potential mates, friends, and allies. While market discourse often emphasizes wealth and status, consumption fundamentally aims to display the “Central Six” heritable traits: general intelligence and the “Big Five” personality dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and extraversion. The prevailing consumerist paradigm is characterized by a signaling inefficiency wherein individuals overestimate the social impact of mass-produced products while under-utilizing natural, more reliable displays such as humor, conversation, and prosocial behavior. Reliability in these artificial signals is maintained through the principles of conspicuous waste and conspicuous precision, which ensure that only high-fitness individuals can afford the associated costs. However, this system frequently leads to a “centrifugal soul” effect, where the pursuit of external validation through material acquisition results in social alienation and environmental degradation. Aligning economic incentives with evolved human nature requires a shift toward more efficient signaling systems, including the implementation of progressive consumption taxes and the cultivation of localized social norms that favor intrinsic trait display over material consumption. Such transitions could reduce the negative externalities of runaway consumerism while fulfilling the underlying human drive for social status and reproductive success. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
Shortly after Charles Spearman’s key work in 1904, intelligence became the best-studied, best-established trait in psychology. Higher intelligence predicts higher average success in every domain of life: school, work, money, mating, parenting, physical health, and mental health. It predicts avoiding many misfortunes, such as car accidents, jail, drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and jury duty. It is one of the most sexually attractive traits in every culture studied, for both sexes. It is socially desired in friends, students, mentors, co-workers, bosses, employees, housemates, and especially platoon mates. It remains ideologically controversial because its predictive power is so high, and its distribution across individuals is so unequal.