People respond differently to the whole notion of conspicuous consumption, Geoffrey Miller says:
Some folks consider it blindingly obvious that most economic behaviour is driven by status seeking, social signalling and sexual solicitation. These include most Marxists, marketers, working-class fundamentalists and divorced women. Other folks consider this an outrageously cynical view, and argue that most consumption is for individual pleasure (“utility”) and family prosperity (“security”). Those folks include most capitalists, economists, upper-class fundamentalists, and soon-to-be-divorced men.
So Miller and colleagues devised some studies based on costly signalling theory — the idea that animals, including humans, use costly, intricate and hard-to-fake signals to flaunt their biological fitness to potential mates and social partners:
In the first experiment the team, led by Vladas Griskevicius from Arizona State University in Tempe and Josh Tybur from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, invited college students to the lab in small groups. Each was randomly assigned to one of two conditions: “mating” or “non-mating”. The mating subjects looked at three photographs of people of the opposite-sex on a computer screen, picked which one they thought most desirable, and spent a few minutes writing about an ideal first date with that person. The non-mating subjects looked at a street scene photograph and spent the same amount of time writing about the ideal weather for walking around and looking at the buildings it featured.Then, all subjects were asked to imagine that they had a modest windfall of money, such as a lottery win of a few thousand dollars, and must choose how much they wanted to spend on a variety of conspicuous luxuries — such as a new watch, European vacation or new car — and how much they would save in a bank account. They were then asked to imagine that they had some extra time available per week, and were asked to choose how many hours they would spend volunteering — such as working at a homeless shelter or helping at a children’s hospital.
The results were dramatic: men in the mating condition said they would spend much more money than men in the non-mating condition — for example, they might take the European vacation rather than saving that money — but there was no mating effect on women’s consumption decisions. On the other hand, women in the mating condition said they would spend much more time volunteering than women in the non-mating condition. There was no mating effect on men’s volunteering. This study confirmed that conspicuous consumption (for men) and conspicuous charity (for women) can be increased by thinking about mating opportunities, and so can function strategically as a form of mating display.
Read the whole thing.