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Cool
How the Brain's Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World
By Steven Quartz, Anette Asp Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Steven Quartz and Anette Asp
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4418-2
CHAPTER 1
THE CONSUMPTION MYSTERY
Reflections of palm trees sway across Gucci's temple-like storefront in the brilliant afternoon sun. The glistening industrial storefront next door bears neither name nor address, evoking Prada's minimalist cool. Inside, a parade of mannequins is arranged with military precision, their averted gaze heightening their aloofness to passersby. One store down, the sun warms $15,000 Fendi bags, the scent of sumptuous leather in the air, and at Bijan, $20,000 silk suits wait patiently for those who have an appointment. Eight-hundred-dollar jeans, carefully torn at the knees and splattered with paint, grace the window display at Dolce & Gabbana. Above them hangs a sign crafted by some marketing consultant reassuring you that $800 for a pair of jeans is money well spent, as these jeans will make you even cooler than you already are. Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills may seem an unlikely place to find Caltech scientists doing fieldwork. Sometimes, though, clues to the deepest mysteries about ourselves come from unlikely sources.
There's something odd about the fact that a row of stores is among the most famous tourist attractions in the world. On this typical summer afternoon, most of the people sauntering up and down Rodeo Drive are posing in front of the storefronts for souvenir pictures, panning the street with their video apps, and pressing their noses up to the display windows. Since they aren't actually shopping, the street's attraction must have some largely unacknowledged ritualistic flavor to it. To an anthropologist from another planet, we suspect, the throngs of tourists would be as exotic and mysterious as any congregation of premodern humans chanting and dancing around a campfire some warm, starry night on a far-off savanna.
What brings these people to Rodeo Drive? What is its allure? Their mood offers a clue. Watching them strolling, gawking, and posing: You can't help but notice that they are almost giddy, their heads no doubt filled with fantasies stemming from the modern-day fairy tale Pretty Woman, and the magical transformative power of this place. For adults, this—and not some amusement park an hour south—looks like the happiest place on earth. It is, of course, more than amusement. It is aspirational. We are so intimately familiar with the link between happiness and consumption that it may never occur to us that Rodeo Drive is something like a shopper's Canterbury or a consumerist Mecca, if you'll indulge us in some mixed metaphors. That is, Rodeo Drive's lure lies in something abstract, in its distillation of the very essence of consumerism: the promise that personal happiness can be found by consuming more than one needs. To that alien anthropologist, the people on Rodeo Drive must seem like pilgrims who have traveled countless miles to let the opulence of its offerings and all that goes with the promise of consumerism wash over them like a balm.
We are all consumers. And we all, more or less, live by consumerism's creed that our consuming is linked to our happiness (in a recent poll, only 6 percent of Americans said that money can't buy happiness). When someone says money can't buy happiness, they typically mean buying "stuff" can't buy happiness. But consumerism is more than just buying stuff. It also makes possible a dizzying array of experiences and lifestyles. Elizabeth Gilbert's bestseller Eat, Pray, Love may have gained Oprah's attention as a woman's search for meaning, but Gilbert's yearlong travels—from savoring the cuisine of Italy to taking yoga lessons in India—was an ode of sorts to consumerism and a lifestyle it made possible. In fact, "things" and "experiences" are often so interwoven that we can't really separate them. Two tickets to your favorite baseball team's game are things, but taking your child to the game might be an unforgettable experience. A bicycle is a thing, but it might offer the experiences of an annual bike trip through the wine country with friends. It might even offer a weekly ride with a local club, travel to take part in races, and a whole cycling way of life. Being a cyclist—a lifestyle made possible by consumerism—might soon start to define who you are.
Just think of how your own pattern of consumption conveys who you are to yourself—and to others. For according to consumerism, without your clothes you are more than naked. You are meaningless. This is because in a consumer culture things live a double life, both as material objects and as symbols or signals with meanings, both explicit and unrecognized, that communicate values, identities, aspirations, and even fears. All these add up to our lifestyles, made possible by consumerism. Indeed, according to some social critics, it is through the world of commodities that our social world reproduces the social categories that structure our personal identities and give form to the social order.
If you want to put the deeply symbolic nature of material things to the test, just drive a Hummer to an environmental meeting or a Prius to a NASCAR race and wait for the reaction you get. The green urban-hipster values of the Prius don't play so well to the NASCAR crowd, while the Hummer's embodiment of a middle finger to the environment has made it a target of "ecoterrorists." We are awash in these signals, from the cars we drive and the clothes we wear to the brand of hand soap beside our kitchen sinks (and the kitchen sink itself, for that matter). Many of these signals were shaped by our evolutionary past and speak to our brains as ancient symbols, below the level of our awareness. They motivate and guide our behaviors in ways we rarely acknowledge and sometimes even vehemently deny.
There is little or no avoiding this world of goods, symbols, and signals. Even the self-proclaimed "anti-consumers" among us typically end up being just alternative consumers. Consider, for example, movements like the Simple Living Network, an anti-consumption group (now defunct) that offered to provide resources for learning to do more with less. Without a hint of irony, its website peddled Simple Living bumper stickers, T-shirts, banners, books, posters, flags, buttons, magnets, note cards, and a veritable laundry list of other goods. And the anti-consumerist organization Adbusters is busy supplying its supporters with its own $125 in-house brand of sneakers, which are no longer clothing but—so the marketing proclaims—have been transformed into rebellious anti-corporatist "tools for activists." And you thought a shoe was just a shoe. Even consider the avowedly nonconsumer, off-the-grid Amish. Recent times have seen more and more Amish trading in the horse and plow for high-paying factory jobs and enjoying the fruits of their labor by dining out regularly and even vacationing in Florida. So popular have winter Amish treks to Florida become that an entire Amish vacation community, Pinecraft, has sprung up just outside Sarasota, where vacationing Amish enjoy deep-sea fishing, parasailing, and shuffleboard. An Amish paradise indeed.
Once synonymous with the West, consumerism has spread widely across the world and today coexists with political and religious climates once strictly antithetical to it. A fitting sign of consumerism's increasingly global reach is the fact that the largest shopping mall in the world is the New South China Mall, more than twice the size of the Mall of America, the largest mall in the United States. In fact, all of the world's ten biggest malls are in Asia or the Middle East. What may appear to be worlds away is oddly connected to us by the language of consumption. While you may at first struggle to find common experiences with someone living in Chengdu in Southwest China or in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, the globalization of consumerism provides common touchstones. You would likely be able to share with them the experience of stopping at Starbucks in the mid-afternoon to enjoy a mocha Frappuccino.
Given how central consumerism is to our lives, and given its growing reach, you might suppose we'd all have a good grasp on our reasons for consuming. But when we started asking people in 2003 why they consume, we found that they had a hard time answering. We were using new brain-imaging technologies to peer into their brains as they made consumer decisions, and we supposed their impressions might help us interpret the brain scan results. Soon, however, we discovered that the brain scans were illuminating "the why of buy" in ways that went far beyond the subjects' introspection. Brain imaging was opening a window into the unconscious brain, which, we were discovering, drives most of our consumer behavior.
Then something unexpected happened. In the spring of 2004, we were conducting a brain-imaging experiment involving "cool" and "uncool" products. It started out as a somewhat lighthearted look into what we thought was an interesting but not central part of our economic life. We didn't expect "cool" to be a game changer. But as we delved into deciphering the brain-imaging results, we realized that they didn't fit with the popular theories of consumer behavior that economists, psychologists, and sociologists had proposed. Looking inside the brain could finally answer why we consume, but it would require a new understanding that would take us a decade of effort to work out, and that would force us to rethink many of our most basic assumptions.
This new brain-based understanding exposes many of our deepest beliefs about consumerism as myths. Human consumption, it turns out, stems from the very same sources as our moral behavior. Our brain studies have also revealed how a special kind of consumption helped to solve an incredibly basic social problem, which we refer to as the Status Dilemma. That solution was the "rebel cool" that emerged in the 1950s, a new, oppositional style of consumption. Another kind of cool consumption, which we call "DotCool," emerged in the 1990s. As much as we may be biased to disdain consumerism, the emergence of these new kinds of consumption forces us to seriously reconsider consumer behavior in a new light.
In Cool, we present this new understanding of why we consume, how cool consumption emerged as a prime driver of the global economy, and how cool consuming shapes our world. Our view draws on the emerging science of "neuroeconomics" and a view Steve first articulated in the 1990s, "cultural biology." Neuroeconomics is a field that is fast uncovering our brain's hidden economic life. Like much work in this field, our work challenges the traditional economic conception of the consumer, known as Homo economicus. This hypothetical character is a bit like Mr. Spock from Star Trek: consuming for him is like figuring out a math game involving rational calculation. He would never buy a new shirt just because a salesperson complimented him when he tried it on. In fact, he makes his economic decisions as though he were the only person in the world. In our experiments involving "cool" products, in contrast, we found that asking people to merely look at cool products sparked a pattern of brain activation similar to what we see when we ask people to do social tasks, such as imagining themselves in a social situation or interacting with others directly. This is a tantalizing clue that part of the economic value of these products lies in the brain's mostly implicit estimate of how they impact our social identity. But deciding if you like a cool product or not is supposed to be a question of economics! After all, you typically hear about "consumers" on the business news, not the celebrity news. If we like cool products because they somehow tap into our social brain, then consumption doesn't fit the traditional, "rational" economic model.
Cultural biology also places a premium on understanding our social life as the interplay between instincts, rooted in ancient neural structures whose design can be traced back to insects, and our capacity for cultural learning. The human brain develops through a prolonged and rich interaction with the environment over the first two decades of life. Nowhere is this rich interaction more pronounced than in the region of the human brain that expanded most during human evolution, an expansion that made possible our extraordinary sociability and also happens to be activated by cool products, as mentioned previously. That is, the brain region that blends our economic decisions and our social identity both grows the most during development and takes the longest to develop. This is not a coincidence. We learn how to associate products with our social identity and then how to use those products to signal what we're all about to other people. This latter ability emerges during adolescence as these brain regions develop—it's one reason why teenagers become so concerned about their social identity and communicate it to others through their burgeoning lifestyle choices.
Because of this complex biological and cultural interplay, cultural biology's view of consumption suggests that trying to understand human nature, including consumption, exclusively through the lens of evolutionary psychology (popularized in such books as Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works) is a mistake. Evolutionary psychology views human nature as the result of hardwired brain circuits that owe little of their function to culture, seeing us as essentially Stone Age creatures out of place in a modern world. On the contrary, cultural biology emphasizes the interplay between a flexible brain and culture, in which culture helps to build the brain and its functions. We suspect this is absolutely crucial if we are ever going to understand how a rapidly changing consumer culture plays a role in reshaping our beliefs and behavior, which have transformed profoundly over the last fifty years, as we will see in chapters 7 and 8.
As important as the social environment's role is in shaping our brain, it's not the whole story. Our brain has been primed for consumption throughout its evolutionary history. In fact, what makes modern consumption such a powerful force in our lives is that it builds on desires and motives that are etched very deep into our brains. In other words, it is part of our nature to consume. As we look into the ancient forces that shaped the modern brain and our consuming nature, we'll discover that like our closest genetic relative, the chimpanzee, we instinctively seek status. While some consumer critics point to our status impulses, they misdiagnose status as purely a competition for individual distinction that builds fences between people. Viewed in the appropriate evolutionary framework, our status instinct, we'll discover, is rooted in our brain's most basic affiliative impulses, which makes consumption more about building bridges between people. We also share with the chimpanzee a rebel instinct that makes us instinctively resent being subordinated. To our knowledge, no one has explored how this rebel instinct figures in our consumption. We thus examine how modern consumption didn't require the invention of new needs, but instead builds on these two instincts. This is a reason why consumption spreads like wildfire whenever conditions allow. Indeed, it took root quickly even among the hunter-gatherer Tsimané, who live in some of the most remote regions in the world, as soon as discretionary income became available and long before advertisements or other social influences appeared on the scene.
A major barrier to understanding consumption is the idea that our status concerns are artificial, or worse yet, pathological. To our thinking, this is a historically monumental mistake, one that has resulted in decades of misleading consumerism critiques. Once we recognize the biological reality of consumer motives—the status instinct and the rebel instinct—and understand the critical role they play in our lives, the prescription to deny them becomes about as feasible—and right-minded—as the Victorian demand for chastity. Indeed, once we recognize that these instincts are a legitimate element of being human, we'll see cool consumption in a new light, as a solution to the Status Dilemma.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cool by Steven Quartz, Anette Asp. Copyright © 2015 Steven Quartz and Anette Asp. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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