Cool: How the Brain's Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World

257 Pages·2015·1.62 MB·English

by  Steven Quartz

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About the Authors
Copyright Page

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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.1 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).2 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.3 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.”4 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.5
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.6 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