Rioting Nonconsumers (10 Aug 2010)

Is rioting an expression of envy, or something more political, or something that is ultimately inexplicable? From Zygmunt Bauman's response to the London riots:

We are all consumers now, consumers first and foremost, consumers by right and by duty... It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved” one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away from trouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops. From cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension. Buying on impulse and getting rid of possessions no longer sufficiently attractive in order to put more attractive ones in their place are our most enthusing emotions. The fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of life....

For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life unfulfilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around.

Supermarkets may be temples of worship for the members of the congregation. For the anathemised, found wanting and banished by the Church of Consumers, they are the outposts of the enemy erected on the land of their exile. Those heavily guarded ramparts bar access to the goods which protect others from a similar fate: as George W. Bush would have to agree, they bar return (and for the youngsters who never yet sat on a pew, the access) to “normality”. Steel gratings and blinds, CCTV cameras, security guards at the entry and hidden inside only add to the atmosphere of a battlefield and on-going hostilities. Those armed and closely watched citadels of enemy-in-our-midst serve as a day in, day out reminder of the natives’ misery, low worth, humiliation. Defiant in their haughty and arrogant inaccessibility, they seem to shout: I dare you! But dare you what?

Here Bauman is drawing on ideas he's developed over his series of books from the past decade: Liquid Modernity, Consuming Life, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (which I wrote about here). Modern identity is fluid, unmoored, and the consumer society has hijacked it to serve its ends, making our sense of self and the meaning of our life contingent on consumer desire; cravings for novelty; the ability to want, get and discard the "right" things, and so on.

In Consuming Life he argues that "if one agrees with Carl Schmitt’s proposition that the ultimate, defining prerogative of sovereign is the right to exempt, then one must accept that the true carrier of sovereign power in the society of consumers is the commodity market; it is there, at the meeting place of sellers and buyers, that selecting and setting apart the damned from the saved, insiders from outsiders, the included from the excluded (or, more to the point, right-and-proper consumers from flawed ones) is daily performed." Thus it should not be surprising that feelings of social exclusion play themselves out as attacks on shops.

But why now? Why riots in London all of a sudden, if this sort of exclusion has been persistently present? Is it just random when one of the land mines Bauman sees littering consumer society gets stepped on? Chris Dillow asks this question and attributes it to information cascades, which allow would-be looters to confirm for themselves that their behavior is sufficiently correlated with others that they will collectively get away with it. But he adds, as "illuminating as the theory of information cascades can be, there is a problem with it. We cannot forecast when such cascades will emerge. We can only identify them in hindsight. They allow us to explain behaviour, but not predict it." This is kind of reminiscent of Badiou's theory of the event, or at least what I understand of it. It can't be predicted because it is a total disruption of how we understand the procession of ordinary occurrences. Would appreciate a link to anyone interpreting the London rioting in Badiou's terms.

Dillow's questions also reminded me of Andrew Potter's response to the Vancouver hockey rioting:

The point is that if you can get enough people to riot, then you all get away with it. The trick, then, is getting enough people willing to do it, in the same place and at the same time, to create a tipping point effect. And so when it comes to starting a riot, what the participants are faced with is essentially a coordination problem.

Potter thought that social media might simplify the coordination problem the way a big hockey game (or an egregious example of police brutality) can, but might also provide enough surveillance to discourage it. Facial recognition technology is being used on looters in London, as it was after the Vancouver incident. Social media potentially adds to the number of cameras pointed at everyone to protect the consumer citadels.

Anyway, I think one of the most interesting things Bauman writes about is his interpretation of Levinas's theory of the infinite responsibility to the other. As infinite responsibility is a pretty serious burden for anyone, one of society's purposes, Bauman argues, is to limit our sense of obligation, to give us rationalizations for watching out mainly for ourselves or some limited subset of society, or to give us a way of ranking our responsibilities to others. In a consumer society, the celebration of individualism and our “right” to convenience and novelties work to convince us that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people’s needs—and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the "hassle" they represent. If we can't afford those or if we become sick of strictly being that hassle to others, then looting works just as well as an expression of our own right to not give a shit about others. If purchasing power represents freedom, so then can looting.

Fake near-misses in gambling (26 May 2010)

I wasn't a degenerate gambler by any means when I lived in Las Vegas. When I would go to the casinos I would almost always play low-stakes craps, the sort of games you could buy in for $50 and see as much action as you wanted (and never really win much). Even then I had an strong bias against slot machines and in favor of table games, which seemed somehow more legitimate -- honest gambling, as if there is such a thing. I used to watch people pump their paychecks into video-poker machines at bars and imagine they felt a sinking, synthetic feeling, wondering how they let the whole world and all its mysteries, the grand cosmic story of their own dance with fate, get condensed down to the whims of a machine. I sometimes get a similar feeling when I play arcade games for too long -- in the end you always die, and the machine decides when it happens to you, despite your accrued skill or karma. It seemed like you were always teased with the possibility of some unforeseen and inexplicable mastery, transcendence, only to have it wrenched away arbitrarily.

So I'm not surprised to learn from this post at Neurophilosophy (via Paul Kedrosky) that gaming machines are rigged to simulate near-misses and jackpot close calls.

Manufacturers of gambling games have apparently known the rewarding effects of near misses all along, and they design slot machines in such a way as to exploit the cognitive distortions of gamblers. Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves. The gambler who nearly hits the jackpot will therefore want to continue playing, because he thinks he has a good chance of winning.

That's just diabolical, a perfect example of the latent evil inherent in neuroscience and psychological studies. But gambling is essentially an activity one participates in because one seeks to indulge the fantasy of suspending the rules of probability and coaxing the universe into organizing itself around one's own good fortune. The near-misses lend support to that dream, that the gambler has a date with destiny. It's not too much of a stretch to connect that kind of mechanical manipulation of the gambler's "narrative" of their losing experience with the sort of manipulations more conventional entertainments -- films, novels, etc. -- subject us to.

Programming the poor (1 April 2010)

At Time.com, Barbara Kiviat has a rundown of a New York City pilot program (modeled after Mexico's Oportunidades) in which poor people are given cash rewards for things like going to the dentist and having a job and, at one point, signing up for a library card. It's not that the cost of the dentist visit was covered (though that may have been the case); it's that the program paid people a reward for doing it. This New York Times article has details on how well this has worked. Apparently, results were mixed.

It seems peculiar and patronizing to have to incentivize these sort of behaviors; you would think it is incentive enough to reap the benefits of clean teeth and steady employment and so on. The theory behind the program seems to be that the poor, by virtue of their poverty, are incapable of responding to incentives like those above them in the class hierarchy; they are unable to grasp such subtleties as the benefits of hygiene. Instead, like computers programmable only in a single language of ones and zeros, the poor understand only one sort of incentive: cash. Their condition -- their "complicated, resource-constrained lives" as Kiviat puts it -- has presumably made them morally one-dimensional. Then, though initially motivated by cash, the poor learn by doing what it feels like to experience the non-cash benefits of virtuous behavior. And this apparently will make them change their ways and break the intergenerational poverty trap.

Kiviat praises the empiricism associated with the implementation of this program, so I feel churlish throwing in my two-bit speculations. But I'm not really even getting two bits for them, so I will toss them out there anyway. Cash payments seem a bizarre way to try to change the habitus of the poor. Aside from being sort of self-contradictory (giving cash incentives to try to get people to see the virtue of doing certain things for their own intrinsic value) it basically ignores the importance of social capital. To be able to have your shit together, so to speak, requires having a stable footing in an entire communal system. It means having better transportation, better connections, better access to amenities, friends who can share better solutions to life's problems, etc. Despite its limitations, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed offers some insight into this -- how poverty breaks down the middle-class approach to life and brings forth what can appear to middle-class people to be a bizarre and incoherent lifestyle, but is in fact life lived in perpetual triage mode. The poverty habitus derives from that, and I guess I am skeptical that crisis mode can be easily unlearned.

I always think of the same incident when I think of habitus-related questions. About 15 years ago, I was on campus at a university where I was an instructor, and a frazzled woman approached in a panic. People were discreetly avoiding eye contact with her and shifting their direction so as to not engage with her, sort of what happens when a homeless person passes through a subway car. I wasn't fast enough and abruptly she blurted a question out at me about how she could find a particular room number. I asked which building and she didn't know. I shrugged and began walking away but she continued to yell at me, demanding to know where this room was. And she explained that she had to show up at this room to make sure she didn't violate the terms of her parole or probation or something, and she was supposed to be their 15 minutes ago, and on and on. It was all on a paper she got in the mail, but she forgot to bring it. Maybe if I was a different sort of person, I would have taken her somewhere on campus where they would have that sort of information on hand (not that I knew of such a place). But instead I just started walking away faster.

At the time, I kept thinking, if I were in her predicament, I would have tried to show up for this highly critical appointment at least an hour ahead of time, so I could avoid going back to jail. And I wouldn't be counting on total strangers to know what the hell I was talking about if I showed up late. And so on. But it dawned me eventually I had no idea what sort of circumstances the woman was in the midst of and I probably shouldn't apply my frame of reference to her problems. It's more useful to think instead about what the prerequisites are for being prepared and consider how the social coping behavior I take for granted is actually a status marker, and then when I walked away quickly, I was basically trying to preserve my advantage.

Quality brands as moribund middlebrow propaganda (22 March 2010)

In a recent New Yorker column, James Surowiecki argues that retailers are succeeding by eschewing the middlebrow and either making luxury goods or cheap, "good enough" stuff. I had trouble following some of his logic (I didn't really understand what he was getting at in his point about economies of scale) but I thought this was interesting:

In the past, these companies were able to charge a premium price because their brands were taken as signals of reasonable quality and reliability. Today, consumers don’t need to rely on shorthand: they have Consumer Reports and J. D. Power, CNET and Amazon’s user ratings, and so on, which have made it easier to gauge differences in quality accurately. The result is that brands matter less: a recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones. In effect, the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.

It seems like a good thing if people aren't mistakenly equating brands with merchandise quality. But I wonder whether that has anything to do with information access. It seems like it could reflect an ideological shift, or a shift in the significance of branding.

Surowiecki depicts middlebrow shoppers as dupes who mistook brands for indicators of quality while they bumbled in the marketplace, with no inner resources to draw on to tell what's what. The brand reassured them they weren't making a mistake, even if the quality wasn't there. Paradoxically, the wealth of new information available makes the possibility of making a mistake much higher; there's more we should have and could have known, and we can quickly confirm our disappointment online if something goes wrong with something we purchase. A form of decisional paralysis may set in as brands are devalued, or at least come to signify qualities other than quality.

But brands have more work to do besides signal quality. They need to be more flexible in what they can mean, what sort of fantasies they can evoke. They need to have richer personalities (ugh). What is precisely middlebrow is the idea that a brand signals only quality, and that idea is perhaps dead. (Surowiecki's muted nostalgia for it altogether befits the middlebrow magazine he writes for, its own brand an increasingly irrelevant signal of quality as magazines founder.) Instead, the ways in which products denote class distinctions have become more complex; the grammar which retailers and consumers alike must use with products more sophisticated.

Pleasure procrastination (31 Dec 2009)

The best defense for the advertising industry is that it licenses our pleasure. It gives us permission to relax and enjoy things. But that assumes that we need such permission, that our instincts lie elsewhere -- possibly with a different sort of pleasure that doesn't revolve around consumption, around possessions. It's not clear whether by pushing its peculiar form of desire, the ad industry isn't undermining other latent modes of pleasure, leading us to neglect them and let them atrophy. When I travel and escape from advertising, it never fails to startle me how much I miss it in subtle ways, how I need guidance about what I should be wanting. The absence of consumerist desire can seem to hurt. The pleasures of travel, such as they are, sometimes fail to compensate.

The difficulty of desire has long been a staple of French social theory. Virtually all of Lacan is about the subject. Baudrillard begins his essay "Concerning the Fulfillment of Desire in Exchange Value" with a memorable anecdote about the difficulty of ridding ourselves of what Bataille called the accursed share: "There was a raid on a U.S. department store several years ago. A group occupied and neutralized the store by surprise, and then invited the crowd by loudspeaker to help themselves. A symbolic action! And the result? Nobody could figure out what to take." The basic idea is that we are strangers in the world our economy has outfitted us with -- we must learn how to be subjects in it, and the adjustment is painful.

Baudrillard claims that "beyond the transparency of economics, where everything is clear because it suffices to 'want something for your money,' man apparently no longer knows what he wants." This is persuasive to me because I often need to see that something is on sale or is a "good deal" in order to permit myself to buy it. (This is why I generally shop at Savers and Goodwill.) I've argued before somewhere (can't find) that ads, as part of their function, promote the market mentality, the neoclassical economist's view of humans as efficient utility calculators for this reason, persuading us we should find pleasure in maximizing utility, in making good deals. In reality, no deals are required for pleasure. It's a free gift that comes with being alive.

The idea that we need external forces urging us to indulge fits well with the findings of market researchers Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy (pdf) about procrastinating pleasure, which John Tierney reports on in the NYT. The researchers claim in the abstract that "the tendency to procrastinate applies not only to aversive tasks but also to positive experiences with immediate benefits." We like deadlines, which make us decisive and prompt us to action. Advertising, marketing, sales -- all these seem to work best when they make it seem like we must "act now!" Maybe the details of the pitch and the dubious emotional associations they cultivate are ultimately irrelevant; maybe only the pressure they put on us forms the real substance of ads. The secret lurking in consumerism may be that we really don't want to spend our time liquidating gift cards and forcing ourselves to the mall -- that this isn't inherently fun, contrary to the pervasive ideology. Free of priming we may find it a hassle to have to want stuff. We postpone consumerist pleasures not out of protestant-ethic guilt but because they actually aren't all that compelling to us when isolated from their marketing.

The assumption that there is something inherently harmful in postponing consumerist pleasure seems a bit dubious to me. There's pleasure in restraint and indulgence both. Tierney sums up the researchers' apparent views this way: "Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be." But doesn't that work both ways -- the longer we wait, the more special the occasion will seem to be when we open it? (Tierney's conclusion sounds the same note.) We can only imagine the nirvana because we are building it around some delay in fulfillment, letting fantasies crystallize around some forestalled moment of truth. Immediate gratification isn't more pleasurable than the circuit of desire, the chase and the capture.

Refuting the paradox of choice (24 Nov 2009)

The idea that consumer choice is freedom is perhaps the quintessential piece of consumerist ideology, so perhaps it is no surprise that economic pundits like Tim Harford, writing in the FT, would be eager to report the evidence against it.

The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way. There seem to be circumstances where choice is counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much about what they are. Overall, says Scheibehenne: “If you did one of these studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.” Perhaps choice is not as paradoxical as some psychologists have come to believe. One way or another, we seem to be able to cope with it.

Interesting that the paradox of choice is here presented as something the psychologists merely want to believe -- is this projection at work? Tyler Cowen, who declares that "the so-called paradox of choice is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences," links to Harford's story approvingly.

Whether you accept the refutation (or the original observation) seems a question of whether you trust the methodology of these sorts of studies. Mine is undermined by the fact that the studies themselves have yielded contradictory results: Harford reports, "Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why." I'm skeptical generally of efforts to replicate real-world psychology in artificial lab experiments. The arbitrariness of the tasks subjects are asked to participate in, and their abstraction from lived social reality, means they have turned off their self-consciousness to a degree and are behaving artificially, different from how they would act in a situation with true social implications and ongoing ramifications for their self-concept.

Determining the psychological impact of the number of choices is a proxy war for whether or not restrictions should be placed on markets in order to benefit consumers -- or to even encourage them to be less of consumers. I don't think any amount of research can ultimately arbitrate what is an ideological question.

Leave deciders alone (7 June 2009)

Economics blogger Matthew Rognile pinpoints what is bothersome about Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and the extrapolations he makes from the slew of ingenious studies he details in the book.

The more general philosophical issue here is the tradeoff between internal and external validity. If you're concerned about internal validity, Ariely's work is great. Small sample size notwithstanding, I have very little doubt that if I set up an identical experiment measuring the effects of bonuses on laboratory tasks in India, my results will be similar to Ariely's, and that if prodding lab subjects to perform contrived tasks ever becomes a critical policy goal, this knowledge will prove predictive and invaluable. In this limited sense, I have far more confidence in randomized economic experiments than I do in, say, the correctness of a particular regression specification.

Unfortunately, we are also concerned about external validity—whether our results extend to a more realistic setting—and here we are forced to indulge massive leaps in analysis.

This seems such an obvious problem -- that people act differently in lab studies than in the course of their ordinary lives -- but it also seems that the sorts of clever and pleasing conclusions Ariely typically draws are hard to resist and function well as story or conversation hooks. I'm wary of elevating the idea of revealed preference to the end-all and be-all of studies of decisionmaking; there are too many variables in play to read to much into a fait accopmli decision. But isolating the decision-making process artificially and attempting to control the variables would seem to yield equally limited results. I have the same skepticism about the neurological-scan based studies that Jonah Lehrer details in How We Decide.

Maybe I'm just creeped out more and more by the attempt to reduce decisionmaking to an object of exact science, so that human responses can be better predicted, and inevitably, better programmed in advance.

"Online monoculture" (31 March 2009)

Several months ago Tom Slee offered these "Theses on Netflix" (he modestly thinks that sort of title for a blog post is bombastic, but nothing could make me want to read something more -- maybe if he called it a "manifesto"). By serving as automated filters, these systems make reviewers and critics somewhat superfluous. "While bad reviewers and publishers would not be missed," Slee points out, "good reviewers and publishers are not only filters; they are also an active part of cultural creation." That is true, but the critical debate often takes place far away from the marketplace and the popular audience for most cultural products. And online there are more critical voices to be heard then ever, albeit at varying levels of professionalism. If anything, we are encouraged to produce opinions, to help make automated recommenders work better, have more data to feed on.

The surfeit of opinions, though, and more important, the surfeit of culture, makes filters more necessary as the demands on our attention become overwhelming. If we are intent on consuming more of what is available, we have less time to participate in such staid, slow-moving endeavors as having a critical debate about one work. There's too much pressure to move on to the next thing and broadcast an opinion about that. So our opinions will be pronouncements, and debate will perhaps become even more of an elitist activity, for those paid to conduct it in academia.

But the key point Slee makes in his theses, amid the recognition that these recommendation systems will become more and more central to cultural consumption, is that they are not neutral. They have the capacity to leverage small differences in initial popularity into huge disparities among works that may not be all that different when regarded objectively (assuming for the moment that an objective standard like that can be approximated). And more sinister, recommendation systems can become the disguise for payola-type schemes that make certain lucrative titles more visible. As Slee puts it:

Ownership matters. Given the variety of approaches, outcomes, and absence of clear "best" alternatives, and given the ability of recommender systems to shape the experiences of their users, there is ample room for ulterior motives to become embodied in the system. The incentives for the recommender and the recommendee may be different. The incentives for Netflix in a regime where they deliver physical DVDs (of which they have limited stock) may be to promote the back catalogue. When they deliver movies digitally (as they are about to) there may be no such constraint and they may be more tempted to promote existing blockbusters.

Slee followed up on this idea a few months later in this post, also with a great title: "Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche." He draws on paper by Daniel M. Fleder and Kartik Hosanagar to argue that online recommendations do not lead us to diversify our cultural experiences. The ideology of the "long tail" -- as Slee puts it, that "our cultural experiences, liberated from the parochial tastes and limited awareness of those who happen to live close to us, are broadened by exposure to the wisdom of crowds, and the result is variety, diversity, and democratization" -- turns out to be something of a hoax. Even though their is a wider field of culture available online, recommendation services work to block most of it out, not open our eyes to it. The parochial tastes once nurtured in isolation were what gave us our distinct niches, our peculiar tastes -- that's why local music scenes were distinctive 50 years ago, but are entirely homogenous now that music is conceived and sold for national audiences. Our taste is more readily massified by exposure to the algorithms that average out the tastes of as many participants as possible. Along the same lines, Slee's simulations suggest that we experience more diversity offline, whereas online we are subjected to "monopoly populism."

A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.

Buying an experience (27 Feb 2009)

It may turn out to be a question of semantics, but the idea of "purchasing experiences," as this PsyBlog item discusses, has always grated on me. It seems to conform the pleasures of living to the calculus of shopping, as if they were essentially the same, and the consumerist paradigm can be applied to all pleasures and desires. Everything is for sale, and everything has its price, if you only think of it in the right way. (Just ask Gary Becker.) Is this in fact true, that rational calculation underlies even our most spontaneous-seeming choices and we just choose to block it out of our consciousness from ideological convenience, or is hyper-rational-choice analysis of human behavior itself the ideological proposition? The PsyBlog post confirms what most research into the subject has found: that buying experiences is better than buying stuff, because the stuff sticks around and becomes lame and/or embarrassing, while the experiences become warm and fuzzy memories.

Experiences also beat possessions because they seem to:
* Improve with time as we forget about all the boring moments and just recall the highlights.
* Take on symbolic meanings, whereas those shoes are still just shoes.
* Be very resistant to unfavourable comparisons: a wonderful moment in a restaurant is personally yours and difficult to compare, but all too soon your shoes are likely to look dated in comparison with the new fashions.

That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, but I just wish it weren't represented as a matter of what to buy. Can we simply have experiences rather than arranging to purchase them ahead of time?

I had a similar feeling about another consumer-choice related post. Jonah Lehrer, who has just written a book called How We Choose, recently posted about a consumer-research study built on the premise that we all operate with two distinct decisionmaking systems: "the slow rational, deliberate approach (System 1) or the fast, emotional, instinctive approach (System 2)." The study set out to determine which yielded better decisions, using the metric of "consumer consistency." I have read the rationale for this several times, and have failed to understand it as anything other than an inexplicable plug for Nikon cameras.

When faced with a choice task, consumers need to evaluate the overall utility of each of the alternatives they are facing and compare these utilities in order to make their final choice. Such a utility computation process is likely to vary from case to case based on the exact information consumers consider, the particular facts they retrieve from their memories, as well as the particular computations that they carry out; any of these process components is a potential source for decision inconsistency. For example, when shopping for a new Nikon digital camera, it is possible that consumers might change the aspects of the camera they focus on, the particular information they retrieve from memory, the relative importance weights they assign to the attributes, or the process of integrating these weights.
As researchers, we often treat such inconsistencies as ―noise‖ and use statistical inference tools that allow us to examine the data while mostly ignoring these fluctuations. Yet, such noise can convey important information about the ability of the decision maker to perform good decisions, and, in particular, it can reflect their ability to conceptualize their own preferences. In the current work we focus on such inconsistencies / noise in decision making as indicators of the ease in which consumers can formulate their preferences: we focus on the question of whether the cognitive or emotional decisions are more prone to this kind of error.

I'm not sure why inconsistency iis defined as "error" (Am I reading this right?) or why they assume that beneath the "noise" evoked in a given decisionmaking moment is a preference that is true and consistent over time for a particular individual. People's desires aren't that static. And the "noise" in the decisionmaking process is what makes us more than automatons; it makes us strange to ourselves, potentially, but that also means we discover new possibilities for who we are that we wouldn't otherwise reason our way into. I tend to think that our identity is not so continuous as the researchers' assumptions imply; that instead our identity tends to be conjured up by the demands of a given context -- to put it in lit-crit jargon, subjectivity is intertextual. It's relational. It's not a given, transcendent thing that then responds to situations and decisionmaking opportunities. The "noise" is everything.

If we are start making consistent decisions when forced to rely on our "emotional" decisionmaking system, as the study found, that suggests to me a failure of imagination, a retreat into safe choices in response to being overstimulated. The emotional brain is boring in its consistency, not "rational" as Lehrer suggests. Again, this could be semantics, could be a matter of how you define "rational," but it seems irrational to me to continue to choose the same thing over and over again. That seems sort of regressive, tending toward an infantile repetition compulsion. As much as I complain about gratuitous novelty-seeking, the idea that only consistent choices are rational seems even more absurd. (I am missing something about this study? I must be.) I sometimes feel as though I am coming around to a totally indefensible and irrational position that we shouldn't bother to study how we choose at all, since it can hardly be anything but a weapon in the hands of marketers to control what we choose, to force out the noise that makes us unique to ourselves and replace it with an official, monologic hum.

Persuasion industry's assault on personhood (5 Jan 2009)

In Shifting Involvements Albert Hirschman cites this 1971 paper by philosopher Harry Frankfurt (who has since gone on to mild mainstream notoriety because of his treatise On Bullshit), in which he calls attention to "second-order desires", or the desires we have about our primary desires. These are what we want to want and, according to Frankfurt, make up the substance of our will, and whether or not we experience it as being free. Frankfurt theorizes that "the conformity of a person's will to his higher-order volitions may be far more thoughtless and spontaneous" than it is for others, who agonize over being able to act on their preferred desires (e.g.: I want to read Marx; I end up playing 1942 on a video game emulator). "The enjoyment of freedom comes easily to some," Frankfurt notes somewhat depressingly, "others must struggle to achieve it."

Hirschman cites Frankfurt's surprisingly accessible essay merely to highlight the fact that we often have multiple sets of preferences simultaneously, which foils the more simplistic models of neoclassical economics with regard to consumer demand. If we want contradictory things at any given moment, it's not clear where we will find our marginal utility; if our wants change in the process of satisfying them, then our incentives are in perpetual flux, flummoxing the calculus that is presumed to drive rational decisionmaking. We end up having to commit now to wants we may not possess in the future, or we may reject one desire in favor of another now, only to find they have switched places later. And so on.

But Frankfurt's essay seems also to have a bearing on the larger question of how the persuasion industry (marketing, advertising, and to some degree, entertainment) scuttles our sense of selfhood, which, Frankfurt argues, hinges on our expression of will. The persuasion industry is seeking always to confuse the communication between our first- and second-order desires; it's seeking to short circuit the way we negotiate between the many things we can conceive of wanting to come up with a positive will to want certain particular things at certain moments. It seeks to make us more impulsive at the very least; at worst it wants to supplant our innate will with something prefabricated that will orient us toward consumer goods rather than desires that are able to be fulfilled outside the market. This can occur without our having been persuaded directly by the advertising messages, simply by overloading us with information and unleashing the "paradox of choice" and worse, optional paralysis. Frankfurt describes it this way:

People are generally far more complicated than my sketchy account of the structure of a person's will may suggest. There is as much opportunity for ambivalence, conflict, and self-deception with regard to desires of the second order, for example, as there is with regard to first-order desires. If there is an unresolved conflict among someone's second-order desires, then he is in danger of having no second-order volition; for unless this conflict is resolved, he has no preference concerning which of his first-order desires is to be his will. This condition, if it is so severe that it prevents him from identifying himself in a sufficiently decisive way with any of his conflicting first-order desires, destroys him as a person. For it either tends to paralyze his will and to keep him from acting at all, or it tends to remove him from his will so that his will operates without his participation. In both cases he becomes, like the unwilling addict though in a different way, a helpless bystander to the forces that move him.

In short, optional paralysis eradicates our identity, especially when we are conceiving of it as being expressed by marketplace decisions. We may argue that it is foolish to found our identity on such stuff, but that doesn't render this sort of anxiety, this being "destroyed as a person," any less existentially terrifying. (It's a good reason, however, to question why identity has become so bound up with consumerism and explore alternatives.) Heavily marketed goods in the competitive marketplace translate into eroded confidence on the part of consumers in what they want and the ultimate meaning of their desires.

Exacerbating the problem, and heightening our ambivalence and akrasia, is that the condition of being a "helpless bystander to the forces" that move us is perpetually in the process of being redefined in marketing discourse as a pleasurable, desirable state; i.e. as a second-order volition worth embracing. Passivity -- an instinctual and inevitable response perhaps to being overloaded with information -- is entertainment, is convenience, is relaxation, is anything but helplessness and alienation from ourselves.

With passivity toward the operation of our will encouraged and celebrated, it's no wonder that we experience more and more of life as being governed by "addictions" -- by compulsions beyond our ability to control -- and that we routinely describe ourselves as becoming addicted to things that are not actually physically addictive (shopping, sex, the internet, World of Warcraft, Facebook, Jamba Juice, etc.). It may be that we want not to be able to control ourselves, as this resolves the contradiction inherent in wanting to will passivity. Our attempts to rationalize our desires fluctuate between pleasurable surrender (we are serenely impulsive, with the speed with which our impulses are gratified serving as an index to our prosperity and to our autonomy) and medicalized despair (we are addicts who are not responsible for our actions, which we stand removed from but which we can't alter to reconcile with our other better desires as yet only vaguely formulated but having something to do with conquering impulses). Our inability to know what we really want ends up being either the illusion of freedom, of keeping options open, or it ends up feeling like a pathological condition that we vainly await the cure for.

Irrationality and shopping "addiction" (19 Dec 2008)

As the scare quotes in the title of the post indicates, I'm skeptical of the notion and prevalence of "compulsive shopping," an affliction detailed in this WSJ story in light of such sufferers' unusual vulnerability within our current economic climate. The notion of a shopping addiction seems another manifestation of how we tend to pathologize and medicalize phenomena that may have a cultural explanation -- that way we make these conditions seem natural if unfortunate rather than products of a culture we can and should change. But I guess that makes me a heartless scourage to the 8.9 percent of Americans who are allegedly afflicted. The WSJ article is full of poignant (if not risible) anecdotes about compulsive shoppers who feel compelled to collect shoes amd can't resist the promise of a sale:

Saks Fifth Avenue this season offered 12 months of no interest and no payments for people who spend $2,000 or more in a single day, a deal that Mr. Shulman says is like a "crack dealer saying, 'Come here, try a sample.' "

Such stories are good for rationalizing our own compulsive shopping behavior -- whatever foolish and unnecessary purchases I've made lately pale in comparison to these, and as pleasant as it can be to score a bargain, I don't find myself jonesing for that pleasure. So I have nothing to worry about! And at the same time we experience the vicarious thrill of letting no obstacle stand in our way of our getting whatever stuff we want.

Anyway, this interview with psychologist Peter Ubel from Scientific American's Mind Matters blog offer a more sober and less sensationalistic look at the relationship between mind and retail, tracing the various ways the classical economists' presumption of rationality fails to reflect the ways people actually behave. Rather than pathologize shopping addiction, Ubel frames compulsion in terms of precommitment -- deciding a measur eof resistance in advance and adhering to it, à la Ulysses vis-à-vis the sirens:

One reason we humans don’t always behave rationally is because we have limited will power. We know that exercise is good for us. We understand that junk food is bad. But we cannot follow through on our rational desires. We plan to run for 30 minutes, but after 10 we get off the treadmill, and convince ourselves we are a bit stiff today. We try to cut down on empty calories, and then grab a handful of M & M’s from a candy bowl, almost unaware of our action. No single M & M caused anyone to have diabetes. No one experienced a heart attack because they were 20 minutes short of their exercise goal. And yet our lives, our waistlines even, are the result of thousands of such decisions and behaviors.
To improve ourselves, we have to act like each M & M matters. Like each decision has important consequences. To do this, it helps to make rules and follow them. Commit yourselves to no candy, no desserts, and you’ll become more mindful of M & M bowls. Run outside, rather than inside on a treadmill, and you’ll be forced to finish your running loop. Tell a friend you’ll walk with them for 30 minutes this afternoon, and you’ll be forced to show up.
Want to save more money? Have some money automatically deposited into a savings account that you cannot access easily through ATMs, debit cards or checkbooks. Sometimes the best way to behave better when you are weak is to impose martial law upon yourself when you feel strong.

This passage gets at an irony, a contradiction, in consumerism. Consumerism proliferates on the basis of the ideology of choice; we believe that thanks to consumerism, we get to make meaningful choices in the marketplace all the time and these extend and enrich our identity. But in fact, these choices tend to become reflexive, unconsidered -- we fail to recognize their important consequences, or at least misconstrue them. The more retail decisions we make, the less important any one of them seems to our lives generally. We feel the meaning slipping away from us, our identities diminishing. One response is to force ourselves to make more choices in search of that diminishing meaning at the very moment we need to be taking decisions out of our own hands, or better, locating meaning in some other aspect of our lives. So consumerism basically prompts us to value choice more while making our choices in practice less meaningful and significant. So suddenly we are left wondering why our choice of blueberry over boysenberry jam hasn't had a lasting impact on our existential weltanschauung.

Tired of making choices (23 July 2008)

The myriad of choices we have in the consumer marketplace is supposed to make up the bulk of our inheritance for having been born into thriving capitalist democracies. Parsing these options allow us to experience the freedom of choice, which is elided with freedom and liberty in general and is meant to compensate for various inequities in income, social mobility, and political access. But as behavioral economists and various consumer researchers have attempted to demonstrate, a surfeit of choices is as likely to make us miserable as it is to make us happy, and the choices can feel merely like occasions to make mistakes, not reveal personal preferences and give tangible shape to our innermost sense of ourselves. We frequently lack the information to make wise decisions in the marketplace yet are compelled to make them anyway -- to express our pseudo-political will, and make manifest our vaunted individuality, of which we are supposed to be so proud. So we are left feeling insecure, vulnerable, beleaguered -- paradoxically looking for advice on what to buy to express our uniqueness.

The studies detailed in this Scientific American article make matters appear even worse, as it suggests that having to repeatedly make choices -- as our consumer culture prides itself on making us do -- leads to degraded "executive function".

When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort-you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function—a talent we all rely on throughout the day—draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental capacity may be severely hindered in another, seemingly unrelated activity.

In other words, the bombardment of marketing we are confronted with tires out our brains and makes it more likely we will make poor decisions or lack the wherewithal to resist that marketing. The advertiser's campaign against us is really a war of attrition.

If making choices depletes executive resources, then "downstream" decisions might be affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Indeed, University of Maryland psychologist Anastasiya Pocheptsova and colleagues found exactly this effect: individuals who had to regulate their attention—which requires executive control—made significantly different choices than people who did not. These different choices follow a very specific pattern: they become reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process, and can thus fall prey to perceptual decoys.

This way of viewing the brain suggests we should take a conservationist approach to decision-making, delegating insignificant ones so that we may be sharp for the ones that matter. One might even argue that we could let ads make the unimportant consumption decisions for us, trusting the ubiquity of certain products in the media as a proxy for their worthiness. But then, of course, we would need to decide which decisions to delegate (or make on automatic pilot) and which ones to take ourselves. And that may be the most insidious aspect of all the marketing -- it obfuscates the importance of various choices, making silly things seem integral and important decisions seem matter of fact.