Objects and Experiences (13 April 2010)

PsyBlog has posted a list of "six psychological reasons consumer culture is unsatisfying." All of them can be boiled down to the idea that when it comes to purchases, experiences are ultimately more satisfying than objects, mainly because experiences become fond memories instead of outdated clutter. Retailers who sell objects are as aware of this as psychologists are, so their marketing efforts arguably tend to try to make shopping itself into an experience, and make the purchased object into a necessary souvenir of that experience. Or is that experiences have become polluted with souvenirs as they are made "consumable"?

I guess what I am driving at here is that the opposition of "object" and "experience" is not as absolute as it may initially seem. Contemporary "experiences" for sale are generally shot through with opportunities to purchase objects, and objects are often packaged as requisite goods for experiences -- e.g., you can't go camping without the appropriate gear, etc. The post contends that consumers typically have a "maximizing" approach to buying things (get the most value for the least money -- the neoclassical assumptions about rationality) and a "satisficing" approach to choosing experiences (getting just enough to satisfy without worrying about maximizing utility). I guess I would like to know more about how the studies were designed to reach this conclusion, because the point the post makes at the end -- that we can think experientially about buying objects -- seems eminently reversible. We can be goaded into thinking of our experiences as objects, as would seem to suit the vested interests of consumerism. That means that the "shopping as experience" ruse may work as a clever piece of marketing jujitsu, promoting shopping for things as an experience in order to habituate us to thinking of experiences as discrete purchasable things rather than a flow of possibility.

Also, I am skeptical that this sort of thing can work:

This experiment suggests that thinking of material purchases in experiential terms helps banish dissatisfaction. Try thinking of jeans in terms of where you wore them or how they feel, the mp3 player in terms of how the music changes your mood or outlook, even your laptop in terms of all the happy hours spent reading your favourite blog.

Making the effort to think in this way would seem to negate the ability to take the contrived thoughts seriously. You have to trick yourself, a la dialectical behavioral therapy, I guess, to forget about how you are forcing yourself to see things differently from how you know, at one level, they are.

Another way of putting this is this: we don't live in a culture that wants to let us think experientially about purchases or to transcend "invidious comparisons", so it requires active resistance to hold on to a experiential perspective. I think that we should worry less about experiences vs. objects and think more of a different continuum -- that of individualism. There must be studies out there that investigate whether thinking less about personal identity leads to a greater indifference about the signifying component of things and experiences and a broader sense of being in the flow of the events of one's life.

Social flow (12 Feb 2010)

BPS Digest has a post about recent psychological research into social flow, an extension of the concept of individual flow states (aka, being in "the zone") to group activities.

Ever had that wonderful, timeless feeling that arises when you're absorbed in a challenging task, one that stretches your abilities but doesn't exceed them? Pioneering psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state 'flow'. Countless studies have shown that flow is highly rewarding and usually provokes feelings of joy afterwards. Little researched until now, however, is the idea of 'social flow', which can arise when a group of people are absorbed together in a challenging task. In a new study, Charles Walker finds that social flow is associated with more joy than solitary flow - 'that doing it together is better than doing it alone'.

The studies the post goes on to cite are of the "approximate social behavior in the lab" variety that I tend to be skeptical of, but nevertheless I found the general idea interesting because it ties in with something that I ahve been thinking about lately in terms of online sociality. One of the things that is absent from the reciprocal affirmation behavior online is this sort of social flow. I haven't conducted a study or anything, but even the most real-time of social interactions online tend to reinforce my feeling of separation -- online chat (which I haven't done in a long time) always seemed to me a bit like social chess, trying to plot the next witty thing to say rather than being lost in the flow of conversation. Maybe this is a personal idiosyncrasy.

The idea of social flow evokes the possibility of a kind of group identity that can coexist with the strictly individual identity that gets constructed in online forums and through consumerism-for-display rituals. The standard argument -- where Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style-- is that a kind of self-consciously deviant consumerism are efforts to maintain subcultural groups, but as Hebdige points out, these efforts generally fail, are co-opted, are mediated by the stereotypes the groups want to defy, and so on. It seems the subcultural identity is probably maintained instead by these social flow states, and the identity markers are just means to achieving the mutual trust necessary to allow the flow to emerge with seeming spontaneity.

Against the case against zero-sum positionality (25 October 2006)

Cato Instituter Will Wilkinson makes a valiant attempt to argue against the zero-sum nature of status games -- comparing ourselves to others and deriving our satisfaction from that rather than the utility of whatever we possess or are capable of. The essence of his argument seems to be positionality is inevitable, but we can always change the game we're playing until we find one we can win.

Crucially, there is no limit to the possible forms of excellence. So, while the number of positions on any single dimension of status may be fixed, there is no reason why dimensions of status cannot be multiplied indefinitely. It does not in fact require a violation of mathematical law to produce more high-status positions, for it is possible to produce new status dimensions.

This seems to ignore the fact that some status games are more significant than others and that ultimately society confers significance on these things; it's not a product of an individual's force of will.

I really want to believe that Wilkinson's right about this:

We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time. We can, like Gauguin, quit law and family to paint naked natives in Tahiti. Or, better, we can move the family to a quieter place where houses are cheap and schools are good. (‘Is this heaven?’ ‘No, Iowa.’) If we are aggrieved by the rigours of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat.

But the problem is not that we internalize the rat race and are unable to let it go and be happy. The problem is the races we want to run are not necessarily recognized as relevant socially, and ultimately, the pursuit of social recognition is not a race we can easily opt out of, no matter how libertarian we seek to become.

No matter how hard I might want thorough knowledge of Dylan albums or 18th century novels to be an important status signifier, in the eyes of most everyone I encounter or ever will encounter, it's not and it's not going to be. So I can be king of an insignificant hill, put my blinders on, block out the rest of the world and be satisfied with that -- or as Wilkinson spins it, "The cultural fragmentation some critics lament is precisely what liberates us from unavoidable zero-sum positional conflict. Surfer dudes don’t compete with Star Trek geeks for status." Apparently you use the Internet to discover a niche in which you can dominate and excel.

In his view, the benefit of technology is precisely the alienation and isolation it produces -- it allows you to construct a fiefdom in which your own predilections and proclivities are the defining traits of importance and influence. But if you are the only resident of that fiefdom, you only influence yourself. This solipsistic game gets boring, just as playing chess versus yourself does. Of course positional conflict isn't unavoidable. It only becomes so if there are actually others present to position yourself against. If you want to take part in an intensely competitive society like ours in a meaningful, recognized way. If you change the rules of the game to make social recognition an insignificant by-product to the pursuit of the joy of winning, rather than its very essence, then yes, status games are not zero-sum. They are just pointless. And I generally disagree with the logic here -- I think zero-sum positionality infects these niches once we import the urge to dominate them for status purposes. Under the spell of capitalism's standard operating procedures (creative destruction for growth, etc.) we bring the fashion imperative to spheres of culture that were once immune to it; and then suddenly it's not about the thing itself but where you stand in relation to others on the competitive field supplied by that thing. That thing recedes in significance, and becomes interchangeable with any other.

Still, Wilkinson's ideas, if not feasible as an overall strategy, do make for good tactics for resisting positionality in everyday life, for imagining alternatives, for trying to conceive other means for deriving recognition. They sound a lot like the ideas the downshifters put forward. (To get utopian for a moment, these individual efforts are likely the minuscule building blocks for building a different kind of society, one less reliant on the fashion and novelty within consumerism for perpetuating economic growth. Wilkinson's right that a paternalistic state wishing competition into the cornfield and guaranteeing equal outcomes isn't the solution.) The key is to opportunistically seize on those moments wherein one escapes the pressures to rank oneself and is lost in an activity.

Every week I get together with friends and we play music in a practice space we rent. It doesn't matter, to me, if anyone else ever hears the music we make, because right now it's an oasis for me where those pressures of positionality are suspended, held at bay. Suddenly I'm in a world where collective action is all; in our all too temporary society of three there is for those two hours no distinction between personal and social goals, and recognition is as immediate and reciprocal as a picked-up change, an established groove that's otherwise inexpressible and intangible.

Addendum: At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell takes similar issue to Wilkinson's argument: "Wilkinson’s claim implies, unless I misunderstand him badly, that it doesn’t matter very much to me if I’m a despised cubicle rat who can’t afford a nice car and gets sneered at by pretty girls, because when I go home and turn on my PC, I suddenly become a level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass! Now this example is loaded – but it’s loaded to demonstrate a serious sociological point that Wilkinson doesn’t even begin to address. These indefinitely proliferating dimensions of status competition are connected to each other in their own implicit meta-ranking, which is quite well understood by all involved.… In short, people are highly aware of the relative rankings of their obsessions."