“When the hell did advertisements get so good? They’re like narcotics”
- 3 O’Clock Things, Song by AJR
If you are as big a fan of Glenn Geher as I am, you may remember Cavegirl Claire. She made an appearance on his blog over a year ago giving advice on how to survive the pandemic. (And if you are reading this, perhaps you paid attention to what she had to say!) Even if you don’t remember, Claire has returned to point out another area where we modern “house-dwellers” could use a bit of advice: The realm of consumerism.
Modern life can be pretty lonely, but it has not always been this way for us humans. When we were tree-dwellers, for example, we were alone in our heads, but we were not physically by ourselves (since we wandered in bands of 40-50.) Then, during the time we were cave-dwellers, we were not physically OR psychologically alone: We foraged for food in groups of around 100 and essentially developed the ability to think with one, single, foraging-focused mind. But in modern times, many people feel both physically alone (thanks to the pandemic) and also alone in our own heads (thanks to the internet.) House-dwellers, as “advanced” as we like to pretend to be, are not doing all that great emotionally. Many of us are feeling pretty scared and isolated...and there is a group of individuals that is taking full advantage of this circumstance -- Advertisers.
Now as much as I respect and admire Glenn, he is not the only researcher I dig. Fairly recently, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (two researchers I also personally know) accepted a prestigious award from the country of France for their contributions to the field of Evolutionary Psychology. During their online acceptance speech, John talked about how he sees the brain as a place that houses a series of motivational systems. I bring this up because sometimes I view the world from the perspective of my inner cave-dweller Claire, and she has brought to my attention how often advertisers are using certain evolutionarily-based motivators to trick people into buying things. Certainly tricking people into buying things is nothing new for advertisers, but some of the tactics in use lately are especially effective. In fact, Cavegirl Claire is feeling somewhat harassed. Here are five evolutionary-based motivations advertisers are using to get us to buy stuff.
Safety - Every living thing likes to feel safe, and even though we are the top of the food-chain, humans are no different. Fear of Missing Out/FOMO is real, and being excluded from a trend makes Claire feel left behind -- even abandoned! But avoiding that scary, isolated feeling does not seem like a logical reason to buy things (to modern me.)
Boredom - When we look at screens (tablets, phones, computers,) oftentimes we are doing it because we are bored. Boredom does not feel good, and I think advertisers know it. When we feel bored, our inner cave-dwellers want us modern peeps to change things up. In Claire's way of thinking, when things get too predictable, I could be taken out by something that has been stalking us for a while. I should change a routine before we get taken out -- but updating my patio, buying a new car, or dying my hair green is not what my inner cave-dweller had in mind!
Revenge - From Claire’s point of view, revenge is an accurate way to describe “Keeping up with the Joneses.” My inner cave-dweller (and yours) wants things to be fair. So when our neighbors get something new, we instinctively want the resources around us to be distributed evenly...so we might go out of our way to get that new thing too.
Scarcity - When advertisers say “Act now! They’re going fast!” Cavegirl Claire hears “Participate or die!” Competition probably existed both between groups of cave-dwellers and between individual cave-dwellers, but the more often we cooperated with each other, the better off we were.
Efficiency - When two problems are solved with one new, special tool, or when we imagine ourselves not having to work very hard to get a job done, it is hard for us to resist buying that new, special tool. That is because way back when, using the least amount of energy to get things done increased our chances of staying alive (since we did not always know when we were going to eat next.) But Claire is not sure, exactly, what modern people are conserving their energy for. After all, it's pretty rare in modern life that we are being hunted or having to hunt for food.
The Bottom Line - When advertisers try to trick us into buying things using evolutionarily-based motivators, we need to try and remember what epoch we are living in. We are not experiencing the stressful conditions our cave-dwelling ancestors once did. Yes, our modern living conditions are certainly stressful, but buying a bunch of things we have been strategically convinced we need is not going to help us going forward. And now that you have become aware how your cave-dweller habits might be involved in your impulses to buy, you might find it easier NOT to be tricked by advertising.
References
Bench, S.W. & Lench, H.C. (2013). On the Function of Boredom. Behavioral Sciences 3(3), 459-472. https://www.ncbi.nlm.
Bhui, R., Chudek, M. & Henrich, J. (2018). How exploitation launched human cooperation. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, (2019) 73-78. https://link.springer.
Fromm, E. (1941). Escape From Freedom. Farrar and Rinehart, New York.
Henrich, J & Gil-White, F.J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22 (3) 165-196
Nunn, N. (2020). The historical roots of economic society. ScienceMag, Online. https://science.
van Vugt, M. (2017.) Evolutionary Psychology: Theoretical Foundations for the Study of Organizations. Journal of Organizational Design, Research Primer Series. https://jorgdesign.
Yarrow, K. (2016). The Science of How Marketers (and Politicians) Manipulate Us. Everyday Money, Time Online. http://time.com/money/
Zajonc, R.B., (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. http://psycnet.
© 2021 Penny Fie. All rights reserved.
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