Spent

I finished Geoffrey Miller's "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior" a few weeks ago, and found it to present an enlightened and useful view of human behavior, especially in the context of markets. My problem is that Miller's evolutionary psychology seems to explain too much -- like viruses are to doctors, and vortexes are to aerodynamics, EP explains all of human behavior, and there isn't much you can do about it (like viruses and vortexes).

Still, it is such a sexy idea, and does seem to have an explanatory power. One example is Miller's characterization of human personality into 6 categories. The first and most dominant is intelligence, the character that is sometimes quantified by IQ tests. The other five are signalled by the acronym "OCASE", which stands for Openness, Contentiousness, Agreeableness, Stability, and Extroversion. Miller claims that all other human personality characteristics can be factored onto these five elements, that these five elements have a normal-like distribution across individuals, and that there a benefits and disabilities that accrue to individual that sit at opposite ends of these base characteristics. For example, an extremely open person would have opportunities to interact with more environments, situations, and people than would less open person, but at a cost of increased contraction of various aliments, both phyical and mental. The opportunity cost of less openness is to forgo those extreme experiences. Most people will be neither very open or very close, and their behavior may vary from time to time.

Having discussed these six personality characterisics, Miller then proceeds to tie them to marketing and consumption through the idea of signalling. Many of the discretionary products that we purchase are done so to signal the type of person we are, letting potential mates, allies, adversaries, and so on know that we have such and such characteristics. Miller is astonished and somewhat disappointed that marketer have yet to discover his personality basis. Marketers prefer instead to continually refactor markets into smaller and more precisely defined segments that have little to do at first blush to Miller's basis elements. This is testable, I think. One could score people on the basis, then use the score to predict the kinds of articles a person is likely to have purchased or will purchase.

It isn't clear that these six elements are in fact a good basis for human personality. Miller himself seems to want to refactor the "extroversion" element into two qualities, one for real personal extroversion, and the other to represent a kind of personal energy or personal initiative. However, this is also something that could be tested, but determining what is left unexplained by the model.

Still, I have had fun in the past couple of weeks estimating individual OCASE levels for the folks that I deal with on a regular basis. Moreover, Miller suggests ways that we might overcome overconsumption by acknowlegding the signalling purpose to our shopping, and looking for alternatives. I especially like it when he suggest more do-it-yourself activities. In all, Miller's is exposing an interesting and possibly useful theory, his writing is engaging and sometimes over the top, and his book was very enjoyable.

Bill