Guest Post: The Curious Case of Women’s Conspicuous Consumption
Today’s post is written by Jaime Cloud. It’s the third in a series of guests posts. – Rob K.
Today's guest blogger: Jaime Cloud
Toward the end of my undergraduate education, something happened that changed the way certain women behaved around me—I got engaged. I suddenly began noticing that every time I walked past one particular woman who was also engaged, she would abruptly scratch her face. Always with her left hand. Once when returning to her desk after giving a class presentation, the same woman casually brushed her hand along the length of my desk … her left hand. With the disconfirmation of each alternative explanation that came to mind (e.g., she’s a righty, not a lefty), I became increasingly confident that I had been drafted into a “ring war.”
I was intrigued by this new conflict; what was she trying to signal with her engagement ring? Her status, or, perhaps, her fiancé’s status? Why was she directing that signal toward mated women like me? And most perplexingly, what did she hope would result from signaling whatever it was that she was signaling?
My curiosity resulted in a research program aimed at explaining why people spend money specifically to display their wealth—that is, why people “conspicuously consume” (think Hummer SUVs or red-soled Christian Louboutin heels). Research has shown mate attraction motives to underlie men’s conspicuous consumption (e.g., Griskevicius et al., 2007). The unresolved mystery then is why women conspicuously consume; what do women stand to gain by advertising their wealth?
Recently, a series of studies conducted by Nelissen and Meijers (2011) provided a clue. They showed that conspicuous consumption increases perceptions of status, which in turn elicits benefits from others (e.g., compliance with a request). The majority of their studies focused on the financial benefits associated with conspicuous consumption, approximately half of which demonstrated these benefits indirectly. For example, the authors showed that targets wearing a luxury brand shirt were rated to deserve a higher wage and were able to solicit larger donations for a charity fund than the same targets wearing a generic brand shirt. These results are compelling, but in neither case did money (or material resources, more broadly) flow directly to the target individuals themselves. In the remaining studies, the authors tested financial benefits more directly and showed that conspicuously consuming targets were given more money across two economic games (e.g., the Dictator game) than non-conspicuously consuming targets. Unfortunately, the authors did not report the sex of the target individuals in the economic games. (In one study the target was referred to using male pronouns, so I assume that the targets in all economic game studies were men.) This is an important detail because the conferral of material resources by others might be a sex-specific benefit of status (e.g., awarded to high status men more so than high status women). Any status benefit that solves male-specific adaptive problems more effectively than female-specific adaptive problems should be awarded to high status men more frequently than high status women, and vice versa. Because they so strongly impact men’s mating desirability (Buss, 1989), material resources might be especially valuable to men, and therefore, more likely to be conferred upon high status men than high status women.
In light of this possibility, I conducted a study to confirm that resource conferral by others is indeed associated with status in both men and women (Cloud, in prep). In this study, participants played the Dictator game face-to-face with a confederate who either was or was not conspicuously consuming. (When assigned to the conspicuous condition, male confederates wore a Ralph Lauren collared shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses and female confederates carried a Louis Vuitton tote and wore Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses. When assigned to the non-conspicuous condition, male and female confederates wore generic versions of each of these accessories.) This study employed a fully cross-sexed design, such that male and female participants played against male and female confederates. To determine whether participants shared more money ($9.00) with confederates who were conspicuously consuming than with the same confederates who were not, all participants were “randomly” assigned to the role of the Dictator. Results indicated that conspicuous consumption increased perceptions of status in male and female confederates; however, conspicuous consumption only increased generosity toward male confederates and this effect was most pronounced when the participants were also male. Figure 1 depicts the average amount of money male and female participants shared with same-sex confederates in the conspicuous condition and the non-conspicuous condition (referred to as the “inconspicuous” condition).
Figure 1
These findings suggest that, while high status men receive material resources from other men, high status women do not enjoy the same benefit. There are two potential explanations to account for the sex-specificity of this effect: (1) simply speaking, resource conferral may not be associated with status in women or (2) resource conferral may not be associated with the type of status signaled by conspicuous consumption in women. Conspicuous consumption definitionally requires the expenditure of large sums of money. It is therefore a direct signal of economic status, which affects men’s desirability in the mating market more than women’s (Buss, 1989). For that reason, men may be especially likely to make affiliative gestures (e.g., sharing resources with another) toward conspicuous consumers because doing so may increase their likelihood of benefiting from the conspicuous consumer’s economic status in the future.
As the status benefits associated with conspicuous consumption in men continue to pile up, women’s motivation to conspicuously consume remains a bit of a mystery. But hope is not lost—additional findings by Nelissen and Meijers (2011) indicate that the benefits associated with status in women may simply be less tangible than material resources (and consequently, more difficult to measure). They showed that mall shoppers complied more frequently with a female confederate’s request (“Do you maybe have time to answer a few questions?”) when she was conspicuously consuming than when she was not. In addition to greater compliance, status may elicit other interpersonal benefits in women, such as an increased ability to control the reputations of themselves and others. A coherent picture of women’s status signaling is beginning to emerge, but this area of study remains a relatively untapped niche in need of empirical work.
To this day, I still wonder if ring wars were merely a figment of my imagination. Was I presuming intent when there was none, or was my competitor using her engagement ring to try to extract status benefits from me? And if the latter is the case, what might those status benefits have been? My hope is that these and many other questions relating to female status will soon be answered.
References
Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 12, 1-49.
Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J. M., Sundie, J. M., Cialdini, R. B., Miller, G. F., & Kenrick, D. T. (2007). Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption: When romantic motives elicit strategic costly signals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 85-102.
Nelissen, R. M. A., & Meijers, M. H. C. (2011). Social benefits of luxury brands as costly signals of wealth and status. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32, 343-355.
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