Spent

I’ve been reading a fascinating book called Spent, written by Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist/marketing consultant from the University of New Mexico.

I recall a weird dinner discussion I had a few years ago with an OZA colleague in which I argued that all human behavior comes down to one of two motivations:

1.  Avoiding death
2. Getting laid

I have found sort of a kindred spirit in Miller.  This book focuses mostly on motivation #2.  He discusses how cars, cosmetics, online gaming, televisions, and other consumer products signal our evolutionary fitness to other people.

He also discusses the so-called “Central Six” traits (general intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extraversion) in a chapter called “Traits that Consumers Flaunt and Marketers Ignore.”

Miller occasionally takes keen insights and pushes them to a credibility-stretching extreme.  For example, if you get a tattoo, are you really doing so to prove that you are fit enough to not die from an infection?  Even at an unconscious level?  Perhaps, but I’m not quite buying it.

Nevertheless, on balance, it is a thought-provoking book that is quite difficult to put down.   Lots of insights here for marketers eager to think creatively about what motivates consumers.

Getting in Rhythm

The July/August issue of Scientific American Mind contains an article about the role of music in our lives.  Among the highlights:

• Music is truly the universal language.   When people in an African village who had never heard western music listened to excerpts of classical piano music, they described the mood of the excerpts in the same ways that Western listeners did.

 

• Perhaps because of this, music is a form of social bonding.  When we go Christmas caroling or sing “Happy Birthday,” we create empathetic connections with the other members of our group.

 

•  Music can affect our emotions more than words in many circumstances.  Favorite tunes have been found to reduce pain during surgery and childbirth, and to reduce levels of agitation in Alzheimer’s patients.

 

There is a lot more to the article than this, of course.  If interested, you can pick up a copy of the magazine or download it here.

Or for a deeper exploration of the topic of the role of music in our lives, check out The Singing Neanderthals by James Mithen.

The colors of good and evil

Metaphors associating white with goodness (“as pure as the driven snow”) and black with sadness or evil (“the dark side”) are prevalent in the English language (and probably in other languages as well).   As detailed recently in The Economist, a pair of researchers at the University of Virginia recently tried to determine how hard-wired humans are to associate white with good and black with bad.

They conducted an Implicit Association Test in which words associated with goodness (like “virtuous” and “honesty”) and words associated with badness (like “evil” and “sin”) were presented in either white or black fonts on a computer screen.  Subjects were asked to identify the color of the word as it appeared on the screen.

When the “good” words were presented in black, participants took significantly longer to identify the color of the word than when they were presented in white.   And the study revealed a similar effect with the “bad” words – it took longer to identify the color of those words when they were presented in white.

The researchers suggest these findings have implications for helping us understand racial prejudice.  In fact, they are conducting a follow-up study right now to determine whether the hard-wired negative associations between black-bad and white-good vary depending on one’s race.  Initial results suggest they do not.

The chess metaphor

Metaphors are everywhere.  As the author of The Immortal Game: A History of Chess states, “So much about the experience of living is intangible, we need choice comparisons and symbols to help frame our thinking, and expand those frames, to make more and more sense of what we see, hear and feel.”

The author explains how the “chess metaphor” helped to alter the dynamic of social relationships during the feudal era in Europe.   Around 1300, a monk named Jacobus de Cessolis wrote a wildly popular book called Libor de Moribus that used chess as a metaphor for life. 

Prior to the dissemination of the ideas in this book, the prominent metaphor for the state was the human body, which depicted citizens as subordinate body parts and the King as the head.   If the King decided the body should walk, the body would walk.  No questions.   The king was in charge.

However, the “chess metaphor,” as popularized by Cessolis, frames each citizen as an independent entity “bound to the state by rules rather than biology.”   The king remains the most important piece because its “capture” marks the end of the game.  But the king is almost completely dependent upon the defensive and offensive powers of lesser pieces. 

The author claims the “chess metaphor” helped knights, shopkeepers, and farmers become more mindful of their interdependence and the importance of their roles in society, while simultaneously forcing nobles to reconsider somewhat the brutal nature of their relationships with those of lower classes. 

In essence, through the chess metaphor, people began to see their own lives played out on the board in front of them and it changed their patterns of thinking.