nonfiction
Douglas T. Kenrick, Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. If you want to know what evolutionary psychology is up to these days, at least in its popular face, this wouldn’t be a bad start. He’s very impressed with his rebelliousness against political correctness. He says of one experiment that his results show that “people” differ depending on the characteristics of the people they’re seeing; oh wait, it’s just “men” who differ in their reactions. This implicit definition is not conducive to trust on my part. The major flaw of his discussion of gender differences related to mating strategies is the repeated statements (the number must be in the hundreds) that men and women differ in various reactions. What he never clarifies: By how much? With what overlap? (The excellent Delusions of Gender is a good place to look for asking how to read studies "proving" gender differences.) The book is silent on race except for how we can manipulate emotions to increase or decrease implicit bias. So, he defends the gender history of the field but not its racial follies.
There’s also an unfortunate caricature of behavioral economists as thinking that people are idiots (he uses this term and others), as if predictable mistakes given certain conditions were some sort of moral flaw that he’s saving us from accepting as our lot. Instead, he argues, such heuristics are the evolutionary equivalent of the invisible hand: our stupid decisions promote genetic survival. This might be true sometimes, but it doesn’t make too much sense as a general rule. On his own terms, numerous conditions-such as the ability to compare ourselves with the richest, most attractive people in the world rather than the local highs-weren’t present in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, and thus responses adaptive in that environment might destroy our reproductive success in this one. Or, if we’re so smart, why do some of us become heroin addicts? By shortchanging behavioral economics because he’s so insistent on evolutionary explanations (for reasons that read kind of like projection based on standard criticisms of evo psych), he ends up both Candide-like and suggesting a kind of fixity I don’t even think he really believes in. Near the end, he acknowledges that the field has spent too much time on sex differences, even though he’s written a book mostly about them, and there’s plenty in the book about the flexibility of human responses given different circumstances.
Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy: Lindstrom is a proponent of using neuroscience and neuroimaging in particular as part of marketing, because we’re so bad at articulating why we make the choices we make. He can play fast and loose with the evidence-for example, he uses brainscans of smokers whose “reward centers,” associated with pleasurable experiences and thus with desire for cigarettes, lit up at the sight of graphic cigarette warnings to argue that such warnings backfired. But his evidence doesn’t prove that. It might prove that even graphic images don’t deter addicted smokers, but it doesn’t show that such smokers smoke more because of the warnings, or that nonsmokers are more likely to convert into smokers because of the warnings. Indeed, other research he discusses found that Marlboro red and other non-logoed reminders did the best job of stimulating cigarette cravings, arguably because without the explicit brand name people let their guards down, not realizing they were being advertised to. That suggests we need more regulation of cigarette brands, including their use of colors and trade dress, not less.
Still, there’s plenty of note here, including the result that pure product placement in entertainment doesn’t work at all unless it’s well-integrated into the story, at which point it does increase brand awareness, which is a critical waypoint to brand liking. Sex, however, distracts people from the brand actually providing the sexual ad, but he nonetheless expects the use of sex in ads to increase-he doesn’t say so outright, but I think the idea is that executives like the look of such ads and will therefore approve them, because they’re no more rational than any other human.
He’s uninterested in non-advertising sources of meaning, arguing, for example, that we buy products “Made in Japan” because of their association with high-tech and newness. While he acknowledges that this meaning is the opposite of what it was five decades ago, he’s indifferent to the changes in production-spurred, not incidentally, by substantial government intervention-that gave Japanese products these associations. This is, I think, connected with his ultimate idea that advertisers will increasingly use neuromarketing to encourage more consumption and will be increasingly successful at doing so. He says at the end-without any evidence at all, and certainly against the weight of what I’ve seen in behavioral economics-that if we, the audience, know this is going on we will be able to make rational choices about consumption. But then he says what he really means: “what choice do we have?” Neuromarketing is going to happen to us, and so our only options will be to choose how to max out our credit cards. That we might make a societal-and governmental-decision not to allow this route is inconceivable. And as a practical matter I’m not sure he’s wrong.
Patrick Keefe, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream: Centered around the ill-fated Golden Venture, this is a story about the desire to immigrate and the willingness of people to profit from that desire, despite both illegality and substantial material risks-most notably to those being smuggled into the U.S. Keefe comes off as highly sympathetic to the desire to enter the U.S.-being able to forget the circumstances of one’s own ancestors’ arrival is a privilege-but he doesn’t lose sight of the callousness of the smugglers.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
There’s also an unfortunate caricature of behavioral economists as thinking that people are idiots (he uses this term and others), as if predictable mistakes given certain conditions were some sort of moral flaw that he’s saving us from accepting as our lot. Instead, he argues, such heuristics are the evolutionary equivalent of the invisible hand: our stupid decisions promote genetic survival. This might be true sometimes, but it doesn’t make too much sense as a general rule. On his own terms, numerous conditions-such as the ability to compare ourselves with the richest, most attractive people in the world rather than the local highs-weren’t present in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, and thus responses adaptive in that environment might destroy our reproductive success in this one. Or, if we’re so smart, why do some of us become heroin addicts? By shortchanging behavioral economics because he’s so insistent on evolutionary explanations (for reasons that read kind of like projection based on standard criticisms of evo psych), he ends up both Candide-like and suggesting a kind of fixity I don’t even think he really believes in. Near the end, he acknowledges that the field has spent too much time on sex differences, even though he’s written a book mostly about them, and there’s plenty in the book about the flexibility of human responses given different circumstances.
Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy: Lindstrom is a proponent of using neuroscience and neuroimaging in particular as part of marketing, because we’re so bad at articulating why we make the choices we make. He can play fast and loose with the evidence-for example, he uses brainscans of smokers whose “reward centers,” associated with pleasurable experiences and thus with desire for cigarettes, lit up at the sight of graphic cigarette warnings to argue that such warnings backfired. But his evidence doesn’t prove that. It might prove that even graphic images don’t deter addicted smokers, but it doesn’t show that such smokers smoke more because of the warnings, or that nonsmokers are more likely to convert into smokers because of the warnings. Indeed, other research he discusses found that Marlboro red and other non-logoed reminders did the best job of stimulating cigarette cravings, arguably because without the explicit brand name people let their guards down, not realizing they were being advertised to. That suggests we need more regulation of cigarette brands, including their use of colors and trade dress, not less.
Still, there’s plenty of note here, including the result that pure product placement in entertainment doesn’t work at all unless it’s well-integrated into the story, at which point it does increase brand awareness, which is a critical waypoint to brand liking. Sex, however, distracts people from the brand actually providing the sexual ad, but he nonetheless expects the use of sex in ads to increase-he doesn’t say so outright, but I think the idea is that executives like the look of such ads and will therefore approve them, because they’re no more rational than any other human.
He’s uninterested in non-advertising sources of meaning, arguing, for example, that we buy products “Made in Japan” because of their association with high-tech and newness. While he acknowledges that this meaning is the opposite of what it was five decades ago, he’s indifferent to the changes in production-spurred, not incidentally, by substantial government intervention-that gave Japanese products these associations. This is, I think, connected with his ultimate idea that advertisers will increasingly use neuromarketing to encourage more consumption and will be increasingly successful at doing so. He says at the end-without any evidence at all, and certainly against the weight of what I’ve seen in behavioral economics-that if we, the audience, know this is going on we will be able to make rational choices about consumption. But then he says what he really means: “what choice do we have?” Neuromarketing is going to happen to us, and so our only options will be to choose how to max out our credit cards. That we might make a societal-and governmental-decision not to allow this route is inconceivable. And as a practical matter I’m not sure he’s wrong.
Patrick Keefe, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream: Centered around the ill-fated Golden Venture, this is a story about the desire to immigrate and the willingness of people to profit from that desire, despite both illegality and substantial material risks-most notably to those being smuggled into the U.S. Keefe comes off as highly sympathetic to the desire to enter the U.S.-being able to forget the circumstances of one’s own ancestors’ arrival is a privilege-but he doesn’t lose sight of the callousness of the smugglers.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.