More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Of course, you might have to be careful not to overdo this kind of signalling. Putting expensive armchairs outside might lead people – not unreasonably – to conclude that the establishment is also expensive.
The advertisements which bees find useful are flowers – and if you think about it, a flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.
Flowers spend a great deal of their resources convincing customers that they are worth visiting. Their target audience is bees, or other insects, birds or animals that may help to pollinate the flower –
orchids are the tourist restaurants of the floral world – they rely on people visiting only once so are less worried about ripping off visitors, because they know they are never going to come back anyway.
It seems unlikely that a company would spend scarce resources advertising a product they believed to be bad – it would simply lead to the unpopularity of a bad product spreading more quickly. Moreover, a company with a long-established reputation for high-quality products has much more to lose from customer disappointment than a company with no reputation.
Caribbean proverb, ‘Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.’
In advertising, a large budget does not prove a product is good, but it does establish that the advertiser is confident enough in the future popularity of the product to spend some of his resources promoting
Since at the moment you make a purchase decision, the advertiser knows more about his product than you do, a costly demonstration of faith by the seller may well be the most reliable indicator of whether something is at least worthy of consideration
In a letter to a friend, Darwin remarked that ‘the sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail’ made him ‘physically sick’. The reason for this strange aversion was that the male peacock seemed a living refutation of the theory of evolution through natural selection
a quality that starts off being prized as a useful proxy for fitness becomes exaggerated to an absurd degree, a process sometimes known as Fisherian runaway selection. In animals this can be extraordinarily wasteful. It seems that competition over antler size – which led to them ultimately growing to insane proportions – may have led to the extinction of the Irish elk.
status-signalling
any provincial solicitor who persisted in writing letters by hand became a tailless peacock.
In the early stages of any significant innovation, there may be an awkward stage where the new product is no better than what it is seeking to replace. For instance, early cars were in most respect worse than horses. Early aircraft were insanely dangerous. Early washing machines were unreliable.
The tension between sexual and natural selection – and the inter-play between them – may be the really big story here. Many innovations would not have got off the ground without the human instinct for status-signalling,fn7 so might it be the same in nature?
Geoffrey Miller says, might sexual selection provide the ‘early stage funding’ for nature’s best experiments?
Yes, costly signalling can lead to economic inefficiency, but at the same time this inefficiency establishes valuable social qualities such as trustworthiness and commitment
Why are people happy with the idea that nature has an accounting function, but much less comfortable with the idea that it also has a marketing function? Should we despise flowers because they are less efficient than grasses?
as neuroscientists have observed, we don’t so much choose brands as use them to aid choice.
Robin Wight calls this instinct ‘the Reputation Reflex’ – although instinctive and largely unconscious, it is perfectly rational, because we intuitively understand that someone with a reputable brand identity has more to lose from selling a bad product
brands tend to focus on hair-splitting distinctions between fairly good products. We often forget that, without this assurance of quality, there simply isn’t enough trust for markets to function at all, which means that perfectly good ideas can fail.
My analogy between signalling in the biological world and advertising in the commercial world may explain something I have noticed for years: if you talk to economists, they tend to hate advertising and barely understand it at all, while if you talk to biologists they understand it perfectly.
often necessary to use oblique approaches to change the behaviour of others.
We used aspirin to reduce pain for a century without having the faintest idea of why it worked.
placebos work even if you tell people they are placebos.
In the words of Jonathan Haidt,fn1 1 ‘The conscious mind thinks it’s the Oval Office, when in reality it’s the press office.’ By this he means that we believe we are issuing executive orders, while most of the time we are actually engaged in hastily constructing plausible post-rationalisations to explain decisions taken somewhere else, for reasons we do not understand.
The strangest aspect of it is that we all spend a considerable amount of time and money essentially signalling to ourselves: many of the things we do are not be intended to advertise anything about ourselves to others – we are, in effect, advertising to ourselves.fn7 The evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers to such activities as ‘self-placebbing.’
The intriguing thing about Uber as an innovation was that no one really asked for it before it existed.fn5 Its success lay in a couple of astute psychological hacks: the fact that no money changes hands during a trip is one of the most powerful – it makes using it feel like a service rather than a transaction.
In countries including Korea and China, accidents at intersections have been reduced by simply displaying the number of seconds remaining before the lights turn green.fn9
one way to understand military paraphernalia of uniforms, trumpets, drums and regalia is to consider its value as a ‘bravery placebo’.
It turns out that more is spent on female beauty than on education.
a fetish for expensive wines seems to me entirely about self-placebbing or status seeking, and little to do with enjoyment – after all, is a great wine really all that much nicer than a good one?
One of Nicholas Humphrey’s rules about what makes an effective placebo is that there must be some effort, scarcity or expense involved.
perhaps we notice the small tin in which Red Bull is sold and unconsciously infer, ‘That must be really potent stuff: they have to sell it in a small can because if you drank the full 330ml, you’d probably go doolally.’
perhaps it is necessary to deviate from standard rationality and do something apparently illogical to attract the attention of the subconscious and create meaning
Opera is an inefficient way of telling a story. Even politeness is effectively a mode of interaction that involves an amount of unnecessary effort. And advertising is a hugely expensive way of conveying that you are trustworthy.
If you look at behaviours to hack the unconscious, they all seem to have an element that is wasteful, unpleasant or downright silly.
do these various things work despite the fact that they are illogical, or do they work precisely because they are? And if our unconscious instincts are programmed to respond to and to generate behaviours precisely because they deviate from economic optimality, what might be the evolutionary reason for this? It seems rather like the lesson that is taught to aspiring journalists: ‘Dog Bites Man’ is not news, but ‘Man Bites Dog’ is. Meaning is disproportionately conveyed by things that are unexpected or illogical, while narrowly logical things convey no information at all. And this brings us full
...more
BETTER TO BE VAGUELY RIGHT THAN PRECISELY WRONG
Keynes once said, ‘It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong’, and evolution seems to be on his side.
We fetishise precise numerical answers because they make us look scientific – and we crave the illusion of certainty.
In scenario A, the door is opened by a vicar.fn4 In scenario B, the door is opened by a man naked except for a pair of underpants. The car has not changed, but what has changed is its provenance.
economist and political scientist Herbert Simon coined the term ‘satisficing’, combining as it does the words ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice’.
the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.
In any complex system, an overemphasis on the importance of some metrics will lead to weaknesses developing in other overlooked ones.
The idea, most simply expressed, is this: ‘People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think Brand A is better, but because they are more certain that it is good.’fn2 This insight is vitally important, but equally important is the realisation that we do not do it consciously.
This distinction matters a great deal, and it is borne out in many fields of decision science. We will pay a disproportionately high premium for the elimination of a small degree of uncertainty
Habit, which can often appear irrational, is perfectly sensible if your purpose is to avoid unpleasant surprises.
Blame, unlike credit, always finds a home,
German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer refers to this mental process as ‘Defensive Decision-Making’ – making a decision which is unconsciously designed not to maximise welfare overall but to minimise the damage to the decision maker in the event of a negative outcome.
The lesson to take from this is that it is possible for something to be objectively wrong but subjectively right.
