Winner takes all: Success enhances taste for luxury goods, study suggests

sc604 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 14:52:15 +0000

While we may sometimes make expensive purchases because of the high quality of a product, these items often represent status symbols, a phenomenon termed ‘conspicuous consumption’. Evolutionary psychologists claim that conspicuous consumption may be comparable to ostentatious behaviours or elaborate physical characteristics seen in the animal kingdom. A peacock’s tail may be energetically costly to build, but may serve as an indicator of genetic quality; similarly, conspicuous consumption may represent a costly display of wealth that serves to increase an individual’s social status.

Previous studies have suggested that testosterone plays a key role in human social status seeking, with elevated levels of the hormone being associated with more dominant and aggressive behaviour in men. It has also been suggested that testosterone levels increase in response to an individual winning a competition, and fall in response to losing.

In a study published today in the journal Scientific Reports, Yin Wu, at the time a PhD student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in collaboration with researchers from London Business School, ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford, and ̽��ֱ�� of Vienna, led an investigation into the effects of social status and testosterone levels on conspicuous consumption. Dr Wu tested the effects of winning or losing a competitive version of the game Tetris on the behaviour and testosterone levels of 166 male volunteers – although in fact, while the participants thought they were competing against each other in two-player games, they were randomly assigned as winners or losers.

After playing the Tetris game, the researchers asked the participants how much they would be willing to pay for luxury items such as expensive cars, from 10% of its retail price up to 120%. They found that winners tended to be willing to pay more for these items than losers. This effect was confirmed with some status products made in the laboratory, such that winners were more willing than losers to pay for a Harvard ̽��ֱ�� T-shirt.

Next, participants were asked to attribute positive and negative words to the items. This task helps assess the implicit value that participants assigned to the objects – in experiments, this is used to measure attitudes that people are unwilling to reveal publicly, and in the field of consumer psychology, these measures can predict brand preferences, usage, and recognition. ̽��ֱ��current study supported the finding that winners attach greater value than losers to luxury items.

Finally, the researchers measured the participants’ testosterone levels. Contrary to expectations, winning and losing had no observable effect on testosterone levels. This suggests that testosterone does not play a role in conspicuous consumption.

“Winning a competition, which we know is associated with feeling a sense of a higher social status, seems to drive individuals towards conspicuous consumption, making them more willing to pay for luxury items,” says Dr Wu, now based at Shenzhen ̽��ֱ�� in China. “However, we were surprised that testosterone levels did not change with winning or losing, and so testosterone does not seem to be driving the effects on conspicuous consumption.”

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that one way in which winning leads to conspicuous consumption is through an enhanced sense of entitlement among winners, the feeling that as winners they are more deserving of preferential treatment than others: the Tetris ‘winners’ may have felt more deserving of the high-status products and also of fair treatment in the ultimatum game. This would be consistent with findings that feelings of superiority over others arising from hard work and success enhance the desire to purchase luxury brands, as individuals see the luxury goods as a reward.

“We are not only interested in examining what people are willing to do to win, but also in understanding the consequences of winning on people’s everyday behaviour,” says Dr Amos Schurr, a behavioural economist at Ben-Gurion ̽��ֱ�� of the Negev, Israel, who was not part of this study.

“Social competition is pervasive in our daily life – whether it is in terms of fighting for the top job, competing for friends and popularity or even growing up in a wealthy, successful family,” says Dr Wu. “Our study demonstrates that winning a competition leads people to prefer high-status products, possibly through an increased feeling of entitlement or deservingness.”

Concerning the null findings on the testosterone levels, the researchers suggested that competition-induced testosterone fluctuations may be hard to detect, and so they are carrying out further work to test the effects of testosterone on conspicuous consumption in their on-going project.

This study was conducted at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, funded by Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust.

Reference
Wu, Y et al. ̽��ֱ��role of social status and testosterone in human conspicuous consumption. Scientific Reports; 18 September 2017; DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-12260-3

Footballers in flashy cars, City workers in Armani suits, reality TV celebrities sipping expensive champagne while sitting in hot tubs: what drives people to purchase luxury goods? New research suggests that it may be a sense of being a ‘winner’ – but that contrary to expectations, it is not driven by testosterone.

Social competition is pervasive in our daily life – whether it is in terms of fighting for the top job, competing for friends and popularity or even growing up in a wealthy, successful family.

Yin Wu

David Villarreal Fernández

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Addiction treatment – genes can play a part

bjb42 — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:14:42 +0000

Professor Barry Everitt and Dr Jonathan Lee of the MRC-Wellcome Behaviour and Clinical Neuroscience Institute have shown that they can selectively impair memories associated with drug addiction and PTSD by inactivating a specific gene in the brain.

Anxiety disorders, such as phobias and PTSD, and also drug addiction are disorders characterised by the persistent impact on behaviour of memories laid down earlier in the lives of affected individuals.

In the case of drug addiction, addicts crave drugs and suffer relapse not just because of the alluring high of drugs, but also because they are compelled by the powerful, haunting memory associations with the stimuli closely associated with their drug taking (e.g. the paraphernalia of syringes, aluminium foil, specific people) and, indeed, the environment in which their drug taking occurs.

For many years it has been assumed that once memories are formed, they become fixed – ‘consolidated’ – forever. However, recent research has shown that when memories are reactivated through recall, or simply being exposed to stimuli that elicit memories, as in drug addicts, the memories become malleable and subject to disruption by certain drugs.

Everitt and Lee saw a long-lasting change in behaviour of rats that had had a specific gene in the amygdala – a part of the brain where emotional memories are formed and stored – inactivated. Of course, selective inactivation of genes in the brain is not a viable treatment option and so current research is aimed at identifying the neurochemical mechanisms in the brain that underlie memory reconsolidation and thereby drugs that can be taken systemically to interfere with those mechanisms. ̽��ֱ��great advantage of this potential new treatment is that it could be given on very few, perhaps even one, occasion, thereby eliminating the need for chronic drug therapy and all the problems that can bring.

www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/BCNI

Imagine a one-off cure for drug addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) instead of today’s life-long therapy regimes.

Credit joeflintham on flickr

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Winner takes all: Success enhances taste for luxury goods, study suggests

Addiction treatment – genes can play a part