Spent

Spin-off ideas from Geoffrey Miller’s new book…

This book is based in evolutionary psychology, or evolutionary sexual selection psychology. Socializing is beneficial for our survival as human animals, but better for the high status individuals than for the low status ones. So we vie to be high status and have high status offspring – males and females alike, similarly, but differently… Through their real and perceived effects, general traits are amplified over generations through differential mating and survival success. Beauty, health, and fertility are clear and easy to accept examples – it is easy to imagine handsome, healthy, vigorous pre-historic men having more kids than ugly, sickly, infertile men. It is also easy to imagine healthier, more fertile women having more kids. It is only slightly more difficult to image prehistoric men and women who were nicer, more conscientious, more intelligent, more social, and more risk taking had more kids.

In tight, social, tribal communities like the societies humans evolved in, it is easy to be accurately evaluated by everyone in your community. It is not necessary to advertise your qualities in any other way except the way you interact and live your life, and possibly through ornamentation and possessions. The qualities themselves result in more alliances, more friends, and more lovers. Emphasizing and advertising these traits through ornamentation results in more friends and lovers, unless, of course, everyone else is advertising just as much as you… Then you up the ante and result in an arms race – where everyone is striving to seem better than average, or where those that seem better win more friends and lovers. And all of this is done more or less unconsciously through our likings, preferences, urges, wants, and needs and is monitored through our self-esteem, or sense of social worth.

How do you increase your sense of social worth (self-esteem) in a world with virtually no face-to-face interaction with the 10,000 people we see or pass by every day? Through ornamentation and possessions? Can I sell you on the idea that this thing (whatever it may be) will make you stand-out of the crowd as distinctively intelligent, fun, risk taking, or conscientious? Yes, I can. Will you feel better and have a higher self esteem? Yes, probably, but only for a little while because your social status will not really be raised among those who know you – at least not for very long. Those who do not know you do not interact with you enough to affirm your status sense, so you lose confidence in the boost. Unless, of course, the product actually changes the way in which you interact with the people you know, it has no effect on your social worth.