About 10 years ago there was a debate in Canada about whether Canadian NHL teams should receive a subsidy to be able to compete with big-market American teams. As soon as somebody came up with the soundbite “no millions for millionaires”, the plan promptly died. This makes the phrase a remarkable innovation that you should keep handy in your pocket like that expired condom you’ve been carrying around since high school. If you think that not wanting to subsidize your local cultural elite is a standard reaction, I’ll bet $245 billion in TARP money that you’re wrong.
The Economist reports that a couple of Dutch researchers have studied the effects designer labels have on others’ perception. Specifically, they found that students dressed up in Tommy Hilfiger or Lacoste clothes with prominent labels were ranked as higher status and wealthier than others wearing cheaper labels or none. Although a couple of their experiments didn’t involve money, one asked people what the contrived fashionistas should receive in salary after a fake job interview, one had the students canvassing door-to-door for charity, and one had volunteers playing a variant of the ultimatum game with bonafide €0.10 coins against pictures of more or less fashionably dressed opponents. Those wearing designer clothes got 9% more salary, nearly twice as much charity and 36% more trust in the game.
The explanation provided is that more expensive clothes represent a costly signal. In other words, buying expensive and ostentatious things works like a down payment on your admission fee to the Good-ol’ boys club. Anyone who’s tried to enjoy an evening at the opera in track pants and flip-flops will get this immediately.
Where it gets perverse is in how the researchers structured the study and in how their (partial) test subjects reacted. They chose the brands precisely because they exude an air of luxury (at least in a third-world country like Holland) and are known to be expensive. Money is default proxy for prestige, status, quality, and virtue. It’s perhaps not too surprising that the respondents seemed to equate status and wealth, but giving people who can ostentatiously display their wealth more charity money than people in greater apparent need is kinda like sending bibles to the Vatican, no? Having committed the cardinal sin of not having read the original study, I can’t say if it ever came up, but what would the canvasser have replied if a donor had answered the door and said, “Gee, I don’t know how much I should donate. What did you give?”. The same logic applies to the salary and trust experiments: the more you seem to have, the more people are likely to give you. Millions for millionaires, indeed.
Although they don’t go overboard, the Economist, if not the researchers themselves, makes an argument for why this occurs using evolutionary biology. The gist is that since humans don’t have any built-in costly signals, like a peacock’s tail, we artificially adorn our monkey bodies with, well, pants.
This puts the study in the same ballpark as “SM seeks F, ovulating”, “SM seeks meaty F”, “No SM seeks well-aged F, unless they’re loaded” and “SF seeks Chubby Checker” (major hat tip, TLP). But it’s hard to imagine how human genes, the posts on evolution’s blog, could develop a preference for little cartoon crocodiles on the left breast pocket and for things like Burmese giraffe imposters. If these latter examples are undeniably culturally selected, there’s at least reason to believe that the others are too – at least until evolutionary biologists can spell out the reason in four letters, ACGT. You heard it here first, though not from me: once we got consciousness, all bets were off.