Month: June 2008

During the 1960s, a sudden upsurge in anti-consumerist rebellion threatened the profits of the world’s big corporations. The solution to the problem turned out to be packaging the counter-culture and selling the concept of rebellion back to a receptive youth audience.

How has this become possible? Salon has an excellent book review that discusses how brands are no longer simple trade marks but have become socially meaningful to the point where consumers know enough about the symbolism to be able to communicate complex messages through what we buy.

The book under review is Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker which aims to uncover the psychology and anthropology of social consumerism.

This only makes sense if you argue, as Walker does, that commodities can have real significance. Some objects — trophies, wedding rings, souvenirs from trips — patently do stand for important aspects of our lives. (They have what Walker calls “authentic” meaning.) Most people, however, don’t want to admit that they believe meaning can also be bought, that Converse sneakers make you a cool outsider or that a MacBook demonstrates one’s creativity and unconventionality. Walker thinks we should acknowledge that the things we buy do carry meaning, as long as we also recognize that we’re the ones who gave it to them. A wedding ring, for example, only represents the relationship between two people because those two people (along with the society around them) agree that it does. We are the ones who invest these objects with symbolic power, and, furthermore, to do so is a universal human activity. Kidding ourselves that we relate to the objects and products in our lives in a purely rational way (something scientists have disproved over and over again) leaves us open to unconscious manipulation by advertisers.

In other words, advertising is not solely about selling products but is concerned with constructing meaning around a product so it can be used in the language of social communication.

I was fascinated by a recent psychology study that found that one crucial aspect of ‘communication’ in the language of social consumerism is to avoid symbolism associated with social groups that are perceived as particularly contrary to a person’s self-image.

This is from the Science Blog write-up:

“Although past research has confirmed that consumers often choose products and brands that represent who they are, the current research suggests that consumers also choose products in ways that demonstrate who they are not,” explain Katherine White (University of Calgary) and Darren W. Dahl (University of British Columbia).

Through a series of studies, the researchers found that people are only motivated to avoid products related to “disassociative reference groups” – that is, groups with which the consumer seeks to avoid association. However, this avoidance tendency did not occur in response to products associated with an “outgroup,” or, a group in which the consumer does not belong, but is also not particularly motivated to avoid. For example, the baby boomer who avoids geriatric shoes might not be a basketball fan, but may be neutral about basketball in general and gladly wear basketball shoes.

The Salon book review is well-worth reading on its own and contains many fascinating points, but I’ll be interesting to track down a copy of the book myself as if it’s supported by good research it could be a fascinating look into one of our most implicit but pressurised methods of social communication.

Link to Salon book review.
Link to abstract of study on avoiding negative brand associations.
Link to ScienceBlog write-up.

Albert Bandura’s 1961 ‘Bobo doll experiment‘ examined whether watching aggressive behaviour could trigger violence in children and is one of the most famous studies in in psychology. The video from the experiment is now available online so you can hear Bandura narrating the study as various children knock ten bells out of a plastic doll.

The study has been widely cited in debates about whether TV violence makes children more aggressive, but Bandura never referred to television at all in the article that described the study.

Undoubtedly, the study came at a time of peak concern about the effect of TV on children and so was highly topical, but it also caught the changing mood in psychology as a science.

In 1961 psychology was moving away from behaviourism toward a cognitive approach. Behaviourism suggested that all thought and behaviour arose from stimulus-response or paired-stimulus learning.

In contrast, cognitive psychology argues that the mind is more like a computer, and so processes information and builds internal models of the world.

The Bobo doll experiment was designed as a study of social learning theory, an approach Bandura innovated which attempts to explain how we can learn from others simply by observing them.

While individuals might get rewarded for successfully learning by observation, there are many other instances when this doesn’t happen even though learning still successfully occurs.

Therefore, social learning theory implies that we have internal models, internal motivations and non-conditioned learning – all of which are incompatible with a purely behaviourist approach.

The study could be applied to social concerns about TV and caught the spirit of the new psychology, making it popular with the public and psychologists alike.

Link to video of Bandura’s ‘Bobo doll experiment’ (via MeFi).
Link to full text of the original paper.

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry reprints a poignant poem from the late English physician and poet Edward Lowbury:

To the Madhouse

What she has told us all a hundred times –
That old, unwanted women can again
Be hunted down, accused of pointless crimes
And burned in the public square; that it is vain
To plead ‚Äì or prove ‚Äì one’s innocence; that men
With solemn looks will come into the house,
And say, fearing a scene, `You’ll feel no pain;’
`It’s for your good;’ `We’re not ungenerous;’
What she foretold, when we dismissed her fear
Saying `You dreamed such things’ ‚Äì it now comes true:
The door is open, and the men are here.
Calmly they question her, and with a new
Smiling indifference drag her from the room
And through the streets to the expected doom.

The poem is apparently from one of his collections, entitled New Poems 1935–1989.

The image of the ‘mad woman’ is a recurrent theme in poetry and literature, particularly of times past, and was famously discussed in the 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic.

One of the Wordworth’s most famous poems, The Mad Mother, is, perhaps, the best known example and recounts the words of a young lady who is experiencing what we would now call postpartum psychosis.

On the surface, it has a more cheerful outlook than Lowbury’s poem, although the content of the mother’s words belie the situation of the subject, rending the piece considerably more disturbing in many ways.

The picture on the right is by the 18th century French painter Th√©odore G√©ricault and is entitled Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy and is from his series of ten ‘portraits of the insane’.

At the time it was believed that madness could be seen in the face, and Géricault wanted to capture how different forms of insanity expressed themselves Рa project that preceded later attempts to do the same with photography.

Sadly, only five of the portraits survive, but they remain some of the most important works in the history of portraiture.

Link to short BJP article on the poem.
Link to Wordworth’s poem The Mad Mother.
Link to piece on G√©ricault’s ‘portraits of the insane’.