Month: April 2011

Drawing from costly signaling theory, we predicted that luxury consumption enhances status and produces benefits in social interactions. Across seven experiments, displays of luxury — manipulated through brand labels on clothes — elicited different kinds of preferential treatment, which even resulted in financial benefits to people who engaged in conspicuous consumption. Furthermore, we tested preconditions in which the beneficial consequences of conspicuous consumption may arise and determined the proximate mechanisms underlying them. The present data suggest that luxury consumption can be a profitable social strategy because conspicuous displays of luxury qualify as a costly signaling trait that elicits status-dependent favorable treatment in human social interactions.

Source: “Social benefits of luxury brands as costly signals of wealth and status” from Evolution and Human Behavior

Pressure to consistently perform stronger than ever.

I wish I’d thought of this.

From the author:

_This proposal aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to under-laying spaces and their own realities. The installation was enjoyed during two weekends in January 2011 by the tourists, neighbours of La Rambla and citizens of Barcelona, a city that faces a trade-off between identity and gentrification, economic sustainability and economic growth.
_This shapes through a technological ritual where the audience is released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.
_The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites him/her to perform as a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of him/herself printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured light scanners (kinect).
_The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.

The iPad 2 is reshaping itself quite nicely as a tool for creation, instead of iPad 1 = consumption. I like how anyone can be a musician now with the likes of Garageband etc. Or at least, anyone can feel like they are a musician. The purists are up in arms about this but I think its brilliant. Bravo.