The Lipstick Effect

In November 2001, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Emily Nelson noted a correlation between economic downturn and lipstick sales.

Lipstick sales are red hot. So why is no one smiling? The reason is that women traditionally turn to lipstick when they cutback on life's other luxuries. They see lipstick, which sells for as little as $1.99 at a supermarket to $20-plus at a department store, as a reasonable indulgence and pick-me-up when they feel they can't afford a whole new outfit. "When lipstick sales go up, people don't want to buy dresses," says Leonard Lauder, chairman of EstéeLauder Cos.

Psychologists may think this has something to do with sex, arguing that the only reason women wear lipstick is to get laid. For example, Hill et all argue that "conditions of economic resource scarcity should prompt individuals to increase effort directed toward attracting mates, particularly for women".  

Meanwhile, management scientists think it may have something to do with work, because of course women will wish to create a favorable impression of themselves in the workplace. For example, Netchaeva and Rees argue that "women with high economic concern elect to improve their professional appearance more frequently than their romantic attractiveness".

Both of these explanations see lipstick in instrumental terms, as a means to an end. Whereas economists may see lipstick simply as a consumer product, whose purpose may be as much to enhance the mood of the woman herself as to enhance the way she is treated by other people. As Elliot notes, "rather than lose the spending habit consumers simply trade down to cheaper items to cheer themselves up".  And Murgea notes how quickly the lipstick can change the person's image, therefore serving as a rapid mood enhancer.

What exactly is the consumer behaviour that economists (and cosmetic executives) are interested in? Zurawski notes that when shoppers stop buying high-end luxury, "a well-documented side effect is the tendency to compensate by buying more high-end versions of lower-priced items".

If a relatively expensive lipstick is still cheaper than even a relatively cheap pair of shoes, then switching from one product to another may be a clue that the two products perform a similar function for the purchaser. Economists call this substitution.

So what exactly is the purpose of the lipstick? Is it to enhance the body image? Or is it to enhance what philosophers call the body without image?

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Larry Elliott, Into the red: 'lipstick effect' reveals the true face of the recession (Guardian 22 December 2008)

Mike Featherstone, Body Image / Body Without Image (Theory, Culture and Society, 23/2-3, 2006)

Sarah E Hill et al, Boosting Beauty in an Economic Decline: Mating, Spending, and the Lipstick Effect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2012, Vol. 103, No. 2, 275–291)

Aurora Murgea, Lipstick Effect in Romania (Annales Universitatis Apulensis Series Oeconomica, 14(2), 2012)

Emily Nelson, Rising Lipstick Sales May Mean Pouting Economy and Few Smiles (Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2001). See also John J Xenakis, Is the Lipstick Debate a Sign of the Times? (Web Log, 11 September 2008)

Ekaterina Netchaeva and McKenzie Rees, Strategically Stunning: The Professional Motivations Behind the Lipstick Effect (Psychological Science, Vol. 27, No. 8, AUGUST 2016, pp. 1157-1168)

Lu Zurawski, The Lipstick Effect And The Epidemiology Of Payments (Forbes, 16 May 2020)

Related post: Playboy models and economic crisis (October 2008)

The Corporate Sorting Hat

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers are known as the inventors of a personality instrument known as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It's not a test, its supporters insist, because you can't fail.

Briggs Myers argued that everyone was good at something. The point of the instrument was not only to recognize and value your own strengths, but to appreciate that other people had different strengths and styles. She thought this knowledge would help people work together more efficiently and effectively. During the Second World War, this also meant enabling people of all types to contribute productively to the war effort.

And not complaining, accepting one's rightful position in life, which is perhaps why so many corporations like it. The MBTI combines a simplistic version of Jungian type theory with an immutable division of labour. You are born with one of these sixteen personality types, and this supposedly determines your path. 

Merve Emre notes how MBTI rhetorically intertwines "the fiction of the complete self with the fiction of the happy, hard-working team". Instead of using the instrument (it's not a test) for self-development, it becomes a way of labelling yourself and others, helping to define and reinforce your identity.

If you have difficulties with a partner or colleague, it is probably useful to remind yourself from time to time that they don't have the same view of the world as you do. A fictional explanation, whether it is based on MBTI or astrology, is probably better than no explanation at all, and may allow you to accept that they mean well ("positive intent") rather than assuming they are being deliberately difficult.

And if you believe that these labels are fixed through life, which is what MBTI theory claims, then you should work with the personality you have been given rather than trying to change it.

So why do so many organizations use this instrument? The first answer is perhaps - because it's there. Briggs Myers worked with Edward Hay, the founder of a management consulting firm specializing in personnel management, and this kind of instrument is popular with consulting firms because it allows them to generate apparently value-adding work for their junior consultants.

Perhaps another reason is that bureaucratic organizations like sorting people at all stages in the employment cycle, selecting people for recruitment, promotion and redundancy. Selection by gender or race is no longer acceptable, but selection by personality type apparently is. If you have the idea that people of a particular type tend to be good at sales, then this becomes an enabling prejudice.

Briggs Myers herself had some old-fashioned views on gender and race. The extreme racism in her second novel was considered unacceptable even in the 1930s, and early versions of her instrument differentiated between men and women. She presented Hay with two scoring keys - a "standard" key and a "female" key. It may astound readers of this blog to learn that this resulted in women being type-cast as nurses, teachers, and secretaries, rather than executives and managers. As Merve Emre remarks sardonically, "destiny wasn't biological; it was typological".

 

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Dean Burnett, Nothing personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test (Guardian, 19 March 2013)

Merve Emre, Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs (Digg, 1 October 2015)

Elle Hunt, What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world (The Guardian, 30 August 2021)

Tim Lewis, Myers-Briggs personality tests: what kind of person are you? (Guardian, 15 September 2018)

Lisa Wong Macabasco, They become dangerous tools: the dark side of personality tests (Guardian, 4 March 2021)

Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)

Related posts: Are Best Practices Obsolete (September 2009), From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices (March 2013), Algorithms and Governmentality (July 2019), Bad Sorting (September 2021)

You're So Pretty

@the_beheld via @marginalutility asks Should We Praise Little Girls For Being Pretty? @nourishthesoul replies "It's wonderful to remind each other that we are all beautiful, but maybe we have it wrong?" Why I get tired of “You are beautiful!”

What's the purpose of commenting on a person's looks? There are three possible positive motivations - to make the person feel good, to make oneself feel good, or as an attempted building block in a relationship with the person (or her parents). There are also three possible negative motivations - to trivialize or attack the person, to put oneself down in comparison, or to trivialize or block an attempted relationship.

If you want a little girl to feel proud and important, then there are probably better ways of doing it than commenting on her looks. As the_beheld comments, "being praised for something you can’t help can feel hollow or even confusing". (The same applies to telling people how clever they are.)

Telling grown women that they are pretty, or that their daughters are pretty, may be an effective chat-up line on some occasions, but the line often carries a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if there is some buried hostility towards self or other. Some women and girls may become accustomed to hearing how pretty they are, possibly starting with their fathers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they believe it.

Perhaps the Sex Pistols had the right idea when their lyrics progressed from "pretty" to "pretty vacant".

Satoshi Kanazawa

@PsychToday descended to new lows of #badscience and #titillation this week when it published Satoshi Kanazawa's latest blogpost on the physical attractiveness of black women, complete with some pseudoscientific tosh about evolutionary psychology and testosterone. Following a storm of protest, Psychology Today has removed the offending blogpost (although it is still available elsewhere, for example on Quora); its other bloggers (Daniel Hawes, Nathan Heflick, Scott Barry Kaufman, Robert Kurzban, Mikhail Lyubansky, Melody T McCloud,  Michael Mills, Stanton Peele, Steven Reiss, Gad Saad, Sam Sommers, and others) have felt the need to gang up on Dr Kanazawa, as if that somehow redeemed the reputation of the website. Commentary and criticism elsewhere includes BBC News, Nanjala Nyabola (Guardian). PZ Myers names Kanazawa "among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology".

This is not the first time that Dr Kanazawa's pseudoscientific musings have provoked criticism from his fellow bloggers at Psychology Today. In November 2008, Christopher Ryan argued that Sloppy methodology is the Achilles Heel of evolutionary psychology. I myself took issue with Dr Kanazawa in my piece on Footballers Wives and Evolutionary Psychology.

But is it just Dr Kanazawa who is at fault here, as some of his more cautious critics suggest, or is there a fundamental methodological flaw at the core of evolutionary psychology? Dr Ryan has also recently criticized Stephen Pinker, suggesting that he may have used misleading data in his TED talk on the origins of war (Stephen Pinker's Stinker). For his part, Stanton Peele believes that "Satoshi Kanazawa's racism perfectly embodies evolutionary psychology".

Dr Ryan's generously illustrated blog features posts on human sexual behaviour and the female form, which he compares with other species - notably the bonobo. What he seems to be claiming is that the similarities between human and bonobo are explained not by their common genetic heritage, but by the existence of some evolutionary advantage of these characteristics.

Sounds plausible enough, but then pseudoscience can make all kinds of speculative explanation sound plausible. For example, someone might try to construct an argument to the effect that large breasts change shape more with age and maternity, therefore breast size makes the visual effects of ageing more obvious and helps men to choose younger and more fertile partners with fewer previous offspring. (That might sound ridiculous, but the logical structure is not very different from other arguments I've seen. See my post on the Purpose of Baldness.) But how on earth do we ever choose between conflicting theories, how do research bodies decide whether to fund this kind of research, and what kind of evidence is deemed relevant?

There is a simplistic POSIWID argument behind a lot of evolutionary biology and psychology, which goes like this. Here is an interesting and perhaps puzzling characteristic; therefore it must have some evolutionary purpose (expressed in terms of selective advantage); so the researchers just need to work out what it is. They then corroborate our hypothesis by carrying out a quick study, often using American psychology students as the subjects.

There are several methodological problems with this approach: firstly, in the way the characteristic is framed in the first place, secondly in the presumption that each characteristic must have a clearly identifiable purpose in its own right, thirdly in demonstrating purpose by identifying outcomes that can be correlated with the characteristic in question, and fourthly in inferring evolutionary processes from present-day observations alone. Kanazawa might just as well argue that Michael Phelps does everything he does in order to get laid. Beyond parody.

Fundamental Programming

While browsing through some BBC News items for the previous post on the Purpose of Hormones, I came across the fascinating work of one Dr Nick Neave, of Northumbria University.

Dr Nick, who writes popular articles in the Daily Mail, and is regularly consulted by the science journalists on the BBC News website, believes that women are fundamentally programmed to depend on men. (Footnote for geeks: can anyone tell me the difference between fundamental programming and any other kind of programming? No, I thought not.)

• "Sorry, but women are dependent on men." [Daily Mail, 4th December 2006]

Dr Nick studies gender differences. His serious research indicates that women are better at finding things, but he is happy to say something quite different when a journalist prompts him for a stereotype about women drivers.

• Some evidence of a female advantage in object location memory using ecologically valid stimuli [Human Nature Vol 16 No 2, June 2005]

• Spatial skills such as map reading and parking may be difficult for some women because they had too little testosterone in the womb. [BBC News 24 January 2005 via BastardLogic]
  

Dr Nick has also studied sexual attraction

• "Females, like males, are always looking to enhance their reproductive success by trading upwards." [BBC News, 16 August 2005]

• "A male face with some attributes of both masculinity and femininity is attractive. ... Women kind of like your macho-but-sensitive type." [Times Online, 20 August 2003]
  

Dr Nick, who is an expert on testosterone, suffers from male pattern baldness. Wikipedia reveals that this form of hair loss is related to hormones called androgens, particularly an androgen called dihydrotestosterone (DHT).


Dr Nick Neave, Northumbria University

Face values applied to love game

According to recent research, many heterosexual people can accurately judge from photographs who would be more interested in a short-term sexual relationship or a long-term relationship. [BBC News, 9 April 2008]

But which is cause and which is effect? Are people more promiscuous because they are more attractive to the opposite sex (therefore more opportunities, one might think), or are people more attracted to those who might be more available?

(By the way, a man or woman may have a rational preference for partners who are capable of commitment, but sexual attraction doesn't always coincide with rational preference. And in any case, the only real proof that a potential partner is capable of commitment is that they are already committed - to someone else.)

(Note also that attraction is not based solely on physical appearance - but it sometimes helps. Other things being equal, we may expect some degree of correlation.)

Interestingly, the research looked not at behaviour (how much casual sex do people actually have) but preferences (are people inclined towards casual sex or longer-term commitment). The mere fact that a person wants casual sex and/or longer-term commitment doesn't mean that person is attractive or otherwise together enough to fulfil these wants.

But there are two processes that might correct this imbalance over time. The first is endogenous preference formation - people change their preferences according to their experiences. Jon Elster, a sociologist with an excellent appreciation for poetry and myth, wrote a book about this phenomenon called Sour Grapes. See also Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons, and the Anticipatory Rationalization of the Status Quo (pdf).

The other process is evolutionary. Genes that produce people who are unattractive to the opposite sex, and genes that are associated with reproductively unsuccessful preferences, will be disadvantaged. In terms of reproduction, of course, both casual sex and longer-term commitment may be successful strategies; promiscuous people don't necessarily have more offspring, and many avoid having children altogether, while I guess most children are born into relationships that were thought at the time (by at least one partner) to be reasonably long-term.


Footnote

The BBC uses two images of women to illustrate this report. Curiously, almost the same two images were used in a previous report, apparently emanating from the same research team, but telling a rather different story - 'Hormonal' women most attractive [BBC News, 2 November 2005] Are these two explanations linked?


Related posts

Purpose of Hormones (April 2008)
Purpose of Sex (June 2009)
Explaining Bodies (February 2013)

Hyperactivity and Society

Which comes first - hyperactivity in children or hyperreality in society. Rebecca Dias asks:

Is this a natural phase of evolution? What if ADD and ADHD were just natural by-products of our over-achieving, capitalistic society? Children just acclimatizing.

In his book Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992), Albert Borgmann criticized some of the features of modern life, which he characterized in terms of hyperreality and hyperactivity. Hyperactivity is often described as a pathological syndrome for the individual - both children and workaholics. Borgmann extends this notion of hyperactivity to society as a whole, and defines it as a state of mobilization where the richness and variety of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been suspended to serve a higher, urgent cause. (p14) 

 

 

Rebecca Dias, ADD and ADHD - Evolution? (27 November 2007)