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If you’re craving an attractive but not particularly desirable item, there’s probably some hidden fantasy associated with it, says science columnist Oliver Burkeman.
Sometimes it’s nice to know that a certain psychological phenomenon has a name – at least you don’t have to think that “it’s just me being so uniquely irrational and counterproductive.” For example, there is the so-called Diderot effect – when you buy something new, in comparison with which all your other things begin to seem old, so you end up replacing them too. The name of this effect is due to the essay of the French philosopher and educator Denis Diderot “Regrets about my old dressing gown”1, in which he describes how he was given a luxurious new robe: “My old robe was in perfect harmony with the rubbish around me,” and now “all harmony is broken.” Soon he has to change all the furniture and paintings: “I was the complete master of my old dressing gown and became the slave of a new one.”
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- Two stories about the right things
You already know, of course, that the consumer society uses our psychological weaknesses to force us to buy unnecessary things. We are governed by “hedonic adaptation”: new things become part of the surrounding space and social comparison with higher ones; if you catch up with the Ivanov family, you will immediately find yourself new Ivanovs, whom you will have to catch up with again. But the Diderot effect introduces some nuances here. We build our identity with things, and we need identity to feel stable. A person who is always poorly dressed, perhaps, shows that his mind is occupied with higher matters, always neatly dressed – which appreciates good taste. But the one who randomly alternates this and that seems to be an eccentric. According to anthropologist Grant McCracken, products are specifically advertised and promoted in “Didero groups” – if you buy one product from this group, you think you need the rest. You ordered a dining table from a catalog, shouldn’t you also take glasses and plates with it?
Book on the topic
Martin Lindstrom
“Buyology: A Fascinating Journey into the Brain of the Modern Consumer”
Martin Lindstrom, the world’s leading brand expert, has been working with various international companies for more than twenty years and helping them create and strengthen powerful brands, gradually came to a number of hypotheses. For example, the fact that inscriptions about the dangers of smoking on cigarette packs actually only increase the desire to smoke. Or that there is a similarity between attitudes towards brands and attitudes towards religion and prejudice, and the influence of a logo or sexual overtones in advertising on a purchase decision is greatly exaggerated …
It’s too easy to call it all manipulation. The Diderot effect works because we give things symbolic power. As McCracken puts it, we see some of them as “bridge things” from the present to the future we dream of. You want a refrigerator, because it reflects some of the features of you – the way you would like to be (at least wealthy enough to want to have a good refrigerator). And so you buy it, and then the Diderot effect comes into play. You soon discover that you have many signs of the kind of life you would like for yourself, but not the most important thing, what these signs are supposed to show – in this case, financial stability.
Pass the tests
- What kind of buyer are you?
- What our clothes say about us
If there is a thing that you do not need, but you really want it, then it is very likely that some kind of obsessive fantasy or desire is associated with it. Computer faster? The desire to be able to do more work. Kitchen update? Desire to have full family dinners. Once you have uncovered a hidden fantasy or desire, you will most likely find that it has little to do with the product. The Diderot effect harms your budget, but even if it didn’t, it’s a fruitless pursuit of mirages, because what we really need can’t be bought. Diderot, who paid for the donated robe with new purchases, was chasing an unattainable harmony. Which, of course, he later regretted.
See more at The Guardian.
1 D. Diderot “Regrets about my old dressing gown.” Collected works in 10 volumes, volume 4 (Academia, 1937).