Spent by Geoffrey Miller

Pg 1 Many products are signals first and material objects second. Our vast social-primal brains evolved to pursue one central social goal: to look good in the eyes of others. Buying impressive products in a money-based economy is just the most recent way to fulfill that goal

Pg 11 Marketing consultants build careers around the postmodern insight: at its heart consumerist capitalism in not materialistic, but semiotic. It concerns mainly the psychological world of signs, symbols, images, and brands, not the physical world of tangible commodities

Pg 12 Marketers still believe that premium products are brought to display wealth, statue, and taste, and they miss the deeper mental traits that people are actually wired to display, traits such as kindness, intelligence and creativity

Pg 39 A company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince people to buy what the company happens to make

Pg 43 The whole point of advertising and branding, to create associations between a product and the aspirations of the consumer, so the product seems to be worth more to the consumer than its mere physical form could possibly warrant

Pg 76 Advertisements for most products converge on one key message; other people will care deeply what products we buy, display, and use.

Pg 110 Study showed that women rated a man driving a Porsche Boxster as more attractive for a short-term sexual relationship than a man driving a Honda Civic, but the Porsche did not make the man more attractive as a possible marriage partner. Men rating women were uninfluenced by the type of car she drove

Pg 146 The Big 5 personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extraversion

Pg 227 Some people actually prefer products that require some regular maintenance, so they can show off their conscientiousness

Pg 291 Punishing bad acts is much easier than rewarding good acts, because there are many low-cost ways to impose fitness costs on people, but only a few, high-cost ways to give them true fitness benefits

Pg 297 Political scientist Robert Putnam has found that American communities with higher levels of ethnic diversity tend to have lower levels of social capital; trust, altruism, cohesion, and sense of community

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