Men’s conspicuous consumption is associated with reproductive strategies but not physiological characteristics.

Abstract

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that men's wealth displays are analogous in function to the costly signaling of a peacock's tail, the classic example of a male secondary sex characteristic. Various mechanisms have been proposed to underlie the relationship between men's resource displays and their reproductive behaviors. Two studies investigate the hypothesis that people will attribute life history patterns to male owners of luxury consumer products in parallel with the behavioral patterns associated with variation in male secondary sex characteristics across and within species and examine whether the products themselves are interpreted as secondary sex characteristics. Size and coloration, two fundamental dimensions of secondary sex characteristics, are manipulated to clarify possible mechanisms. Both dimensions influenced judgments of mating effort, parental effort, interest in long-term committed romantic relationships, and interest in brief sexual affairs. However, rather than biasing physiological assessments of product owners, product displays are interpreted as attention-seeking behavior associated with high mating effort reproductive strategies. Public Significance StatementFrom a practical perspective, luxury goods are a waste of resources compared to similar moderately priced goods. Advancing the understanding of luxury good consumption may benefit individuals and society. The current article demonstrates that people intuitively understand that men's displays of flashy luxury goods (i.e., those with more prominent visual properties) are efforts to attract sexual and romantic partners and not good predictors of investment in children.