It is a principle of advertising that people who make big life changes are susceptible to marketing. Events like birth, death, marriage, and moving all interrupt our normal patterns of behaviour and thereby open space to pursue new avenues of consumption.
In the wake of SARS-COV-2 pandemic, the world is undergoing the largest pattern interrupt in modern history. We’ve been collectively catapulted into the quarantine lifestyle, and the result is we are doing a lot of online shopping, often a lot more than we would like.
The Diderot Effect – How Identity Influences Your Shopping Habits
On a fundamental level, we buy more at ‘life events’ because we are doing things differently and therefore have new problems to solve. If we were perfectly rational, that would be the end of it. Each purchase would happen in isolation. To paraphrase Marx; for each need an Amazon order, and to each need an actual problem.
But we are not rational, and far from being mere tools in service of our goals, the things we buy are enmeshed with our self-image to the degree that a mismatched sweater or sofa can feel like a mismatched limb. This feeling of disharmony has the potential to catalyze a spiral of consumption in which we pursue a mental unity through unity in our possessions.
My own experience of quarantine shopping has borne this out. Does this sounds familiar….
I bought a kettlebell and now that it’s arrived; I’ve realized that I really need another one or two to do the same kettlebell workout I did at the gym. With that many kettlebells, I’ll probably want a kettlebell rack, and a pullup bar to decompress my spine, a new yoga matt so I can do yoga at home now, which of course means I’ll need a foam roller to get that fascia mobilized and so on…
Our knives weren’t as sharp as I’d like them. So I bought a knife sharpener. In the process of buying that sharpener, I thought “hey since you’re cooking at home more; you should get a nice paring knife.” So, I bought the sharpener and the knife, and now every time I stick that fancy knife in the drawer, I think what I really need now is a knife holder…
This tendency to seek unity of self through unity in our possessions was first noted by the French philosopher Denis Diderot and later named after him as the Diderot effect. Diderot first identified this phenomenon after he purchased a beautiful new robe. Almost immediately, the brilliance of his new garment cast a kind of shadow over his other possessions that made them seem shabby and out of place. The result was an epic shopping spree that nearly bankrupted him. He wrote,
“I was absolute master of my old dressing gown, but I have become a slave to my new one … Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth.”
The implication of the Diderot effect is that when we think we are just putting together our wardrobe or our living room, we are unconsciously toying with the fabric of our identities.
My Patagonia Habit & Diderot’s Two Principles
I first learned of the Diderot effect from a fantastic YouTube video by the Nerdwriter. In his video, the Nerdwriter points out that the Diderot effect is built on two psychological principles:
- “All the products purchased by a consumer aim to be cohesive with that consumer’s identity.”
- “The introduction of a new product, in any way deviant, can trigger a process of spiraling consumption.”
In my own life, I admit to a penchant for Patagonia clothing and other expensive outdoor gear that, within the confines of my sedate urban lifestyle – the most likely scenario for me ending up on a mountain top is falling out of an airplane – cries out for explanation.
The Diderot effect explains that I buy Patagonia because it has created an identity of environmentalism and outdoorsmanship, something I consume as much as I do the garments themselves. That is to say that even though I don’t do that much for the environment (certainly zero activism) and I don’t spend that much time in real wilderness, just by buying Patagonia clothing, I can feel like these things are part of who I am.
Buying Patagonia is, in a sense, an offering towards the person I’d like to be. And this is the unsubtle genius of their marketing approach. Would some other brand’s clothing do the job? Maybe, yes… actually, I don’t really know… And in the space of this uncertainty creeps the justification for building my identity around their branding. A process that ends with the rationalization that my money is going to go somewhere; it may as well go to them.
Attention and The Delicate Balance
The Diderot effect describes the way that we require the things we own correspond to the internal construct of identity. But the Diderot effect seems to me to be only one aspect of the way we project ourselves into the things we own and use.
Take, for instance, my recent spiral of gym equipment purchases. Having more than two kettlebells, a yoga mat, and a foam roller to go with them is still about me, but it’s about a different aspect of my identity then say, my fashion choices.
Our possessions act as something like a three-way mirror:
- They react, each upon each other, (coherence in the system);
- they reflect back on us, casting an identity back at ourselves (coherence with our internal identity);
- and they project outward to the world who we are (coherence in our outward identity).
My kettlebell problem is about achieving coherence in an externalized system (coherence in the system). This is an aspect of my identity because when I feel like I have a more complete system, I feel more complete, as if some good part of me has been externalized. By the same token, when a system is incomplete or even less than elegant, its failings are also a reflection on me.
I make this point to illustrate the fact that all our passions exist in a state of delicate equilibrium, both between themselves and against our own mental constructs of them. An equilibrium that is mostly maintained by an absence of attention. For if we look hard enough at any part of our lives, we’ll begin to see the possibility of improving some aspect of our systems, and that, as we’ve seen, has the potential to spark a chain-reaction of consumption. So be careful what you pay attention to.
Schrodinger’s Shopping Cart – How the Stuff You Need Creates the Things You Don’t
Another important implication of the Diderot effect is that that contrary to our intuitions, each purchase does not bring us closer to having ‘enough’ or being ‘complete’ but instead, takes us a step further down a rabbit hole of consumption.
In this way, our consumption resembles something like an infinitely branching decision tree where each step forward opens the door to several more likely purchases. This means that that from a probabilistic perspective, buying a kettlebell is in effect a decision buy both the kettlebell and half a kettlebell rack.
This fact is no secret to retailers who are increasingly building and refining tools that capitalize on this principle, injecting it into the infrastructure of our online experience. The case in point being Amazon’s “frequently bought together” suggestions which feature on almost every page of its website.
Reinforcing the Habit – The Pavlov’s Shopping Drone
The psychological undercurrents of our compulsive shopping are neat. But to lay the blame squarely on these niceties of our psyche risks missing the more obvious but no less potent fact that shopping is itself habit-forming. We are sitting at home, bored as hell, and buying things is fun.
You know how it goes, you’re wandering around your apartment and something catches your eye so – a problem to solve! So you go online to find a solution, maybe you spend a few minutes (or a few hours) doing the modern equivalent of celestial navigation; comparing, contrasting and triangulating between, stars, reviews and prices until finally, target locked, and emboldened by strong drink and the prospect of free shipping and returns, you smash that checkout button, and you get:
A. the satisfaction of having solved the problem to a degree in your mind, and;
B. the joy of anticipating when that solution will come.
I presume that I am not alone in manically checking my shipping updates when I buy something.
Then, finally, the thing arrives, and you have the dopamine hit of opening it and playing with it, putting it in the neat little place where it solves your problem (maybe) and then roving around your home like a drone looking for the next thing to buy. And thus, with every purchase, you are reinforcing your Pavlovian predilection.
Minimalist Mental Jujitsu – Hacking the Diderot Effect Through Identity Shift
While there are many powerful tactics to curb out-of-control shopping (get rid of Amazon Prime), one that combats the Diderot effect most directly is consciously shifting our identity towards one that values things other than consumption.
To do this, all you have to do is visualize solving the problem through a different identity. For instance, think of the minimalist version of yourself, the thrifty version of yourself, the survivalist version of yourself. How could that person figure out a way to solve the same problem with what they already have or at a fraction of the price?
I recently employed this tactic in my own life when after seeing the difference between chlorinated water and filtered water had on my sourdough bread, I decided I needed a water filter. To try and counter-act the urge to buy my way through this ‘problem’, I re-framed the problem to, how I could set up filtered water without buying anything? After some quick research, I realized I could boil the water and then put it into a container I already owned which could then act as my filtered water source for my drinking and cooking needs.
Looking at my problem in this way was helpful in two ways. First, in the short-run, the challenge to do it myself gave the little hamster on a wheel in my mind something to do without going online shopping. And second, in the long-run, I got the superior satisfaction that comes from MacGyvering through a problem, instead of just Amazoning it. I say superior because solving the problem through your own ingenuity endures in a way that goes far beyond the happiness you’d get from just pointing and clicking your way to a fix.
Whether it’s a minimalist or creative mindset, by shifting our identity, we hack the Diderot effect to our advantage. By re-imagining who we are, we perform a kind of mental Jiu-jitsu in which we flip satisfaction we would get from buying something into another container and in doing so, we become more complete by integrating into ourselves the virtue of the things we don’t have, instead of extending ourselves into the inevitable disappointment of buying another thing we don’t need.
