Talkative Sell, Silent Buy

Me six years ago:

Every transaction has both a buyer and a seller. Yet we hear much more about salesmen, and how to sell, than we do about buyermen and how to buy. … Why? [Since] buyers are usually more uncertain about their value than sellers are about their cost, … whether a sale happens is more clearly a signal of seller ability than of buyer ability. … We like to see and affiliate with people who have impressive abilities associated with sales. (more)

Katja and I did another podcast recently, this time on advertising, and we talked a bit about how people seem to pay more attention to selling than to buying. Katja noted that we seem to give more attention to the signals we send, vs. interpreting the signals of others. For example, we think more about what we will wear than about the judgements we form based on what other people wear. We think a lot more what our charity says about us than about what we think about others based on their charity.

Someone at the talk last Thursday argued that they can’t be donating to look good, since they don’t tell anyone. And that reminded me of how terrified people are to speak in public. And that brought a unifying explanation to mind: we more often need to verbally justify the signals we send than how we interpret the signals of others. Let me explain.

For our distant forager ancestors, their most important public speaking probably happened in situations where they were being accused, and needed to defend themselves. Since the generic accusation behind any specific accusation was that one wasn’t doing enough overall for the band, and maybe should be exiled or killed, our ancestors should have been eager to collect examples of the help they have given, especially unheralded help. So we may have inherited a habit of doing helpful things, and not calling attention to them, but remembering them so we could mention them later if called on to defend ourselves.

More generally, our ancestors probably acquired the habit of consciously thinking about actions that others were likely to challenge or criticize. They’d continually come up with explanations of what they did and why, and be ready to tell those stories, even if they didn’t actually have to explain or justify most of them. And because they were rarely asked to justify or explain the judgements they made about others, they didn’t get into as much of a habit of explaining those.

This theory predicts that we in fact give just as much mental attention to buying as to selling, and just as much to interpreting signals as to sending signals, because these are in fact on average equally as important to us. But we give a lot more conscious attention to the side that needs to be explained, because that is what consciousness is about – consciousness helps much less to make decisions than to explain and justify them.