Lionhead introduces us to their Project Natal-enabled interactive character named Milo. This demo is from E3 2009.

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Genuine or Generic?

When it comes to consumer buyer patterns, an interesting psychological process unfolds. According to author Jonah Lehrer, “In general, people rely on a simple heuristic, or mental short-cut, when trying to evaluate the quality of a product: we assume that more expensive things are of higher quality. In other words, you get what you pay for. As a result, we automatically suspect products on sale of being faulty, or inferior. And because our expectations profoundly influence our experience, an olive oil that we expect to be lower in quality will actually taste lower in quality.”

Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford, supplied a group of people with Sobe Adrenaline Rush, an “energy” drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. The drink contained a potent brew of sugar and caffeine which, the bottle promised, would impart “superior functionality”. Some participants paid full price for the drinks, while others were offered a discount. The participants were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. Shiv found that people who paid discounted prices consistently solved about thirty percent fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price for the drinks. The subjects were convinced that the stuff on sale was much less potent, even though all the drinks were identical.

Why did the cheaper energy drink prove less effective? According to Shiv, consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin, or why Coke tastes better than cheaper colas, even if most consumers can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. “We have these general beliefs about the world⎯for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality⎯and they translate into specific expectations about specific products,” said Shiv. “Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior.”

This is consumerism at its best. The mega and multi-site churches have tapped into this consumerism. Megachurches are the brand name product. They spend lots of money on branding and advertising and they look “expensive”. They look genuine. All you have to do is say their name: Willow Creek, Saddleback, Fellowship, Northpoint, Life Church. Everybody in the area knows what they are. That is also why everybody jumps on the popular “brand” names: Journey and Fellowship are names that come to mind. This is also why they go multi-site. The brand sells.

But what it also does is turn churches that have less resources into the generic version of the brand. They are not as flashy, not as “expensive” feeling or looking, and thus are not as genuine as the church that spends so much money on appearances and the show, the production that occurs each weekend. They can’t advertise their brand so they are practically unknown. They are not perceived as genuine, thus they are “church lite”, a copy, and not as effective in satisfying needs.

People associate with a brand of Christianity. But here is the bigger question: Do people associate the followers of the brand with the creator of Christianity or with the brand of Christianity the followers are pushing? The jury may still be out on that. As Matt Casper told Jim Henderson after visiting ten megachurches in the US, “Is this really what Jesus told you guys to do?”

Ecological Intelligence

Scientist Daniel Golemen has written a new book entitled Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition; Why It Can Matter More Than IQ and Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman reveals the hidden environmental consequences of what we make and buy, and shows how new market forces can drive the essential changes we all must make to save our planet. Ecological Intelligence draws on cutting-edge research to reveal why “green is a mirage,” illuminates inconsistencies in our response to the ecological crisis, and introduces new technologies that reveal with “radical transparency” the eco-impact of products we buy, with the potential to drive consumers to make smarter decisions and companies to reform their business practices.

Here are a few excerpts from found at a Goleman’s blog:

Every small step toward green helps, to be sure. But our craze for all things green represents a transitional stage, a dawning of awareness of ecological impact but one that lacks precision, depth of understanding, and clarity. Much of what’s touted as “green” in reality represents fantasy or simple hype. We are past the day when one or two virtuous qualities of a product qualify it as green. To tout a product as green on the basis of a single attribute—while ignoring numerous negative impacts—parallels a magician’s sleight of hand.

…

To be sure, there are relatively virtuous products, building materials, and energy sources. We can buy detergent without phosphates, install carpeting that exudes fewer toxins or flooring of sustainable bamboo, or sign up for energy that comes mainly from wind, solar, or other renewable sources. And all that can make us feel we have made a virtuous decision.

But those green choices, helpful as they are, too often lull us to more readily ignore the way that what we now think of as “green” is a bare beginning, a narrow slice of goodness among the myriad unfortunate impacts of all manufactured objects. Today’s standards for greenness will be seen tomorrow as eco-myopia.

And finally,

In a day when major players in every industry, and more and more consumers, are pressing for green, we would do well to understand the implication of improving impacts all along the supply chain and throughout a product’s life cycle. Green is a process, not a status—we need to think of “green” as a verb, not an adjective. That semantic shift might help us focus better on greening.

Why is East Asia more conservative?

“One of the major problems in most societies…is the fact that people observe correlations of attitudes & beliefs, and infer from those necessary relations.” What an opening sentence! We do that don’t we? We observe people, find out an important aspect of their belief system, and immediately categorize them according someone’s correlation theories. Suppose I said that I stated on this blog that I believed in macro evolution, the belief that one species can evolve until such time as a new species is formed, i.e., a horse becomes a cow. (I don’t believe this by the way.) Based on that statement, a whole set of associations, correlations, and categorizations begin to occur in your brain. For a particular group of people, I am now someone who denies the authority of scripture, see Genesis 1-11 as metaphorical or fiction, not true. Some might say that I would embrace homosexuality, endorse women as senior pastors and deny the virgin birth of Jesus. All because I stated that I believe in macro evolution. Is that a fair correlation?

We in the West have generally associated atheism with liberalism. I have to wonder if that is why we who claim to follow Christ fight so hard for maintaining the belief that America is a Christian nation, that our founders were Godly men, and our culture to be based on Judeo-Christian principles. We are fearfully concerned that the increase in atheism will lead to a total and complete social liberal agenda.

However, could it be that there are societies which are both far more secular than the United States, and more socially conservative? Is that even possible? According to the World Values Survey, it could just be. It appears that East Asia is more secular than the US and yet on social matters, it is more socially and fiscally conservative than us. A recent post by Razib Khan, a socially conservative atheist notes this.

I think it may be interesting to note something I heard Bob Roberts say at a conference in California in 2007. He said that there is such thing as a postmodern world. However, there is a postmodern West. According to Bob, who has spent years in East Asia and the Middle East, postmodernity is not an issue in these areas. Primarily, I think one of the reasons is because they have yet to go through modernity. They are still mystics, not relying solely on the modern scientific method to account for every aspect of life. They still believe in the spiritual. They still have faith. Their worldview does not revolve around the propositional but the relational.

In fact, another extrapolation of data from that same survey gives us the glimpse that those nations coming out of communism, which had a heavy emphasis on the non-existence of God, actually are less inclined toward the liberal socialism that appears to be growing in Western Europe and the United States. “In China atheists are actually some more hostile to the precepts of godless Communism than the religious..it was curious that Chinese atheists are probably among the segments of the world population most likely to appreciate the non-zero sum power of capitalism and economic growth.”

In the US, however, where the emphasis is on scientific and propositionally-based truth is great, atheists in America are about five times more likely to be extremely liberal than theists. I will follow this up in a future post.

What do you see as some of the reasons that Eastern cultures are more socially and fiscally conservative than many of the more Western cultures? In addition, how does that impact how we deal with the philosophical expressions of modernity and postmodernity as well as the religious embrace of either a modern or postmodern viewpoint?

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