Abstract
Like humans, monkeys value information about sex and status, inviting the hypothesis that our susceptibility to these factors in advertising arises from shared, ancestral biological mechanisms that prioritize social information. To test this idea, we asked whether rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) show choice behavior that is similar to humans in response to sex and social status in advertising. Our results show that monkeys form preferences for brand logos repeatedly paired with images of macaque genitals and high status monkeys. Moreover, monkeys sustain preferences for these brand logos even though choosing them provided no tangible rewards, a finding that cannot be explained by a decision mechanism operating solely on material outcomes. Together, our results endorse the hypothesis that the power of sex and status in advertising emerges from the spontaneous engagement of shared, ancestral neural circuits that prioritize information useful for navigating the social environment. Finally, our results show that simple associative conditioning is sufficient to explain the formation of preferences for brand logos paired with sexual or status-based images.
Highlights
Despite continued debate about their appropriateness, depictions of sex and social status in advertising continue to help marketers sell their products
We show that in a pseudo-advertising campaign in which brand logos were paired with images of high or low-status male monkey faces, or female monkey genitals, monkeys develop preferences for logos paired with female monkey genitals through conditioning
These findings suggest that sexual and social-status based appeals in advertising are processed peripherally, as suggested by prior research [34, 35], and that associative conditioning driven by prioritization of sex- and status-based social information is sufficient to induce preferences for otherwise neutral brand logos
Summary
Despite continued debate about their appropriateness, depictions of sex and social status in advertising continue to help marketers sell their products. Shared brain circuits mediating social perception and valuation in rhesus macaques and humans provide a mechanism by which increased valuation of stimuli associated with social information may be translated into preferences for brands associated with sex and status in advertising [22, 32, 33] This specific participant population provides us with unique opportunities for a controlled experimental design to test our predictions. We found a similar conditioning effect for high-status male faces but not for low-status male faces in both sexes These findings suggest that sexual and social-status based appeals in advertising are processed peripherally, as suggested by prior research [34, 35], and that associative conditioning driven by prioritization of sex- and status-based social information is sufficient to induce preferences for otherwise neutral brand logos. Preferences for brands advertised with sex or status can emerge without culturally-bound, complex decision mechanisms found only in humans
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