Advertising Makes Us Unhappy

by?Nicole Torres

The University of Warwick’s Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country’s ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.

在比較了27個歐洲國家90多萬位市民在1980年至2011年間的生活滿意度調(diào)查數(shù)據(jù)，和同一時期內(nèi)這些國家的年度廣告支出后，華威大學的安德魯·奧斯瓦德（Andrew Oswald）及其團隊發(fā)現(xiàn)兩者之間存在負相關(guān)，即：國家的年度廣告支出越高，其市民在一兩年后的生活滿意度就越低。結(jié)論：廣告讓我們不幸福（Advertising Makes Us Unhappy）

Professor Oswald, defend your research.

奧斯瓦德教授，捍衛(wèi)你的研究吧！

Oswald:?We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there.

奧斯瓦德: 我們的確發(fā)現(xiàn)了明顯的負相關(guān)。如果觀察每年的國民幸福度變化及該年度或數(shù)年前的廣告支出變化，在GDP 和失業(yè)率等其他因素不變的條件下，會發(fā)現(xiàn)二者之間存在相關(guān)性。這種相關(guān)性表明：當廣告商對某個國家投資時，會降低當?shù)厝嗣竦男腋８小?/p>

HBR:?What prompted you to investigate this?

HBR: 什么啟發(fā)你進行這方面的調(diào)查？

Colleagues and I have been studying human happiness for 30 years now, and recently my focus turned to national happiness. What are the characteristics of a happy country? What are the forces that mold one? What explains the ups and downs? I’d never looked at advertising before, but I met a researcher who was collecting data on it for a different reason, and it seemed to me that we should combine forces. Like a lot of people in Western society, I can’t help noticing the increasing amount of ads we’re bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture: How is your happiness and mine shaped by what we see, hear, and read? I think it’s rather intuitive that lots of ads would make us less happy. In a sense they’re trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more on goods and services to ease that feeling. I appreciate, of course, that the world’s corporate advertisers and marketing firms won’t like hearing me say that.

我和同事進行了30年的人類幸福度研究，最近將重點轉(zhuǎn)向了國民幸福度。幸福國家的特點是什么？哪些變量匯聚成了一股力量？如何解釋幸福度的上下起伏？我以前從來不看廣告，但我遇到了一位出于其他目的而收集相關(guān)數(shù)據(jù)的研究人員，發(fā)現(xiàn)我們似乎應該將變量結(jié)合起來。和西方社會的許多人一樣，我很難不注意到周圍轟炸式的大量廣告。我自然而然地聯(lián)想到這種現(xiàn)象是否會給我們的文化帶來不快：我們的所見所聞所讀如何影響你我的幸福度？我認為，大量廣告會讓我們感到不幸福，這是相當直觀的。從某種意義來說，廣告天然會喚起不滿情緒，從而激發(fā)人們花更多錢去購買商品和服務的欲望，以緩解這種不滿。當然，我理解世界各地的廣告商和營銷公司并不愿意聽到我說的這些。

Yeah, I don’t think they’d agree that that is the goal of advertising.

確實，我認為他們并不同意這是廣告的目標。

Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one.

他們的理念是廣告試圖向大眾介紹令人興奮的新鮮事物以供購買，而他們的任務僅僅是提供信息，并以這種方式來提高人類幸福感。然而，托斯丹·凡勃倫（Thorstein Veblen）等人的另一種看法是，將人們置身于大量廣告之中會增強其欲望，讓他們感到自身的生活、成就、財產(chǎn)和經(jīng)驗不足。這項研究證實了針對廣告的負面看法，而非正面看法。

So ads make us want what we don’t or can’t have?

那么，廣告是否令我們想要得到我們沒有或無法獲得的東西？

The idea here is a very old one: Before I can decide how happy I am, I have to look over my shoulder, consciously or subconsciously, and see how other people are doing. Many of my feelings about my income, my car, and my house are molded by my next-door neighbor’s income, car, and house. That’s just part of being human: worrying about relative status. But we know from lots of research that making social comparisons can be harmful to us emotionally, and advertising prompts us to measure ourselves against others. If I see an ad for a fancy new car, it makes me think about my ordinary one, which might make me feel bad. If I see this $10,000 watch and then look at my watch, which I probably paid about $150 for, I might think, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” And of course nations are just agglomerations of individuals. Now, in this paper we don’t prove that the dissatisfaction is coming from relative comparisons, but we suspect that’s what happening.

傳統(tǒng)想法是這樣：我必須有意識或潛意識地觀察其他人怎么樣，才能判斷自己的幸福度。我對收入、汽車和房子的很多感受都建立在我鄰居情況的基礎上。這只是人性的一部分：相對比較引發(fā)擔憂。但是大量研究表明，進行社會比較可能會給我們造成情感上的傷害，而廣告會促使我們將自身與其他人進行比較。當我看到漂亮新車的廣告，會聯(lián)想到自己的普通轎車，從而產(chǎn)生負面情緒。當我看到這只價值一萬美元的手表，再看看自己可能僅花費150 美元購買的手表，可能會想：“也許是我自己存在什么問題?！碑斎?，國家只是個人的聚集體。在本文中，我們并非證明不滿來自相對比較，但是我們懷疑這是存在的事實。

How do you know advertising is actually causing us to be unhappy? That this isn’t correlational?

你如何得知廣告確實讓我們感到不幸福？這是相關(guān)性還是因果關(guān)系？

First, we controlled for lots of other influences on happiness. Second, we looked at increases or drops in advertising in a given year and showed that they successfully predicted a rise or fall in national happiness in ensuing years. Third, we did lots of statistical checks to make sure the empirical linkages were strong. Fourth, people sometimes forget that causality always requires there to be a correlation somewhere. But your question is constantly in my mind as a researcher.

首先，我們控制了很多其他對幸福度的影響因素。其次，我們觀察了指定年份廣告的增減，結(jié)果表明這成功預測了隨后幾年國民幸福度的提高或下降。第三，我們進行了大量統(tǒng)計檢查，確定這種相關(guān)性是明顯的。第四，人們有時會忘記因果關(guān)系是建立在相關(guān)性的基礎上。但是作為一名研究人員，你的問題一直在我的腦海中浮現(xiàn)。

But doesn’t this apply just to materialistic people? A lot of people understand that you can’t buy happiness.

結(jié)論是否僅適用于唯物主義者？因為很多人知道幸福無法用金錢衡量。

Yes, some might see that watch ad and say, “Why are men buying $10,000 watches when they carry a mobile phone with the time on it?” Or respond to a car ad by congratulating themselves for not buying a gas-guzzler that’s expensive to service and destroys the environment. Our research shows that the really big influences on human happiness are things like health, intimate relationships, being employed, social safety nets, not being in midlife (there really is a crisis for many), and so on. Buying that watch or car can help make us feel slightly happier, but deep down it has a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses status effect. And when everybody buys the same thing the effect is nullified. That’s partly why advertising hurts group happiness; there’s only so much status to go around.

是的，某些人可能看到這只手表會說：“手機照樣可以看時間，為什么還有人花一萬美元買一只手表？”或者，某些人對汽車廣告的反應是，慶幸自己沒有購買油耗高、服務昂貴且污染環(huán)境的汽車。我們的研究表明，真正對人類幸福度產(chǎn)生巨大影響的因素有：健康狀況、親密關(guān)系、有工作、社會安全網(wǎng)絡、沒有中年危機（這對很多人來說真的是一種危機）等等。購買昂貴的手表或汽車可能會讓我們感覺稍微幸福一點，但深入來看，這有一種“與鄰居攀比”地位的效應。當每個人都購買同樣的產(chǎn)品時，就不會出現(xiàn)這種效應。這是廣告之所以會傷害群體幸福感的部分原因；除此之外，還有很多顯示比較的方面。

This reminds me of how social media makes us miserable because we compare ourselves with influencers.

這讓我想到社交媒體讓我們感到難受的原因，因為我們自己會和有影響力的人進行比較。

Yes. There is research bubbling up through the journals about this. For example, one longitudinal?study?from 2017 found that using Facebook was associated with compromised well-being. My hunch is that over the next few decades this will become a really serious policy issue.

是的。各種期刊中大量涌現(xiàn)有關(guān)此話題的研究。例如，2017 年的一項縱向研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，使用 Facebook 與幸福感降低有關(guān)。直覺告訴我，未來幾十年中，這將成為一個非常嚴肅的政策性問題。

Has any other research linked advertising with reduced well-being?

是否有其他研究將廣告與幸福感降低聯(lián)系在一起？

The short answer is no. Although there’s some interesting literature on how children are affected by advertising in terms of their eating and health, there is surprisingly little on this topic. We don’t know of a paper close to ours. Perhaps there is one, but nobody’s written to us about it.

沒有。盡管有一些有趣的文獻是關(guān)于兒童如何在飲食和健康方面受到廣告影響，但關(guān)于此話題的內(nèi)容卻少之又少。我們沒有發(fā)現(xiàn)與我們類似的文章。也許存在這樣的文章，但沒人告訴我們。

How did you measure national advertising and national happiness?

你如何衡量全國性廣告與國民幸福度？

The advertising metric is straightforward accounting. We have data on the amount spent in different countries on different forms of ads: newspaper, radio, TV, and so on. Measuring happiness or life satisfaction is more complicated, but we now know how to do so reliably. In this study we have a large sample, close to a million people, and we decided to choose one of the most long-standing simple measures of human well-being, which is the survey question “How satisfied are you with your life?” People used a scale to answer it, and then we aggregated those answers for each country.

廣告指標即可直接衡量。我們擁有不同國家在不同形式的廣告上所花費的費用數(shù)據(jù)：報紙、廣播、電視等。衡量幸福度或生活滿意度則更為復雜，但我們現(xiàn)在知道如何以可靠的方式進行衡量。在本研究中，我們有一個接近一百萬人的大型樣本，并決定選擇其中一個可長期衡量人類幸福感的簡單指標，即調(diào)查問題——你對自己的生活有多滿意？人們回答此問題時會限定一個范圍，然后我們匯總了每個國家的答案。

And you’re sure the lower life satisfaction isn’t due to the other things that you just mentioned affect it, like age and marital status?

你確定生活滿意度低不是因為你剛剛提到的其他影響變量（例如年齡和婚姻狀況）嗎？

Those are among the things we controlled for in addition to the unemployment rate and GDP. We also controlled for the underlying starting levels of happiness and advertising in countries, because we wanted to do a fair comparison with the same baseline. And year by year we controlled for what you might call shocks—think of oil-price shocks—that have a common set of consequences across the whole of Europe.

除了失業(yè)率和 GDP 之外，我們也控制了這些變量。我們還控制了各個國家的幸福度和廣告的基本起始水平，因為我們想要用相同的基準進行公平比較。我們逐年控制所謂的沖擊，例如油價沖擊等，這些沖擊對整個歐洲造成了同樣的后果。

How big is the negative effect of ads?

廣告的負面影響有多大？

Our analysis shows that if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction. That’s about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed. We have a lot of experience working out how people are affected by bad life events, and advertising has sizable consequences even when compared with them.

我們的分析表明：如果將廣告支出提高一倍，會導致生活滿意度降低 3%。這相當于，離婚者的生活滿意度驟降一半，失業(yè)者的幸福感下降了三分之一。我們在研究人們被負面生活事件的影響程度方面具有豐富的經(jīng)驗。即便和這些事件相比，廣告產(chǎn)生的后果依然很大。

Is there anything we can do about this?

對此我們能做些什么？

It’s worth wondering whether Western society has done the right thing by allowing large levels of advertising, almost unregulated, as though it were inevitable. Given these patterns, it seems like something we might want to think about. But we haven’t got any political punch line in this paper. We don’t recommend any policy.

一個值得商榷的事實是，西方社會允許大量幾乎不受管制的廣告存在，這是不是正確的舉措。盡管廣告的存在不可避免。鑒于這些影響，這是我們可能要思考的問題。但在研究中，我們不提供任何政治宣言。我們不做任何政策上的建議。

What if everyone just downloaded ad blockers for the web and fast-forwarded through commercials on TV? Would that help?

如果每個人都下載網(wǎng)絡廣告攔截軟件并快進電視廣告會出現(xiàn)什么情況？會提高幸福度嗎？

I try to be an evenhanded statistical researcher, but I can see how you might look at our study and think, “Maybe it’s sensible for me to opt out of some of these ads.”

作為一名統(tǒng)計研究員，我會盡量保持公平性，但我知道你可能會這樣看待我們的研究：“也許不看某些廣告對我來說才是明智之舉。”

妮可·托雷斯（NicoleTorres）| 訪??

馬冰侖 |譯?? 劉筱薇| 校?? 騰躍 | 編輯