There’s an experiment, by a different group of social scientists, that gives us one early clue. In 1978, two Canadian social scientists got a bunch of four- and five-year-old kids and divided them into two groups. The first group was shown no commercials. The second group was shown two commercials for a particular toy. Then they offered these four- or five-year-old kids a choice. They told them: You have to choose, now, to play with one of these two boys here. You can play with this little boy who has the toy from the commercials—but we have to warn you, he’s not a nice boy. He’s mean. Or you can play with a boy who doesn’t have the toy, but who is really nice.
另一组社会科学家进行的一项实验为我们提供了一个早期线索。1978年，两位加拿大社会科学家找了一群四五岁的孩子，把他们分成两组。第一组不播放广告。第二组观看了特定玩具的两个广告。然后他们为这些四五岁的孩子提供了一个选择。他们告诉他们：现在，你们必须选择和这两个男孩中的一个一起玩。你可以和这个拿着广告里的玩具的小男孩一起玩——但我们必须警告你，他不是一个好男孩。他很刻薄。或者你可以和一个没有玩具但非常友善的男孩一起玩。
If they had seen the commercial for the toy, the kids mostly chose to play with the mean boy with the toy. If they hadn’t seen the commercial, they mostly chose to play with the nice boy who had no toys.
如果孩子们看过这个玩具的广告，他们大多会选择和那个拿着玩具的坏男孩一起玩。如果没有看到广告，他们大多会选择和没有玩具的好男孩一起玩。
In other words, the advertisements led them to choose an inferior human connection over a superior human connection—because they’d been primed to think that a lump of plastic is what really matters.
换句话说，广告让他们选择了劣等的人际关系，而不是优越的人际关系——因为他们已经做好了准备，认为一块塑料才是真正重要的。
Two commercials—just two—did that. Today, every person sees way more advertising messages than that in an average morning. More eighteen-month-olds can recognize the McDonald’s M than know their own surname. By the time an average child is thirty-six months old, she already knows a hundred brand logos.
两个广告——只有两个——做到了这一点。如今，每个人看到的广告信息都比平常早上多得多。十八个月大的孩子能认出麦当劳的M的人比知道自己姓氏的人还要多。当一个普通孩子三十六个月大时，她已经知道一百个品牌标志。
Tim suspected that advertising plays a key role in why we are, every day, choosing a value system that makes us feel worse. So with another social scientist named Jean Twenge,21 he tracked the percentage of total U.S. national wealth that’s spent on advertising, from 1976 to 2003—and he discovered that the more money is spent on ads, the more materialistic teenagers become.
蒂姆怀疑广告在我们每天选择让我们感觉更糟的价值体系中发挥着关键作用。因此，他与另一位名叫Jean Twenge的社会科学家追踪了1976年至2003年美国国民财富中花在广告上的百分比，他发现花在广告上的钱越多，青少年就越物质主义。
A few years ago, an advertising agency head named Nancy Shalek explained approvingly: “Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that … You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it’s very easy to do with kids because they’re the most emotionally vulnerable.”
几年前，一位名叫Nancy Shalek的广告公司负责人赞许地解释道：“广告最好的方式就是让人们觉得没有他们的产品，你就是一个失败者。孩子们对此非常敏感……你会暴露出情感上的脆弱性，这对孩子来说很容易做到，因为他们在情感上是最脆弱的。”
When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created. Ads are the ultimate frenemy—they’re always saying: Oh babe, I want you to look/smell/feel great; it makes me so sad that that at the moment you’re ugly/stinking/miserable; here’s this thing that will make you into the person you and I really want you to be. Oh, did I mention you have to pay a few bucks? I just want you to be the person you deserve to be. Isn’t that worth a few dollars? You’re worth it.
自 20 世纪 20 年代以来，广告从业人员在相互交谈时就承认，他们的工作就是让人们感到自己能力不足，然后提供产品来解决他们所造成的能力不足感。广告是终极的亦敌亦友——它们总是说：哦宝贝，我希望你看起来/闻起来/感觉很棒；此刻你很丑/很臭/很痛苦，这让我很难过；这件事会让你成为你和我真正希望你成为的人。哦，我有没有提到你要付几块钱？我只想让你成为你值得成为的人。这不值几块钱吗？你值得。
This logic radiates out through the culture, and we start to impose it on each other, even when ads aren’t there. Why did I, as a child, crave Nike air-pumps, even though I was as likely to play basketball as I was to go to the moon? It was partly because of the ads—but mostly because the ads created a group dynamic among everyone I knew. It created a marker of status, that we then policed. As adults, we do the same, only in slightly more subtle ways.
这种逻辑通过文化传播开来，我们开始将其强加给彼此，即使广告不存在。为什么我小时候渴望耐克气垫鞋，尽管我会打篮球的几率和我会登上月球的几率一样？部分是因为广告，但主要是因为广告在我认识的每个人中创造了一种群体活力。它创建了一个地位标记，然后我们对其进行监管。作为成年人，我们也会做同样的事情，只是方式稍微微妙一些。
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