Rob Nelissen

Rob Nelissen

Social psychologist whose 2011 field experiments with Marijn Meijers reported that luxury brand labels bring social benefits to the wearer. The paper became the standard citation for why logos work, and a double-blind replication six years later found no such effect across five experiments.

Who they are

Nelissen works on emotion, social behaviour and costly signalling, at Tilburg University. The 2011 paper took a prediction from evolutionary theory out of the laboratory and into ordinary social encounters, which is the right move and the reason the result travelled as far as it did.

Publishing in Evolution and Human Behavior, he and Meijers reported positive evidence that visible luxury labels produced better treatment. It has been cited several hundred times.

What happened next is not a criticism of him. Joël Berger identified that some of those experiments were not run in a perfectly double-blind way, rebuilt the design properly, and found nothing. That is how the process is supposed to work, and the only fault worth naming is in the field's citation habits rather than in the original authors.

Key papers

Nelissen, R. M. A., & Meijers, M. H. C. (2011). "Social benefits of luxury brands as costly signals of wealth and status." Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(5), 343-355. First author.

Key ideas

Costly signalling applied to consumption, tested in the field rather than in a laboratory. See Costly Signalling.

The prediction is concrete and that is a virtue: people displaying an expensive label should receive measurably better treatment in ordinary encounters.

The finding did not survive a better-controlled attempt, and both facts belong in the same sentence whenever this paper is cited.

Sources

  1. Nelissen & Meijers (2011), Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(5), 343-355, verified at the published record 1 October 2026, doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.12.002.
  2. Berger, J. (2017), PLOS ONE, 12(2), e0170216, for the replication.