Silvia Bellezza

Who they are

Bellezza works on how status is inferred from consumption, and her contribution to this site is a complication rather than a confirmation.

"The Red Sneakers Effect", with Francesca Gino and Anat Keinan in the Journal of Consumer Research, tests inferences drawn from nonconformity. The title states the result. Deliberate, visible deviation from a norm can be read as evidence of standing, on the reasoning that only somebody secure enough can afford to flout the code.

Richard Shotton builds a chapter of The Illusion of Choice on this paper, and that chapter came out well in this vault's reliability audit of the book.

Key papers

Bellezza, S., Gino, F., & Keinan, A. (2014). "The red sneakers effect: inferring status and competence from signals of nonconformity." Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 35-54. First author. Issued online 18 December 2013 in the 2014 volume.

Key ideas

Nonconformity as a status signal, which runs directly against a simple reading of costly signalling. Conforming expensively raises standing, and conspicuously not conforming also raises standing, so whatever observers read off clothing is not simply price. See Costly Signalling and Status Signaling.

The conditions do the work. This is not a general licence to break dress codes, and the boundary conditions are where the interesting argument sits.

A limit on what this record claims: we have verified authorship, year, journal, volume and pages at Crossref, and have read the paper's title and its treatment in Shotton rather than the paper itself.

---