Observations will be an occasional companion to Field Notes: short essays on the issues that shape our experience of luxury. I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts at [email protected].

There’s a YouTube channel I subscribe to that’s produced by someone who reviews and comments on watches. I’m not going to name the channel here because my point isn’t to attack an individual, but to look at human psychology more generally. This creator put out a video recently talking about a new release from a watch microbrand, and in it, they said:

In the comments section on YouTube, the most upvoted comment and the creator’s response read:

Is the creator being sincere? I’m willing to believe they are. But the fact is that even assuming they are being sincere, it doesn’t matter. Subconscious motivations are facts whether we’re aware of what’s influencing us or not. The creator assumes that because they’ve disclosed the financial relationship, and because they believe they’re offering their sincere opinion, that should settle the matter. It doesn’t.

An opinion can be entirely our own and still shaped by a relationship we value. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Think of how you assume good intentions on the part of those you love the most, and how you evaluate their actions in that context. Your relationships shape how generously you interpret what they say and do. That’s not only reasonable but—I imagine—a necessary trait in a species that values both family and friends.

My education in public health makes this a familiar problem, one that’s not at all specific to luxury or to content creators. The insightful Atul Gawande explored physician ownership and financial incentives in his 2009 article for The New Yorker, “The Cost Conundrum”. In the article, he described visiting McAllen, Texas, which he described at the time as “the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world”, with per-capita Medicare costs twice the national average and 25 percent higher than local per-capita income, which is (or should be) a shocking statistic.

What Gawande found was a town that had evolved a healthcare culture in which many physicians owned their own advanced testing equipment and facilities, their own surgical suites and facilities. He found honest, caring physicians who nevertheless prescribed tests and surgeries at far higher rates than peers who were paid a fixed salary without regard to what procedures they did or didn’t order, such as physicians employed at the Mayo Clinic.

In other words, take two well-meaning and sincere physicians. Pay one of them a salary, and pay the other based in part on how many extra procedures they recommend. The latter will inevitably order more, with no apparent benefit to patient outcomes, believing all the while they’re doing what’s right for their patients.

Psychologist Ziva Kunda’s 1990 review, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning”, explains how wanting a particular conclusion can affect how people retrieve information and which arguments they find convincing. They generally still need a justification they consider plausible; the flexibility lies in how they reach it.

For a watch reviewer, for example, that might mean giving greater weight to the strengths of a particular watch—say, beautiful design—while giving less weight to areas where the watch in question isn’t as strong, such as power reserve, accuracy, warranty, serviceability, and the like. The difficulty is that the resulting opinion may still feel considered and authentic. When we look inward and find in ourselves no intention to deceive—that’s an inadequate test.

This applies to those of us criticizing the arrangement, too. Recognizing someone else’s conflict doesn’t confer immunity to our own. The creator in question—were they to happen upon this article—might think of me, “He’s just jealous that he doesn’t have watch brands offering him sponsorship.” It’s a fair point, and it’s why I quite deliberately started this newsletter by stating clearly that I wouldn’t accept that very thing. As I wrote back then, “Money is inevitably distorting, even with the best of intentions, and its distortion grows over time.”

Disclosure is necessary and important. It’s also insufficient—or at least it should be for all of us as consumers of content related to luxury. Knowing about a payment, gift, ownership interest, or commission helps us to assess the relationship that underlies a recommendation. It doesn’t undo that relationship, and it doesn’t tell us how much we should adjust our confidence in what we’re being told.

So look beyond the disclosure. When a financial relationship exists, ask yourself what the person stands to gain, whether the supporting evidence can be checked, and whether there’s corroboration from someone without the same interest. Put simply:

We don’t have to doubt someone’s honesty to question what influences their judgment.

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