How Markets Make and Tame Emotions: The Struggle of Evaluating Diffuse Psychedelic Experiences

• In Event: Theoretical and Methodological Advances in the Sociology of Consumption

Abstract

Markets make emotions. In any market, order is contingent on participants being able to determine what things are worth. Value is typically inferred by prices—themselves proxies for complex processes of evaluation—but in markets for rare or unconventional goods and services, interpretation, articulation, and classification often is required. Such activities (re)produce emotion concepts and emotion rules. To build support for this claim, I analyze 3,200 consumer reviews of illegally purchased psychedelic drugs, in which users ascribe meaning to ambiguous experiences. The product reviews were scraped from seven online drug trade websites that operated between 2011 and 2015—the formative years of drug ecommerce. The analysis consisted of several rounds of qualitative inductive coding of 100 reports, followed by a computational and deductive topic analysis of the full corpus. I identify four central emotion repertoires—Good Trip, Bad Trip, Cathartic Introspection, and Mystical Experience. These repertoires provide concepts and interpretive guidelines for making sense of the consumption of psychedelic products. I also find evidence of growing quantification of value in the consumer reports, which reduce attention to complex emotional experiences and shifts focus toward criteria more amenable to numeric rating, such as shipping speed and customer service. The findings suggest that markets are sites of emotion construction, but that their generative capacity diminish as evaluation practices become routine.

Author

• Isak Ladegaard, University of Hong Kong