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The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature ReviewDr. Saad has been a pioneer in bringing evolutionary ideas to the field of business. An overwhelming body of literature has now demonstrated that human decision-making is influenced by adaptively motivated biases we inherited from our ancestors. It follows that those motivated biases will influence how we allocate our scarce economic resources. This has profound implications for consumer behavior, as Geoffrey Miller and others (Jill Sundie at UT, Vlad Griskevicius at Minnesota, and Josh Ackerman at MIT) have been arguing. These researchers have also been providing ample empirical demonstrations of the power of that viewpoint. Gad Saad has been been advancing an evolutionary approach to business for years, sometimes encountering opposition from colleagues in his field (who labor under a set of false Blank Slate assumptions that Saad reviews in the first chapter, along with brief rebuttals).The consumer goods in Saad's clever title are not chosen randomly, but are matched to what he views as four overriding Darwinian pursuits:
1. Survival: We are here because our ancestors were inclined to eat fatty cooked meats and other calorie-dense foods scorned by all California vegans today. Transported into the present, our ancestors would have lined up at McDonald's for those juicy burgers in his title. In the modern world, Saad notes that the top ten restaurants are McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, Starbuck's, Subway, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Domino's Pizza, and Dunkin' Donuts. That diet does not help us live to 90, but the inclinations that drive those choices probably helped our ancestors survive until reproductive age.
2. Reproduction: As Saad notes, men are overwhelmingly the consumers of pornography, and this sex difference is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, flashy overpowered sports cars are also overwhelmingly a male purchase, and, Saad argues, mainly used as a sexual signal (and indeed the media from Fox News to the Belfast Telegraph is abuzz this week with a series of studies by Jill Sundie and colleagues that demonstrates the links between Porsches and mating displays). In Saad's own research, he finds that simply driving an expensive sports car triggers a boost in men's testosterone levels.
3. Kin Selection: Saad notes that many of our purchases are made for direct kin. This month, I've shelled out money for Legos, art supplies, summer recreational programs, as well as a number of special foods aimed to please my seven-year-old son. I just got back from lunch with him, his older brother, and my two grandchildren, and to test your knowledge of marketing behavior and inclusive fitness, guess who paid?
4. Reciprocity: We not only buy gifts and lunches for our kin, we buy gifts for friends, pick up the tab at the restaurant when we're with close friends, and so on. We do so not because we're economically "irrational," but because it feels good to make our close associates feel good. Indeed, gift-giving is linked not only to friends and kin, it is used to woo mates and to maintain relationships with them (think Valentine's day and anniversary presents). I enjoy Saad's abundant use of statistics to bolster the points. He informs us that fully 10 percent of retail purchases in North America are for gifts, which boils down to $1,215 per person, which starts to add up after a while (to a whopping $253 billion per year in the economy, in fact).
One could quibble with Saad's list of motivational forces, but I will instead simply agree with something that David Buss says in the foreward to the Consuming Instinct: This is a book that should be required reading at business schools. Besides a broad-ranging overview of research on marketing, psychology, economics, anthropology, and biology, Saad peppers the book with lots of take-home messages for consumers, policy-makers, and business people (this is an appealing feature of books aimed at the business crowd -- a la Heath and Heath's Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Goldstein, Martin, and Cialdini's Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive- practical bottom-line suggestions of how the science can be used).
If you are either a professional businessperson or simply a consumer, I would challenge you read this book and Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior -- and not come away thinking very differently about people's motives for buying the many, many, things they buy.
Doug Kenrick is author of Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human NatureThe Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature Overview
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