Transcriber: Sigal Tifferet Reviewer: Ivana Korom
You know that you've made it big when somebody introduces you
with only one name.
So I'm like Madonna and Cher now.
He doesn't have to mention my last name.
So, thank you all for being here,
and for waiting for the last talk,
I can't promise you that I'll be as exciting as Nomadic massive,
or as Owen with his mashing up, but I'll try to keep you entertained.
So basically, in the past 15 years
I've been trying to infuse evolutionary psychology
into the study of consumption.
The idea being
that if you look at these faces,
of course there are very important cross-cultural differences,
that define these people
but underneath these differences
there is a bed of human universals
that are very much rooted in our common shared human nature.
And so, to quote E. O. Wilson, the famed Harvard evolutionary biologist,
he said that "the genes hold culture on a leash,"
to which I would simply add, "the genes hold consumer behavior on a leash".
So, of course culture is malleable,
but it is malleable within our biological constraints.
So this idea of "Nature vs. Nurture"
is one that has come up in many different fields,
many different contexts,
are charismatic leaders born or are they made?
So, in the context of consumer behavior
I'll give you one such example:
toy preferences, is typically the example that social scientists use
to demonstrate that we are socialized
to be consumers.
So, little Johnny plays with the blue truck aggressively
while little Linda plays with the pink doll in a very nurturing way,
and it is this cascade of gender socialization
that eventually leads us to be grown up males or females.
It turns out that that's not quite so accurate.
So let me just very briefly discuss a few findings
that demonstrate that some of these preferences
are actually quite innate.
Children who are in the pre-socialization stage,
meaning that they don't yet have the cognitive development
to be socialized,
also display this sex-specific toy preferences.
Little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia,
which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls,
they tend to then have toy preferences that are very much like
little boys'.
And then, if you do studies with some of our primate cousins,
rhesus monkeys and vervet monkeys,
they have very much the same sex-specific toy preferences.
So that puts a bit of a damper on the idea
that we are just empty minds who are subsequently sociallized.
And if you are wondering why the baby is extremely beautiful,
that's because of the beauty of my wife
who is here in the room.
(Applause)
That's a belated Valentine's gift.
(Laughter)
Now I don't have to pay her any fancy flowers and so on.
To give you a sense of how powerful evolutionary psychology is
in understanding even daily events,
I'll just share one example continuing with the story
of my little daughter.
So, when my wife was pregnant with our daughter Luna,
of course we got the requisite two-month ultrasound,
we put it up very proudly
on the refrigerator,
mother in-law came over with my father in-law,
and she looks at these images,
now, these images I should point out,
they could be those of a lizard,
they could be those of an ameoba,
they could be those of an alien,
yet she looks at it
and arrestingly says,
"Oh, my god, Gad, the baby looks exactly like you."
(Laughter)
"He has your profile, can't you see?"
Now, why would that be related to evolutionary psychology?
Well, it turns out that when children are born,
around the world, right?
So this is not specific to Peruvian culture
or Israeli culture,
it's very much a human universal,
when kids are born,
usually the mother's side of the family will very very quickly proclaim
that the newborn baby looks exactly like the father.
The reason for that is because it's a mechanism,
it's a cultural mechanism to try to assuage
threats of paternity uncertainty.
But in this case, this is the first scientific case
where this mechanism happened in utero.
So I've already made my daughter famous
even before she could speak or think.
So, for the rest of the talk today I'll talk about some of the research
that I've been doing, linking how our survival instinct
manifests itself in consumer behavior, and then also our reproductive instinct.
So, food, of course, is probably the consumption act
that is most closely linked to our survival.
So if you look at the hummingbird, he has to eat roughly 1.5 - 3 times
its body weight per day, because of its high metabolism,
in order to be able to survive.
So, he's got a good reason why he has to eat so much.
On the other hand, 'All you can eat' buffets,
'All you can have' vacation packages, 'supersize me's,
cater to the same instinct of hoarding and gorging.
Unfortunately, we don't have his metabolic rate, so we end up
with these dreadful diseases.
Continuing with the same line of thinking,
we have this incredible innate preference for fatty foods,
few of us prefer raw broccoli to chocolate mousse,
or to a juicy steak.
So, if you look here at the grizzly bears,
they're eating fatty salmon,
you know, prior to going into semi hibernation.
If you look at the top ten restaurants around the world,
they have one thing in common,
they deliver fatty foods to us, that is tasty.
It's not that they have good advertisements,
it's not that they have nice jingles.
It's that they deliver a product that is perfectly congruent
with our evolved taste buds.
and this is exactly what the Atkins diet did, right?
The Atkins diet said, "Hey, you could eat as much as you want
fatty steak, eggs, you could eat bacon, and you're going to lose weight."
Great, sign me up, right?
Interestingly, though, cross-cultural differences
in cullinary traditions, are also, themselves, due to biology.
So if you look at cultures that are predominantly meat-based,
so look at the top smoked meat sandwich,
or predominantly vegetable-based,
or how much spices are used in a culinary tradition,
how much salt consumption is used,
how much pickling happens in a culture,
each of these culinary traditions turn out to be adaptations
to the local environment.
And what's specifically,
it's correlated to the latitude of the country,
which is of course correlated to the ambient temperature,
which is correlated to the density of the food pathogens in that culture.
So rather than simply saying that here we have an example
of oh, it's due to culture,
an evolutionary approach allows you to understand
what is the ultimate explanation for that cultural difference.
Moving on to mating, something that I think everybody here
would be interested in.
If you look at the cardinal, he's engaging in what's called:
nuptial gift-giving.
In many species you offer a gift, the male cardinal, you could see,
has a food morsel in his mouth,
he's saying, "Hey, look, I can provide for you,
and as a measure of how well I can provide for you,
how about you grant me sexual access to you?"
And, of course, we engage in endless forms,
as consumers, in exactly this behavior.
The diamond rings that we have to offer have to be a costly signal,
otherwise, the ladies wouldn't be able to assort the difference between the faker
and the true suitor.
Therefore, I have to pay 25%
of my yearly income to show you that I am truthful.
And hopefully then, you will give it up,
just like the female cardinal.
(Laughter)
We use products as sexual signals, right?
So if you look at the peacock over here,
the hen seems to be rather uninterested, and he's saying, "Look at my tail.
Look how big it is. Look how symmetric it is.
Look how iridescent the colors are. This is why you have to choose me.
Because my phenotypic quality is so great."
Well, I've argued in several of my books
that consumers do exactly that.
Many times, we use products either men or women,
to improve our position in the mating market.
So a few years ago, with one of my former graduate students,
John Vongas, we decided to test this idea.
We brought in people - not people, we brought in males into the lab,
and we had them drive either a fancy, it's not imagine driving a Porsche,
they actually drove a Porsche.
Or they drove a beaten up, rusted, old sedan,
in one of two environments, either in downtown Montreal,
where everybody could see you,
or in a semi-deserted highway.
By the way, try to get a granting agency to release money,
and convince them that you're not going to use the Porsche
for your own personal sinister pursuits.
(Laughter)
Now, what were some of the dependent measures?
At the end of each of these conditions, these driving conditions,
we collected salivary assays, which then help us measure
their fluctuations in their testosterone levels.
And what do you think happened?
When you put young males in the Porsche
the endocrinology response is outlandish!
(Laughter)
Now, we had thought that, yes, testosterone would go up
in both environments, but it would go up a lot more
when everybody could see you.
So in downtown Montreal it would go up a lot more
than on a semi-deserted highway.
The guys couldn't give a damn.
Put me in a Porsche, the testosterone shot through the roof.
Just to continue with this point,
cars are sexual signals,
this is a study that was done two years ago
by some British psychologists.
These are the actual stimuli that they used.
You take the same guy, you put him in a Ford Fiesta,
beaten up old car, or in a Bentley,
and you ask women to rate this guy in terms
of how physically attractive he is.
You're not talking about his status, just physically,
how beautiful is this man?
And you do the same thing with the woman, and men have to judge it.
Men couldn't give a damn the car that the lady was driving.
On the other hand, the women when the guy is in the Bentley,
"Oh my god, he's Brad Pitt."
When he's driving the other car, "Oh no, I don't like losers like this."
OK?
So again, it shows you how these products
are quite intoxicating,
in terms of how it helps us position ourselves
in the mating market.
Of course, not only men engage in sexual signaling.
The ladies are also guilty of such pursuits.
On the left hand side we've got a female baboon who is in estrus,
and she's in estrus, engaging in conspicuous advertising of her genitalia.
I think I could speak safely for all men here,
that we would not want our human females
to be conspicuously displaying their genitalia in this way.
But, sticking true to the pink theme - what they certainly do do -
is that they would dress much more provocatively
when they are maximally fertile
in their menstrual cycle.
So with one of my doctorate students, who's here in the room -
I can't see him because I am blinded by the light -
Eric Stenstrom, we've done a very very thorough study
where we've looked at how the menstrual cycle
affects women's behaviors as consumers.
One of which is how much do they engage
in beautification
as a function of whether they are
in the luteal phase or in the fertile phase
of their menstrual cycle.
Continuing on with this idea of sexual signaling.
A few years ago I had an undergraduate student
who at the end of the course came to me and said,
"Professor Saad, I have to work with you, could you hook me up with some project?
I want to do anything!"
So I thought about it for a while, and I said -
this is a male student -
I said, "OK, how about if I were to give you the following project,
you're going to surf porn sites
for the next one month."
(Laughter)
To which he looked at me and his eyes told me,
"Prof. Saad, I love you!"
(Laughter)
So, what was the point of the project, basically?
I wanted to test
what evolutionary psychologists have talked about,
this idea of a preference for the hourglass figure,
which is a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7,
whether I could actually pick it out
by doing a content analysis of how female escorts
advertise themselves on the Internet.
So, typically, you know, my height is 5'3'',
here are my measurements, here is my weight,
here is my fee.
So, what I had this very lucky male undergraduate student do
is just surf different sites,
he ended up gathering data of more than 1,000 female escorts.
(Laughter)
Right, he was really assiduous in his pursuit of science,
and it covered 48 different countries,
so nobody could say,
'Oh, but this a Western standard.'
'Oh, it's due to the Oprah effect.'
'It's due to Cosmopolitan magazine.'
We specifically chose cultures
that were extraordinarily disparate in terms of the different metrics
that a culture might be defined on,
and it turns out that the average
waist-to-hip ratio is exactly in line
with what is expected from an evolutionary perspective.
Men like a waist-to-hip ratio that signals nubility and fertility.
So, continuing very briefly, how do some of these sex differences
that I've been talking about
manifest themselves in other settings?
Well, if you were a paleontologist,
and you want to study the evolution of a species,
you typically would have gone through skeletal remains,
you might go through the fossil records,
and that would allow you to reconstruct the phylogenetic
history of a species.
Well, of course, our minds don't fossilize,
and so we have to find some alternate fossil record.
And so, what I have argued is that we can turn to cultural products
as our fossil records.
Because cultural products
are ultimately created by human minds.
And so we could do a content analysis
on these cultural products
to help us identify some of the evolutionary forces
that would have led to the evolution of the human mind.
So, romance novels are almost exclusively read by women,
around the world, whether you are from Peru,
or Egypt or Montreal,
it's read by women.
If you, for example, look at the male archetype,
the male hero,
it's almost identical across all romance novels.
He's never a short, hourglassed, beta male who is afraid of his shadow.
He's larger than life, he's tall,
he's muscular, he's a neurosurgeon,
or a king or a prince.
That's because that particular product caters to women's evolved fantasies.
On the other hand, hardcore pornography
doesn't exist because there is a patriarchal conspiracy
to demean women, it exists because
it caters to a particular penchant in men.
And so, if you want to understand some of these sex differences,
look at these cultural products that are very successful,
and you will really understand quite a bit, not only
about our commonalities but also about our differences.
Next, since we've had Nomadic Massive and Owen
talking about music, this is particularly apropos,
If you look at songs,
they're a fantastic stimulus for looking at some
of these sex differences.
So, the things that men and women sing about,
are perfectly congruent
with universal mating preferences.
So, around the world men tend to place a lot more
value on youth and physical beauty
in prospective mates,
and around the world women place a lot more value
on social status of men.
Therefore, if you look at the left-hand examples
all of these top songs: Gwen Guthrie, Destiny's Child,
TLC and Marlena Shaw,
they're denigrating men for having low social status.
'If you think you're going to get with me
and you don't have any money,
walk away, idiot, i'm not interested in you.'
(Laughter)
There are no songs that say, 'Hey, Linda, you're not working
hard at school, I won't have sex with you.'
(Laughter)
Right?
(Applause)
Thank you.
Thank you, I feel like I'm a comic up here.
(Laughter)
And, of course, when men sing about social status
they then show off.
'I've got the goods,
I've got the Aston Martin.'
There's a million songs 'money in the bank',
I mean, literally, there is at least ten different
Hip-Hop artists that have the exact same title
'I've got money in the bank,
you want to get with me.'
Look at the right-hand corner, the way that men and women
navigate in terms of their sexuality in their song lyrics,
is drastically different.
So, Mickey Gilley,
who is a country music star from the mid seventies,
had a song called: 'Don't the girls all get prettier
at closing time?'
In other words, the girl that men are willing to sleep with
at eleven o'clock is very different from the creature
that they are willing to satisfice with at three in the morning.
You don't have too many songs that say, 'Don't the guys
get more handsome at closing time?'
Precisely because the cost of making a sub-optimal mating choice
looms much larger for women.
That's not due to socialization,
that's due to a basic biological reality called Parental Investment Theory.
Same thing for physical attractiveness.
It's almost always the case, and by the way,
it's not only true in English songs,
it's not Hip-Hop or English, or soul songs, you could do Hindi songs
and Arabic songs, and you will find the exact same phenomena.
So, in conclusion, exactly on time,
T. Dobzhansky was a famous evolutionary geneticist who said that,
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
Well, I would slightly tweak that, and say,
Nothing in consumer behavior could ever make sense without an understanding
of our evolutionary heritage.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)