David M. Buss
In addition to informing basic scientific research, evolutionary psychology is increasingly being used for practical applications, from the business world to public policy to the courtroom. This final section of the Handbook captures four of these new trends—public policy, consumer behavior, organizational behavior, and legal issues. Three chapters are entirely new, and the fourth is an updated chapter from the first Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.
Nicolas Baumard kicks off this section with an outstanding chapter on evolutionary psychology and public policy. At a fundamental level, public policies carry assumptions (implicit or explicit) about human nature. Baumard contrasts traditional public policy assumptions about that nature with those of evolutionary psychology. He illustrates that these assumptions matter a great deal by highlighting empirical research on more effective means to gently nudge people to adopt behaviors that are more environmentally friendly (in this case, by invoking social norms). Public policies, in short, work better with an accurate model of human nature, and Baumard’s chapter provides the first extant road map for this important set of evolutionary psychological applications.
Gad Saad, a leader in applying evolutionary psychology to human consumer behavior, provides a compelling chapter about applications to the world of marketing. Understanding human adaptations for survival, mating, reciprocity, and kinship, he argues, is critical to effective marketing in a world where so many products compete for our attention. Although business schools have traditionally been slow to utilize evolutionary psychology for these practical applications, Saad’s pioneering efforts, as summarized in this chapter, will be seen in retrospect as showing the light and the way.
Nigel Nicholson extends an evolutionary analysis to organizations, with a special focus on organizational leadership. His chapter addresses these key questions: What does the history of our species teach us about the essence of leadership? What are the gaps in knowledge that an evolutionary approach might fill? How can an evolutionary approach shed light on the key processes of leadership emergence, effectiveness, and failure? Leaders in organizations worldwide would do well to read Nicholson’s important chapter and use a deep understanding of human evolved psychology to inform their own and their organization’s behavior.
The final chapter in this section, by law professor Owen Jones, offers a penetrating evolutionary analysis of the law. The legal system, Jones argues, is designed to affect human behavior in certain ways, such as deterring certain forms of behavior—theft, rape, and murder. Simultaneously, it is designed to encourage other forms of behavior, such as persuading people to further public goals. Insights from evolutionary psychology offer tools for making the legal system more efficient in attaining these goals. It can do so, Jones argues, by discovering useful patterns of regulable behavior, identifying policy conflicts, exposing unwarranted assumptions in the law, revealing deep patterns in legal architecture, and assessing the comparative effectiveness of legal strategies, among others. Jones’s analysis—prudent, judicious, and careful—promises to revolutionize the legal system. Indeed, after reading Jones’s chapter, it is difficult to imagine how the legal system can accomplish its aims in ignorance of our evolved psychological mechanisms.
These four chapters signal the dramatic infusion of evolutionary psychology into practical applications with real-world consequences: How to formulate public policies to maximize their effectiveness? How to market to consumers in a world of information explosion? How to more effectively lead organizations? And how to devise laws as effective levers of human behavior?