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The Genius of Marketing

THE TALE OF ALADDIN, from the 1,001 Arabian Nights, offers a serviceable metaphor for consumerism. The poor boy Aladdin discovers a magic lamp in a secret cave. When he rubs the lamp, he releases a terrifying but powerful Genius (“genie,” colloquially). This Genius of the Lamp grants Aladdin many wishes—rich food on silver plates, embroidered clothes, fine horses, the intimidation of a sexual rival (the Grand Vizier’s son), forty gold basins, and a marble palace set with jasper, gold, and rubies. In Aladdin’s case, the reproductive payoffs of releasing and mastering the Genius are real: he wins the love of a princess and sires a long line of kings.

In the modern world, the market is the Genius, and its products embody our wishes, though the biological payoffs in this case are less clear. The market holds a mirror up to our desires, creating public manifestations of our private preferences. Like the Genius of the Lamp, the market seems both magical and manic in its potency and ingenuity. Through many cycles of market research, consumer feedback, and economic competition, the market, like the Genius, also makes enormous efforts to fulfill our stated wishes—but often, like the Genius, it obeys the letter rather than the spirit of those wishes, with frustrating consequences.

Marketing has already transformed our world more dramatically than the Genius transformed Aladdin’s. Thirty thousand years ago, we could learn very little about ourselves by looking outside at our environment. There were rocks, trees, insects, and stars—an ornery reality from which we had to wrest a living. Yet in the twenty-first century, at least for educated elites in rich countries, consumer capitalism has profoundly reshaped our environment to reflect our wishes. So, to understand the nature of our wishes, we need only look out at the world and see what it says about us. The world of goods, services, advertisements, media, and entertainment is a rich source of evidence about what people want—or at least about the products that people think they want.

Roughly, products fall into two overlapping categories: (1) things that display our desirable traits and bring us “status” when others see that we own them, and (2) things that push our pleasure buttons and bring us satisfaction even if no one else knows we have them. This book focuses on the first category, the status products, which reveal human instincts for displaying various traits to others. Analyzing such products can even help us discern the nature of the human traits they are designed to display. For instance, to better understand the trait of human intelligence, we can go beyond traditional IQ tests, and analyze ways that bright consumers acquire educational credentials (Oxford MAs, Harvard MBAs) as intelligence displays. To better understand the trait of human altruism, we can go beyond experimental economic studies of the well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma and Ultimatum Game, and analyze the ways some consumers unconsciously display their kindness by driving their Toyota Camry hybrids to their local organic food co-ops to pick up their Fair Trade shade-grown coffee. For every aspect of human nature, for every dimension of variation in human personality, intelligence, virtues, and values, there exists a vast market of product sets that we can draw from to broadcast our personal traits to others.

The same reasoning applies to pleasure products. To understand our aesthetic tastes, we can go beyond laboratory research on visual preferences, and examine the clothes and cars designed to attract the human eye. To understand male sexual psychology, we can do more than ask men what they’re willing to say they want; we can also analyze the ways that female sex workers have learned to maximize their earnings by looking and acting in certain ways. Many evolutionary psychologists have already been working for years to better understand human tastes and preferences by analyzing such pleasure products; the status products remain much more mysterious.

To understand how human status seeking plays out in consumerist capitalism, we need a new way of thinking about the human condition, one that goes beyond conventional science and conventional ideas about consumerism. Most writing about consumerism assumes that culture shapes human nature, so that our desires conform to the dictates of advertising, through socialization and learning. This is the heart of postmodernist cultural theory. Much of evolutionary psychology tends to work in the same direction, from the outside in, as Darwinians consider how the external challenges of prehistoric living would have shaped our thoughts and feelings through genetic evolution. Both postmodernists and Darwinians agree that our minds conform to the external environment, through either cultural or biological adaptation. I try to work in the complementary direction, from the inside out. I argue that we have inherited a rich human nature from our ancestors, full of desires and preferences for seeking status and impressing others. I recognize that we have a few key dimensions of variation in intelligence and personality that are genetically inherited, sexually attractive, and socially valued, and that these drive most consumerist displays. I try to trace how our internal status-seeking instincts get refracted through consumerist culture to produce the products, markets, and lifestyles that constitute our modern environment.

A deeper understanding of human nature helps everybody, whether we are consumers trying to live a more fulfilling life, or marketers trying to increase brand recognition and market share, or scientists trying to understand the world, or activists trying to improve society. Indeed, new insights into human nature have provoked every other major revolution in the classical liberal tradition of evidence-based enlightenment: the Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the women’s movement. Those democratic revolutions reformulated the relationships between governors and citizens, but with the spread of free-market capitalism, business-consumer relationships have become much more important. What democracy is to politics, consumer demand is to business: the fulcrum with which ordinary people have the most leverage on how their world is organized. Spent is therefore not just a book about business or psychology; it concerns the most important issue that confronts a free-market society—how to make the economy work for us, rather than vice versa.

Beyond Maslow

If we want to understand our behavior as consumers, it helps to remember that we evolved as social primates competing for mates, friends, family support, and status. Throughout most of the twentieth century, psychologists assumed that this biological legacy gave us just a few simple instincts to survive and reproduce, and that everything else was due to learning and culture. Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and B. F. Skinner had some great insights, but they did not integrate Darwin’s legacy into human psychology. This Darwinization has taken place only since about 1990, in the field of evolutionary psychology, and it has yielded a picture of human nature much richer than a short list of simple instincts.

Evolutionary psychology reaches all the way into our most cherished abilities and aspirations, explaining why we care about friendship, love, family, social status, self-respect, moral virtue, and authenticity. It explains much more than merely why “sex sells.” It also explains why empathy and extraversion are sexually attractive, and why we are motivated to buy mobile phones that reveal our popularity, and pets that reveal our kindness and conscientiousness. It has demonstrated a set of human motivations and aspirations vastly more detailed, nuanced, and principled than the “hierarchy of needs” posited by Abraham Maslow in the 1950s, which remains the dominant model of human motivation in consumer-behavior textbooks.

Maslow’s hierarchy includes just seven types of human needs, clustered into two categories. “Deficiency needs” are drives to reduce states of deficiency or discomfort, and are pursued only when a deficiency arises. They include:

• physiological needs: breathing, drinking, eating, excreting, regulating temperature, having sex

• safety needs: health, well-being, familiarity, predictability, personal security, financial security, insurance

• social needs: family, friendship, intimacy, sexual love, belonging, acceptance

• esteem needs: recognition, status, fame, glory, self-respect, self-esteem

“Growth needs” are drives toward “transcendence,” and are pursued whenever the individual is free to do so. They include:

• cognitive needs: to learn, explore, discover, create, acquire knowledge, and increase intelligence

• aesthetic needs: to experience beauty as found in nature, people, or artifacts

• self-actualization needs: to fulfill one’s potential and make the most of one’s abilities

From an evolutionary viewpoint, Maslow’s hierarchy is hopelessly muddled. It mixes innate drives (breathing, eating, seeking status, acquiring knowledge) and learned concerns (seeking financial security, self-esteem, and increased intelligence). It does not “cut nature at the joints” in terms of the key selection pressures that shaped human behavior: survival and reproduction. Survival includes most of Maslow’s physiological needs (breathing, eating), but also some of the more concrete safety needs (avoiding harm from predators, parasites, sexual rivals, and hostile tribes), social needs (building relations with family, friends, and mates who can help feed, protect, and heal you under adverse conditions), cognitive needs (to learn about survival-increasing opportunities and survival-reducing dangers), and even aesthetic needs (to find a propitious landscape for one’s clan to live in, to make weapons that are serviceably symmetric, strong, and sharp). Reproductive challenges, including finding high-quality sexual partners and raising high-quality offspring, encompass one of the key physiological needs (having sex) and most of the other social, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualization needs. For example, mate preferences for kindness can explain our social needs for intimacy, belonging, and acceptance. Mate preferences for status can explain our esteem needs for recognition, fame, and glory. Mate preferences for intelligence, knowledge, skills, and moral virtues can explain our cognitive needs to learn, discover, and create, and our self-actualization needs to fulfill our potential (for example, to display the highest possible mate value given our genetic quality).

Moreover, a branch of evolutionary theory called “life history theory” points out that there are often tough trade-offs between these survival and reproductive priorities. The lower-level needs do not always take priority. For example, male elephant seals will often starve to death during a breeding season while guarding their harems. If elephant seals could talk, and you recruited them to participate in a focus group at your market research institute, they might explain that they were giving up a physiological need (to eat) for three higher needs: a social need (to feel intimacy and belonging with each of many females), an aesthetic need (to be surrounded by beautiful—that is, fine, fit, fat, fertile—females), and a self-actualization need (to be the best elephant seal one can be, as demonstrated through biting, mauling, bloodying, and excluding all male sexual rivals from one’s beach-front harem). But these last three Maslovian needs can actually be reduced to reproductive benefits. Natural selection crafted social, aesthetic, and self-actualization motivations because they yielded higher reproductive success over thousands of generations of elephant seal evolution. Male elephant seals who were “slackers,” content to fulfill their survival and safety needs without conflict, would have avoided the bloody beach sites where more ambitious “status seekers” fought, copulated, starved, and died. The slacker seals may have been perfectly happy, and might have even turned vegan and ate plankton, but they did not leave any descendants to inherit their easygoing temperaments. Only the male seals that were willing to compete for dominance, status, and harems, even at the cost of their own lives, sired any offspring. Although male humans did not evolve in prehistory to compete for large harems, both human sexes did evolve to compete for high-quality mates, friends, and allies, leaving us with many of the same drives, instincts, preferences, and aspirations that the elephant seals in the focus group might have articulated.

Finally, Maslow’s hierarchy overlooks most of the adaptive preferences, emotions, motivations, and aspirations that evolutionary psychology has demonstrated in human nature. It conflates different forms of love—parental solicitude toward offspring, familial solicitude toward kin, social attachment to same-sex friends, romantic attachment to mates, cultural attachment to one’s tribe. It ignores the distinctive functions of gratitude, guilt, shame, embarrassment, moral outrage, and forgiveness in sustaining cooperation within groups.

While Maslow’s work was a useful early step in categorizing the diversity of human motivations, it never integrated Darwinian insights, and it is now seriously outdated. Its continuing popularity in marketing and consumer behavior textbooks is puzzling, especially since marketing professionals actually don’t use it much in their day-to-day thinking about consumer behavior; perhaps nothing better has yet emerged to take its place. As our understanding of human nature has become broader, deeper, and more subtle over recent years, we should have been able to understand an ever-greater range of products, marketing issues, and consumer behavior patterns. Why hasn’t this happened?

Why Evolutionary Consumer Psychology Is Just Getting Started Now

Over the past two decades, evolutionary psychology has been offering new insights into our motivations, emotions, preferences, relationships, and even aesthetic tastes. College students have learned about this new science through the hundreds of evolutionary psychology courses that are springing up across North America, Europe, and Asia. The public has become familiar with it through excellent popular books by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Matt Ridley, E. O. Wilson, and others, and through fascinating TV documentaries by PBS and the Discovery Channel in the United States, and by the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK.

Evolutionary principles have also revolutionized many traditional disciplines during the same period. Hundreds of papers and dozens of books have discussed Darwinian medicine, Darwinian psychiatry, evolutionary analysis in law, evolutionary economics, Darwinian political science, Darwinian aesthetics, and Darwinian moral theory. Insofar as evolutionary principles promote a more coherent understanding of human nature, their popularity should not be surprising, because human nature is at the foundation of all social sciences and humanities. However, the business world has conspicuously remained the odd man out. Marketing, advertising, consumer research, and product development are equally dependent on an accurate understanding of human nature, yet evolutionary insights have so far had little influence in this realm.

Executives are still trained in MBA programs, and market researchers are still trained in Ph.D. programs, as if humans were created from clay eight thousand years ago, and designed with an arbitrary list of “manifest motives” and “latent motives.” Virtually no course content on the evolutionary origins of human behavior and preferences is included at any of the world’s top business schools—IMD (Lausanne), INSEAD (Paris), ESADE (Barcelona), London Business School, Rot terdam School of Management, Indian Institute of Management (Ban-galore), Queens School of Business (Toronto), Harvard, Stanford, MIT (Sloan), U. Penn (Wharton), New York University (Stern), or Northwestern (Kellogg). To date, only a few researchers have used Darwinian insights in any systematic way to understand consumer behavior.

Since the late 1990s the marketing professor Gad Saad, at Concor dia Business School in Montreal, has been developing this new field of evolutionary consumer psychology almost single-handedly. He published the first papers about evolutionary psychology to appear in any marketing or consumer behavior journals, and published the first book on the topic, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, in 2007.

Since the mid-1980s, the Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has been using evolutionary principles of social and sexual competition to understand the more specific issues of runaway economic status seeking and conspicuous consumption. His books, such as Choosing the Right Pond, The Winner-Take-All Society, and Luxury Fever, have not only connected Darwin and Veblen, and framed human economic behavior in its biological context, but have also pioneered new empirical ways to analyze economic data, in order to demonstrate the pervasive effects of status seeking in career choices and consumer choices. (Robert H. Frank is not to be confused with journalist Robert L. Frank, author of Richistan.) I owe Gad Saad and Robert Frank a great debt for their groundbreaking work.

More recently, a few other researchers, such as the marketing professors Vladas Griskevicius at University of Minnesota and Jill Sundie at University of Houston, have been taking evolutionary consumer psychology forward in new directions by integrating it more closely with social psychology. A few other evolutionary psychologists have thought about human nature in relation to particular kinds of products, such as food, pets, landscapes, singles ads, drugs, pornography, and novels. In each case, by more clearly understanding the evolutionary origins, biological functions, and design features of our psychological adaptations (such as our perceptions, emotions, and preferences), researchers can better understand the “hedonomics”—the pleasure-giving design features—of various goods and services.

At the moment, though, Darwinians have only scratched the surface of consumer behavior. The most powerful theory in the whole of the biological and behavioral sciences, a theory that explains the origins and functions of the complex psychological adaptations that constitute human nature, has rarely been called on to illuminate the swamps and jungles of modern consumerism, where we all live these days. For example, given the antibiological biases of most consumer-behavior researchers and journal editors, as of mid-2008 only one paper mentioning evolutionary psychology has ever appeared in any of marketing’s four leading academic journals—Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. None of them has ever published an article concerning biological evolution, human nature, Darwinism, or primate behavior.

Consumer research has been almost as oblivious to the extraordinary recent progress in the study of individual differences—the ways that people’s minds are distinct from one another’s. Individual-differences research has delivered some wonderfully robust and useful models of human personality, intelligence, and moral virtue. These models are much simpler than might have been expected. Human personality, for example, can be represented quite accurately by just the “Big Five” dimensions of variation between people: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. Human intelligence can be represented with astonishing efficiency and accuracy by just one dimension, called the g factor (a.k.a. general intelligence, general cognitive ability, IQ). As we’ll see later, if we know how an individual scores on these “Central Six” dimensions (the Big Five personality traits plus general intelligence), we can predict a great deal about his habits, preferences, values, and attitudes—and about the products he may acquire to display those traits to others. All six dimensions are also genetically heritable: twin and adoption studies show that these individual differences are predicted at least moderately by genetic differences, and not just by family upbringing or random effects during development. They are all fairly stable across the life course, so one’s score in adolescence reasonably predicts one’s score in older age. They are all salient to other people during normal social interaction, and are assessed fairly accurately, if unconsciously, even within the first few minutes of interaction with a stranger. While some recent textbooks on consumer behavior and marketing have started to pay lip service to the Big Five traits in a paragraph or two, these traits are still almost never mentioned in popular marketing books, or used in marketing practice. Discussions of general intelligence remain taboo throughout marketing theory and practice.

The advances in evolutionary psychology and individual differences research have rarely been used to understand consumerism, because very few consumer researchers understand the new psychology, and very few psychologists know anything about marketing, advertising, or product development. It is admittedly difficult to straddle the worlds of science and business. Science strives for cumulative progress through humbly authoritarian respect for one’s predecessors (through citations) and colleagues (through collaboration and peer review), whereas most new business books pretend to offer 100 percent fresh, new, radical, and unprecedented concepts, enabling its authors to profit from corporate speeches and consulting work. Science tries to build coherent, nuanced, testable theories that look gravely intimidating, whereas business books offer bullet-point lists and two-by-two graphs that look winsomely simple. Scientists try to use consistent technical terms that can be understood by them and no one else, whereas business books invent wacky new catchphrases that sound great but that can’t really be understood by anyone (Gung ho! The millionaire mind! Who moved my cheese? Lead like Jesus! Eat that frog! Purple cow!). If you’re accustomed to reading popular business books that mimic the ADHD pace of Jerry Bruckheimer action films, you’ll need to adopt a calmer reading mode here—one that allows, I hope, some elbow room for thinking, judging, and reflecting. On the other hand, if you’re used to reading scientific journal papers, you’ll just have to hang on as my writing careens pinball-style from topic to topic, and seek your quietude in the copious notes and references on the book’s website.

This Book

Spent concerns where we are today—how we live within this wondrous, horrific, perplexing world of consumerist capitalism that we have built over the past few generations—and where we could go in the future. My first book, The Mating Mind, concerned where we come from—how our ancestors lived in prehistory and how human nature evolved over the past few million years. It argued that some of our most wondrous and distinctive human mental abilities—art, music, language, kindness, intelligence, and creativity—evolved not just for survival, but for reproduction. Specifically, they evolved in both sexes as fitness indicators to attract high-quality sexual partners.

To explain how the process of sexual selection through mate choice might have shaped human mental evolution, The Mating Mind used a lot of marketing metaphors. Animals seek sexual partners in a competitive mating market. Animal bodies and behaviors evolve largely as advertisements for their genes. Male humans evolved potent new sales tactics—verbal courtship, rhythmic music, gentle foreplay, prolonged copulation—for seducing skeptical female customers into accepting free trials of their fastest-moving consumer goods (sperm). Female humans evolved potent new tactics of relationship marketing to build long-term loyalty among their highest-value male customers, and to promote continued male investment in their new subsidiaries (children). Human creativity evolved to keep our mates fascinated as we release ever-new behavioral products—new utterances, stories, jokes, observations, ideas, artifacts, songs, and gifts—designed to seem initially fashionable but that quickly become obsolete. Each individual’s ideology (religious, political, and philosophical beliefs) can even be viewed not as his editorial content but as his ad campaign—designed not to convey verifiable news about the world, but to create positive emotional associations between the individual as product and the customer’s aesthetic, social, and moral aspirations.

These marketing metaphors seem to work as well as they do because most readers know more about shopping than about sexual selection theory, so the latter could be explained by reference to the former. Spent tries to reverse the direction of explanation, by analyzing consumer behavior based on what we know about human evolution and individual differences. This task might prove harder, given that it entails explaining the apparently familiar in terms of the unfamiliar, as if one were to say, “Look, it’s really very simple to draw a dog; you simply visualize the molecular structure of ethanol, and imagine the oxygen atom is the dog’s cranium, and the two carbon atoms form the dog’s torso . . .” Nonetheless, it’s worth a try, because we really need to understand how consumerist capitalism arose from human nature, and how it could be improved.

To follow my reasoning, you’ll need to rethink most of what you thought you knew about your motives, preferences, and aspirations. You’ll have to look at your adult human life the way a wise child or a Cro-Magnon matriarch would. You’ll have to set aside some traditional distinctions between biology and culture, animals and consumers, evolution and economics, psychology and marketing. You’ll need some existential courage to accept that years of obsessive workaholism and status-seeking consumption may have been misguided.

That’s the hard part. The easy part is that Spent demands very little background expertise. You don’t need to know much about psychology, beyond what you already know about people. You don’t need to know much about consumerist capitalism, beyond what you already know about shopping. In fact, the less you’ve been taught about traditional marketing and economics, the fewer misconceptions you’ll have to overcome.

My ideas will also be easier to follow if you haven’t been taught too much cultural theory, postmodern philosophy, gender feminism, cultural anthropology, media studies, or sociology. While these fields have produced most of the trenchant thinking and writing about consumerism, they usually preach that human biology has nothing to do with human culture, consumption, or ideology. They usually preach that scientists work to maintain the status quo, and that evolutionary psychologists like me are especially dangerous and conservative. Even many marketers have been socialized to take that view. As you will see, such preaching is false. Evolutionary psychology can offer a deeper, more radical critique of consumerist culture than anything developed by Marx, Nietzsche, Veblen, Adorno, Marcuse, or Baudrillard. We can respect their insights without insisting that they’re more profound than Darwin. We can combine their moral outrage, playful irreverence, and utopian imagination with the best of twenty-first-century science, and see how far we can get.

At the practical level, I’ll consider mostly goods and services from companies with recognizable brands, websites, and advertisements that readers can buy retail for a fairly standard cost, that interest people across a wide range of sexes, ages, cultures, and countries, and that can be illuminated by evolutionary psychology and individual differences research. Most specifications and prices for particular products are from the company websites or print advertising as of 2007 or 2008. I devote less attention to many product categories that are economically important but less interesting, such as commodities and raw materials (steel, oil, plastic, lumber, grain), basic domestic utilities (water, gas, electricity, heating, cooling, lighting), basic consumer durables (appliances, furniture, linens), and financial products (banking, credit, mortgages, insurance, equities, bonds, wills, trusts). In many of these categories, consumerist showing off and status display are less important, as when one is seeking the best price on soybean oil futures, or the best heart surgeon, or the most reliable life insurance company. No doubt the evolutionary psychology of consumer behavior will eventually embrace all these product categories, but I won’t here.

This Author

Cultural theorists have proposed a good insight: books are easier to understand when their authors are candid about their background and motives, and self-critical about their likely biases and blind spots. Because evolutionary psychologists have often been caricatured as racist, sexist, conservative reductionists, it’s especially important to clear away those misconceptions. Just for the record, I’m a secular humanist, an antiwar internationalist, an animal-rights environmentalist, a pro-gay feminist, a libertarian on most social, sexual, and cultural issues, and a registered Democrat—in other words, a typical psychology professor.

At the University of New Mexico, I work with about half a dozen Ph.D. students, doing research on human mate choice, intelligence, creativity, personality, mental illness, humor, and emotions. My wife and I have a twelve-year-old daughter, a thirteen-year-old Toyota, and a fifty-four-year-old house in Albuquerque. I try to understand the crushing poverty and impotent despair that still afflicts half of our species (including most people in South America, Africa, Asia, and graduate school), but my modest tenured income means these problems aren’t very salient to me. I was born two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, so I’m too old to care about cell-phone fashions, and too young to care about hospice costs. Like 1.47 percent of humans on earth, I’m a white heterosexual American male. So, I try to be a good Darwinian feminist, but my sex and sexual orientation mean I’ll slip sometimes. I’ve lived abroad for nine years, but only in England and Germany. I try to be globally aware, but my race, nationality, and limited expat experience mean I tend to overlook many issues.

Culturally, I’m eclectic and ambivalent. I enjoy anticonsumerism books by Thomas Frank and Juliet Schor, but I also subscribe to the Economist and Wired. I enjoy lefty-radical-feminist music by Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos, but I have immense respect for the business world, and gratitude to the workers, managers, and investors who provide our necessities, luxuries, and entertainments. I appreciate that the Prius exists, but I drive a tanklike Land Cruiser (and you would, too, if you saw how people drive in Albuquerque). I loathe malls, but I respect the free market as the most ingenious system yet devised for people to enjoy mutual gains from trade under conditions of peace, freedom, and autonomy. I hate the way that corporate lobbyists corrupt democracy, but I recognize that our quality of life in the developed world is a fragile, fortunate exception to the global historical norm of toil, oppression, poverty, disease, and death.

My interest in this topic came from two intellectual awakenings—one around 1990 concerning evolutionary psychology’s power to explain human nature, and one around 2000 concerning marketing’s power in modern culture. In 1988 I was a psychology Ph.D. student at Stanford University, after a B.A. at Columbia University in New York and a childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. That year, some key founders of evolutionary psychology—Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, Martin Daly, and Margo Wilson—were all visiting Stanford for a sabbatical year. My friend Peter Todd and I got excited about their ideas, met with them about once a week, and learned about the extraordinary potential of Darwinian theory to revolutionize psychology. Everything about human behavior suddenly seemed easier to understand—clearer, simpler, more functional, more grounded in the 3-billion-year saga of life on earth. Everything in psychology seemed more unified—more connected not only to the other sciences, but also to the humanities and to everyday life. I got hooked on the idea that human behavior could be best understood by considering the challenges of survival and reproduction that our prehistoric ancestors faced. This paradigm shift seemed uniquely satisfying and complete—as if I had found my intellectual home once and for all, and nothing could ever blow my mind in the same way again.

Fortunately, I was wrong. About ten years later, I got a research job at the new Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution at University College London. My challenge was to get the evolutionary psychologists and game-theory economists to work together. I spent months talking to researchers individually, in groups, and at conferences. It was the most frustrating experience of my professional life, for we psychologists just did not understand the economists, and they did not understand us. We were interested in real people; they were interested in idealized markets. We liked experiments; they liked proving mathematical theorems. We published ideas about human nature; they published results about Pareto-dominant equilibrium selection in mixed-motive games (don’t ask).

My crisis point came at a 1999 conference that I organized in London on the origins of people’s economic preferences. We psychologists thought that economists would enjoy hearing about our preference experiments, so that they could develop more accurate and sophisticated models of human economic behavior. How wrong we were. It became clear that economists still followed a “revealed preferences” doctrine, which holds that consumer preferences are psychological abstractions—hidden, hypothetical states that cannot be measured or explained apart from the purchases that they cause. If preferences are revealed only through purchases, and not through questionnaires, interviews, or focus groups, then it is redundant to study preferences apart from actual consumer spending patterns, to speculate about the origins of preferences, or to conduct market research on preferences for hypothetical products. In short, the revealed preferences doctrine suggests that psychology is irrelevant to economics. (This was before the psychologist Daniel Kahneman got the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decisions and preferences.) So, the economists gradually drifted away from the conference, leaving the psychologists to nurse our bruised egos, in the company of some strange-looking folks we hadn’t seen before.

These folks weren’t like the academics at the conference. They were forty-five but looked twenty-five; they had funky clothes and hair; they spoke with torrential enthusiasm; they gave out business cards with baffling job titles (Cool-Hunter, Frenzy-Mistress, Vice-President of Buzz, Meme-Seeder). They were the marketers, and they were hot for psychology. They actually cared about people’s preferences—where they come from, how they worked, and how to profit from them. I talked for hours with them, and a new world opened up.

Over the next several years, I read everything I could about marketing, advertising, public relations, market research, product design, retailing, branding, positioning, and consumer behavior. It felt as if my latent interest-in-business genes had finally turned on. (My maternal grandfather, Henry G. Baker, had been a professor of management and marketing at the University of Cincinnati, and most of his five sons now run private equity funds.) I taught courses on the evolutionary psychology of consumer behavior, first to undergraduates at UCLA in 2000 as a visiting professor, then at UNM to graduate students. I became fascinated by incisive portrayals of the consumerist lifestyle in movies such as The Matrix, Existenz, American Beauty, and Idiocracy, and in novels by Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, Nicholson Baker, and J. G. Ballard. I talked about marketing with everybody I knew who was involved in it—old high school friends, relatives, neighbors, local business school faculty. I subscribed at various times over the past seven years to any periodical that seemed likely to reveal something new about consumerism: Architectural Digest, AutoWeek, the Baffler, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Consumer Reports, the Economist, Gourmet, Harper’s, Maxim, Men’s Fitness, Money, PC Gamer, Premiere, Rolling Stone, Stuff, Wired, Worth, the Utne Reader, and Vanity Fair. I also pulled articles and ads from the occasional issue of Action Pursuit Games, Adult Video News, All About Beer, Atomic Ranch, Christian Music Planet, Cosmetic Surgery Times, Frozen Food Age, Guns & Ammo, Hooked on Crochet! Hot Boat, Log Home Living, Luxury SpaFinder, Meat Processing, Modern Bride, Modern Dog, Monster Muscle, New Age Retailer, Packaging Digest, Pet Product News, Sport Compact Car, and Tropical Fish Hobbyist. This was not always as fun as it sounds. I also read a few hundred books on consumerism and business, in search of good ideas.

I started to see that marketing underlies everything in modern human culture in the same way that evolution underlies everything in human nature. Writers have agents; movies have publicists; politicians have press secretaries. Magazines are published not to inform readers, but to sell the market segment—the readers’ attention—to advertisers. Almost nothing in popular culture gets there by chance or gossip, by the unsupervised spread of memes from one mind to another. Everything has been put on the public’s radar screen deliberately by marketing professionals of one sort or another.

I realized, in short, that if you weren’t tuned in to marketing, you were missing the elephant in culture’s living room.