The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think

by Kenrick, Douglas T.

  The reasons people give their savings to those they shouldn’t trust are surprisingly similar to the reasons they spend money on things they don’t need, can’t afford, or don’t even really want. Just as in all species there is an arms race between successful organisms and parasites, the same is true for each of our subselves, which are locked in a race with outsiders who seek to take advantage of them. Whether masquerading in the form of helpful individuals, caring politicians, or friendly corporations, these manipulators seek to profit from our evolutionary needs by using our ancient wisdom against us. But by discovering what they don’t want us to know, we can defend ourselves from nefarious malfeasance.

  THE EXPLOITATION CONTINUUM

  Exploitation doesn’t sound like something most people want to be a part of. But it is not always a one-way street. Sometimes the exploiter gives back. Take the relationship between a clown fish and a sea anemone. The clown fish takes advantage of the sea anemone by loitering near its poisonous tentacles for safety. But the clown fish returns the favor by eating tiny parasites that can harm the sea anemone. The clown fish gets safety and a meal, while the sea anemone gets a much-needed cleaning. Everybody wins. Biologists call this kind of two-way exploitation symbiotic mutualism, with each party benefitting the other.

  In other cases the exploiter doesn’t provide much of a benefit to its host, as when a beetle looking for greener pastures hitches a ride on the back of a bison. Biologists use the term commensalism to describe this one-sided relationship, in which one party benefits and the other is neither significantly helped nor harmed. The sticky ties between the remora fish and the whale shark exemplify such relationships. Remoras, which have an adhesive disk on the surface of their heads, attach themselves to whale sharks, which tend to be sloppy eaters. When food floats away from the shark’s mouth, the small remora unhitches itself and collects the floating scraps of seafood. In this hanger-on relationship, the remora wins, but the shark neither wins nor loses.

  But sometimes the exploiter hurts its relationship partner, as when a mosquito or a tick takes a portion of its mammalian host’s blood supply. Biologists call this relationship parasitism, meaning that one party benefits while the other is harmed. Most parasites have some built-in limits to their greed, since their own welfare depends on the host’s survival. If parasites get too greedy, the host might die, as when overzealous viruses kill the organism that provides their meal ticket.

  But even nature’s checks and balances can’t always restrain the immense greed of some parasites, which can literally suck the life right out of their hosts. The digger wasp, for example, paralyzes a caterpillar and then lays its eggs in the caterpillar’s still-living body, which provides a source of food when the wasp eggs hatch. The wasp benefits—but the caterpillar is obliterated.

  As with animals, other people can exploit us in mutually beneficial ways, as when a clothing advertisement uses our natural responsiveness to beauty to draw attention to a new line of threads that might actually make us more attractive. At other times, human parasites might exploit us in ways that are only a little costly, as when a waiter pretends to give us inside information about the benefits of a more expensive bottle of wine, when its main advantage is that it will allow him to extract a slightly bigger tip. But sometimes human parasites prey on our evolutionary tendencies to suck the life savings right out of us, as pyramid schemers like Bernie Madoff do to their investors.

  Let’s consider how our ancestral needs open us up to exploitations, from the beneficial to the malignant, by exploring our love-hate relationships with Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and Hollywood Boulevard. Along the way, we’ll probe the secret relationships between shoe companies, Hallmark cards, jewelry tycoons, and our occasionally bedazzled subselves.

  WHY WE BUY

  The word “marketer” doesn’t have a positive connotation for most people. It may instead call to mind those advertising hucksters who broadcast “New and Improved!!!” in fluorescent orange letters all over shiny new packaging for a product that was perfectly fine to begin with. But not all Madison Avenue types are bad. Marketers can sometimes be quite helpful—by identifying what people need and then helping them satisfy those needs.

  If you are yearning for a car that lessens your carbon footprint, for example, good marketers are eager to identify that desire, make sure such cars are manufactured, and then inform you about the new car’s availability and special features. Although marketers are technically exploiting consumers, this exploitation is often mutually beneficial, like the symbiotic relationship between a clown fish and a sea anemone. You want an environmentally friendly car, and marketers want to help you find the vehicle that best meets your needs.

  If you have a product or service to market, an evolutionary perspective highlights something very useful: people everywhere have the same evolutionary needs, and those fundamental needs have a profound influence on their decisions.

  From Alabama to Zanzibar, all humans need to affiliate with friends, get respect, keep themselves safe from the bad guys, avoid disease, attract a mate, maintain a loving relationship, and care for family. Even if people claim that some of these needs have no effect on their personal choices, we know that all human brains are wired to pursue these ancestral goals. Whether you are aware of it or not, even your desire for that environmentally friendly car may well have been stoked by deeper motives having nothing to do with saving the planet or even gas money (remember the study on “going green to be seen”).

  Each year people collectively spend billions of dollars on products and services that help fulfill each of our evolutionary needs. The need to affiliate contributes to a $160 billion mobile phone industry (that number is for the United States alone), serving the affiliative need of people so motivated to stay in touch that they text their friends while driving into oncoming traffic (r u kidding!? 2 gd 2 B true! . . . WTF! . . . crash :< ). The need for status inspires people to accumulate such giant mounds of stuff that it has spawned an entire new industry whose sole purpose is to store our excess material goodies—the $22.6 billion self-storage industry. The need to keep ourselves safe from the bad guys contributes to the $29 billion home-security industry that rigs our dwelling with alarms to keep away the villains (fence not included in the $29 billion figure—that goes to the $7 billion fencing industry). And the need to avoid pathogens contributes to a $27 billion soap and detergent industry, designed to keep our homes, clothes, and bodies scrubbed clean of all those nasty little microbes.

  And if you’re all cleaned up and looking for a mate, you might feel inspired to make a contribution to the billion-dollar Internet dating industry or one of the other multi-billion-dollar industries that provide snazzy duds, cosmetics, cologne, cleansing creams, grooming, and gym memberships to make us look good for those dates. Once you meet someone special, the need to hang on to that mate is facilitated by the $70 billion wedding industry (throw in a few billion extra for the honeymoon industry). And if you’re not yet broke, the need to care for kin contributes to additional billions spent on relatives young and old, encompassing the $57 billion senior home-care industry and the $21 billion toy industry, which includes princess dolls and action figures based on Walt and Roy O. Disney’s classic movies (but the costs of Disney amusements parks, Disney resort hotels, Disney movies, Disney music, the Disney channel, and Disney cruises are not included and go on a separate tab).

  The need for friends, safety, status, lovers, and families leads us to fork money over to manufacturers that make products to satisfy these ancestral desires, and the manufacturers fork over a share to the marketers, who make sure we’re aware of the options and where to purchase them. So far, so good—everybody wins. But even symbiotic relationships can sometimes enter a grey area. At what point does the relationship between manufacturers, marketers, and consumers cross the line from symbiosis to parasitism? And how can you tell the difference?

  GETTING PEOPLE TO PAY MORE AND BUY MORE

  If you make a living
selling something, the principles of economics suggest that you should seek to sell as many units as you can for the highest possible price. This is much easier said than done, of course. Of all the businesses started in the United States, 34 percent disappear within the first two years, and 56 percent are gone within four. For any would-be capitalist tycoon, the critical questions are how to get people to buy your product in the first place and then how to get people to pay more for your product. From an evolutionary perspective, both problems have a surprisingly simple solution.

  Let’s say you open a shoe company called the Corner Cobbler, and you’re trying to figure out how much to charge for your shoes. If you used the most common pricing strategy, called cost plus, you would take the cost of producing the shoes and add some extra on top for profit. But shoes can be expensive to produce, and you may quickly learn that most people are not willing to pay this much for your product, which has the unglamorous function of allowing them to step on things without hurting the soles of their feet—the utilitarian purpose of a shoe. Yet those same people are willing to pay a lot more for the same pair of shoes if they believe this footwear will help them fulfill some additional social need, such as looking cool and attaining status in the eyes of others. If shoe companies want to charge people more for the shoes they are hawking, they would do well to persuade consumers that their shoes are not just shoes. This way, they might be able to charge $150 for a shoe that costs only $15 to produce, even if consumers are fully aware that the status-enhancing leather foot coverings are not really any better at protecting their toes than another pair selling for half the price.

  Exploiters of our evolutionary needs can compel consumers to pay more for products that seem to fulfill those needs, regardless of the products’ actual utilitarian function. This is precisely what makes Madison Avenue so effective. The explosion of advertising in the twentieth century didn’t just inform people about products; it transformed those products into something much greater than the sum of their parts. When was the last time you saw a car ad touting, “The Model S is really effective at getting you from point A to point B”? You rarely see such ads because modern cars are intentionally hyped as being about so much more than mere transportation. They are instead status symbols, family fun rooms, sexy-curved muscle sculptures, places to bond with friends, and protective steel armor systems that will keep us safe in any situation.

  Cars are not unique in this regard. Modern clothing is about more than keeping your corporeal person protected from the elements, housing is about more than having a roof over your head, and even food is rarely about the physiological need to eat. If it were, advertising would proclaim, “Come to the Olive Garden—we’ve got your calories right here!” or “If you’re looking to fill your stomach up efficiently, look no further than Red Lobster.” To coax us into paying premiums for basic products, companies have persuaded us that we’re not paying for just a shrimp, just a car, or just a shirt. These products are instead so much more valuable because they help fulfill deeper ancestral needs.

  Let’s return to your Corner Cobbler shoe business. By making it seem like your shoes can fulfill the need for status, you can charge a higher price. Perhaps you’ll want to change your name to The Pampered Paw. But your goal to sell as many shoes as possible is going to come up against another inherent obstacle: the raw number of consumers. Shoes last a while, and people only need so many pairs. Or do they?

  A hundred years ago, an average American had around two pairs of shoes—one for everyday wear and a nice Sunday pair. Given the utilitarian function of shoes to protect the feet, having just a couple pairs was sufficient to meet this need. But what if shoes could help fulfill multiple needs? And more importantly, what if different pairs of shoes were required to fulfill each of those needs?

  Some shoes, for example, can help you achieve status at work or on the playground (think Bruno Magli or Michael Jordan). Others can help us achieve mating goals (think Manolo Blahnik stilettos). Others can help you be healthier, like those North Face trail runners or Sketchers Shape Ups. And then, of course, there are shoes for wearing when casually hanging out with friends, and yet other kinds of cozy footwear for wearing at home with the family, and still others for when you need serious protection from the elements.

  Has the shoe industry’s diversification motivated the average Joe and Jane to buy more shoes? Shoe betcha! A typical American man today owns five pairs of shoes, while a woman owns eleven. When it comes to more affluent individuals, Time magazine reports that higher-stepping men own an average of twelve pairs, and upscale women own an average of twenty-seven, with 19 percent owning more than fifty pairs of shoes, inching closer to former Philippine first lady and fanatical shoe aficionado Imelda Marcos. This is good news for your shoe business. Rather than being limited to a best-case scenario in which every person owns a pair of shoes, now you can sell every person seven pairs. After all, each of your evolutionary needs is fundamentally important, and each of your subselves must have its shoe needs covered.

  Across many industries, exploiters of our evolutionary needs have successfully persuaded consumers that we need different variants of essentially the same product. As with shoes, these different variants are often targeted to our different subselves. Consider greeting cards. How often do you need to “greet” people? It turns out that Americans feel compelled to greet people quite a bit, as reflected in the $7.5 billion greeting card industry. Companies like Hallmark have helped institutionalize holidays and “special occasions” that require greeting, and many of these greetings are directed specifically at our different subselves. Happy Mate Acquisition—It’s Valentine’s Day! Happy Mate Retention—It’s Our Anniversary! Happy Disease Avoidance—Get Well Soon! Happy Status Striving—Congratulations! Happy Affiliation—oops, did you forget to send those “Thank You!” cards? Better get the “I’m Sorry!” ones. Happy Kin Care—We’re Expecting! Which card—It’s a Boy! or It’s a Girl!—is appropriate for the baby shower? And you’d better not forget to greet that woman who cared for you—Happy Mother’s Day! And don’t forget to send another special Hallmark greeting to dad on Father’s Day!

  If you want to greet people properly, though, you should really send a gift as well. Perhaps some flowers or candies, or maybe something a little more practical, like a gift card for Amazon or iTunes. Special occasions and holidays are also festive times, and it would be downright insensitive of us if we didn’t let our friends and neighbors know just how festive we feel by buying some decorations—at Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and, of course, the bedecked behemoth of them all, Christmas. The monthlong holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a veritable orgy of spending—to the tune of $165 billion a year. There is a reason why the Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday; this is when many retailers turn a profit and move their ledger books from the red into the black, thanks to the millions of shoppers who want to spend their money so badly that they wait in lines outside the store throughout the night.

  Is this symbiotic mutualism or parasitism? Do both companies and consumers benefit by inspiring shoppers to purchase more shoes, more greeting cards, and more presents for an ever-increasing number of holidays and special occasions?

  Rather than genuinely fulfilling our evolutionary needs, many of these purchases might instead simply make us feel like those needs are being met. This is because the companies and marketers that stand to profit from our spending often pander to our ancestral cravings by recasting whatever product they’re pushing to make it appeal to an otherwise disconnected evolutionary need. You need to attract a mate? How about some new shoes! You need to gain some status? How about some new shoes!

  On nature’s exploitation continuum, the relationship between consumers and the companies who target them is often less symbiotic and perhaps more commensal—the middle ground between symbiotic mutualism and parasitism. Many companies are like remora fish, attaching themselves to our wallets and snatching up the dollars that drop out
during our sometimes sloppy spending. It certainly beats being paralyzed so that someone can lay eggs in our flesh for their offspring to feed on, right? Well, as we discuss next, that’s what “they” would like you to think.

  SWIMMING (AND SPENDING) IN INFESTED WATERS

  The yellow tang is a brightly colored fish that resides in the tropical reefs of the Indian Ocean. When it needs a deep-sea cleaning, the yellow tang looks for its symbiotic buddy, the cleaner wrasse. The tang recognizes its symbiotic partner by the bright lateral stripe running down the length of its body. But before the yellow tang will grant access to its sensitive gills and mouth, the cleaner wrasse must first perform a secret dance to win the tang’s trust, like entering a PIN number into the fish’s neurological automatic bank teller machine.

  This code system normally works out well, except that near the same reef lurks another small fish called the saber-toothed blenny, which is almost identical in size and appearance to the cleaner wrasse. It even sports the same shiny stripe down its back. If approached by a yellow tang, the blenny also knows the secret dance, which gives it complete access to the most private parts of the big fish. But once allowed in, instead of providing a service, the blenny uses its saber-like teeth to rip a chunk of flesh from the unsuspecting client. Rather than helping the yellow tang rid itself of parasites, the saber-toothed blenny is a parasite—in disguise.

  Like the saber-toothed blenny, human social parasites often try to make themselves look like the good guys, and they even know all the right moves to gain our trust. But once you let them in, they’ll rip you off by taking a bite out of your wallet. Let’s look at the ways in which our evolutionary tendencies can open us up to exploitation by those lurking social parasites.