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

by Kenrick, Douglas T.

  Know Thy Enemy

  If you begin to feel like something is a little fishy, ask a simple question: Is the other person really what he or she appears to be? Exploiters like Bernie Madoff and Kevin Trudeau will often tell you that they are just like you. But before taking them at their word, it pays to look a little closer. The cuckoo also attempts to have the egg it sneaks into another bird’s nest mimic the eggs of the intended foster parent. But the cuckoo’s egg will rarely be completely identical to that of the targeted bird. If the victimized bird were to take a closer look, it would recognize the fake. In fact, many successfully spot the parasitic egg and throw it out of the nest before any damage can be done. Likewise for us humans. Even if someone seems to be just like you, unless he is your identical twin, your interests don’t completely overlap. Taking a closer look at an opportunity that seems too good to be true will likely reveal that it is. If it still sounds like a great deal, ask what the other person gains from your benefit. If the answer is the feeling of satisfaction from helping you, this is a clear warning that you’re dealing with a bad egg.

  Know Thy Situation

  If you are feeling compelled to spend a lot of money, sign on the dotted line, or make some big decision, ask yourself, Have I been primed to feel this way right now? Exploiters will often first prime in their unsuspecting targets the specific subself most vulnerable to their pitch. Before trying to sell you a “rare” diamond ring costing two months of your salary, for example, a deep rationality parasite might activate your mate-acquisition subself, for which the opportunity to part with thousands of dollars for a scarce rock might seem perfectly reasonable. But the same decision might seem ludicrous to your other six selves, who are being shut out of the current decision-making process by a manipulative exploiter. Even if at that moment it feels like the smartest decision in the world, the best advice is to wait and sleep on it. By giving yourself a little more time, you enable your other subselves to weigh on the decision. What seemed like a no-brainer one day might look foolish the next. And by waiting, you’ll avoid being played for a fool.

  Know Thyself

  Finally, if you find yourself really wanting something you can’t afford, ask yourself a deeper question: What evolutionary need is this purchase attempting to fulfill? The answer will often come back to one of our seven subselves. For instance, your yearning for that expensive family trip to Disney World likely reflects a need to be a good parent, and that pricey diamond anniversary ring reflects a need to be a good spouse. Realizing that our material desires reflect deeper evolutionary needs provides an important insight: before maxing out your credit card, consider alternative ways to achieve the same evolutionary need. Usually there will be plenty of options. Rather than taking your kids to Disney World, you might equally meet your need to be a good parent by spending some quality time with them (one of our wives is fond of noting that “love” is spelled T-I-M-E not C-A-S-H). And rather than buying expensive jewelry as an anniversary gift, you might equally meet your need to be a good spouse by telling your partner a heartfelt “I love you” and writing a thoughtful note to express exactly why he or she means so much to you. Our brains are wired not to seek material goods but to fulfill evolutionary needs. And just like our wise ancestors, we are fully capable of fulfilling those needs without draining our bank accounts.

  Conclusion

  Mementos from Our Tour

  IN THESE PAGES, we have traveled widely in time and space, from the depths of the Amazon jungle to the crowded streets of New York, meeting rock stars, topless dancers, and Silicon Valley billionaires along the way. We’ve cruised into Memphis, Tennessee, in Elvis Presley’s diamond-encrusted Cadillac and considered the cost of brides in Afghanistan. During the exotic wildlife portion of the tour, we had close encounters with loss-averse capuchin monkeys, conspicuous bowerbirds, suicidal turtles, and unscrupulously parasitic cuckoos.

  As we look over the photos of our nine-day trip, which particular memories do we want to carry around with us in our wallets?

  •Here’s a picture to help us remember the first day of our journey: It’s Joe Kennedy Sr. in a tuxedo performing a dazzling trick jump on a skateboard, with a beautiful Hollywood actress looking on. The note on the back reminds us of the insight we gained on that initial leg of the tour: Although our decisions may sometimes appear irrationally foolish on the surface, they are often deeply rational—the products of decision-making mechanisms designed to boost our evolutionary fitness.

  •Here’s a snapshot to help us remember day two: Martin Luther King Jr. addressing a large crowd in Birmingham, Alabama, while his evil twin is backstage with his arm around Eve Black (the dangerously fun-loving and flirtatious woman afflicted with multiple personality disorder). The associated insight: We all have multiple subselves—each with different and sometimes conflicting priorities.

  •Snapshot number three shows ousted Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner coldly handing Walt Disney an itemized bill for Mickey Mouse’s wardrobe, lodging, and feeding expenses. The insight there: The market-pricing rules of Wall Street economics apply to only a small portion of our important everyday decisions, most of which involve family, friends, and long-term exchange partners to whom we apply very different sets of rules.

  •Our fourth Polaroid shows Zambia’s president Levy Mwanawasa at the post office, using a magic marker to scrawl “return to sender” on a giant bin full of genetically modified food from the United States. The caption: Our minds are built like smoke detectors, biased in ways that sometimes lead us to miss opportunities but that would have helped our ancestors avoid possible dangers.

  •In the fifth snapshot we see several shirtless members of an Amazon tribe accepting an honorary degree from Harvard for their successful performance on a test of logical reasoning. The takeaway: When seemingly difficult problems are framed in ancestrally relevant terms, we don’t need fancy educations to look like savants.

  •Next we see a colorful action shot of MC Hammer dancing in a yellow vest and parachute pants in front of his repossessed mansion. This one isn’t imaginary; it comes from an ad for Nationwide Insurance, along with an appropriate caption: “Life comes at you fast.” The insight here: Different people follow different life history strategies, with some taking a fast and others a slow approach to accumulating and expending economic resources.

  •To remember the seventh segment, picture Leonardo DiCaprio driving a brand-new, conspicuously green Prius to his luxurious solar-panel-covered mansion, as he publicly proclaims his altruistic motivation to help the environment. The takeaway of this leg of our journey: The conscious reasons for our decisions and their ultimate evolutionary functions may be very different.

  •From the eighth day of our trip, here’s a grainy picture shot with a hidden camera of New York governor Eliot Spitzer handing a bag full of eighty thousand $1 bills to a beautiful and scantily clad young woman. The caption: When it comes to one of the most important evolutionary markets, men and women are exchanging very different natural resources.

  •And finally, we have a photo from the last leg of our journey showing a colorful cuckoo bird wearing a diamond ring, perched on investment swindler Bernie Madoff’s shoulder. The insight there: Evolutionary successes attract parasites; some are symbiotic, but others are exploitative tricksters taking advantage of our evolutionary needs.

  THREE LESSONS ABOUT THE RATIONAL ANIMAL

  If one of our children were looking over this photo album, he or she might ask, “What are the three life lessons I should take away from all this, Daddy?” (we both have analytic and inquisitive kids). Here’s what we’d say:

  Lesson 1: Don’t assume other people are morons.

  The recently prevalent view of decision making—of people making haphazard and irrationally biased decisions—doesn’t fully capture how people make important everyday choices. Decisions are almost always biased and sometimes even foolish, but if you dig a little deeper, those biases and seeming irrationalities often make good ev
olutionary sense.

  Behavioral economists have uncovered a host of ways in which people’s decisions can be oversimplified, self-defeating, and biased. If you read about this research, it’s easy to chuckle at the foibles of human nature. And it turns out that we humans suffer from one especially strong bias: we secretly believe that it’s other people who are the fools, whereas we are thoughtfully brilliant geniuses. The theory that people are eminently rational applies to us, but the theory that people are irrational applies to them.

  But the more deeply we look, the more we realize that people’s decisions, though sometimes foolish and irrational at the surface, are often driven by subconscious programs that make deeper evolutionary sense. Even if the person making the decision can’t explain the evolutionary logic behind it, humans have evolved to make decisions in ways that are typically good for their evolutionary interests. So you shouldn’t assume that you yourself are an omniscient Econ, and it will serve you well not to assume that other people are self-defeating morons.

  This is not to say that our evolutionary tendencies will always steer us correctly. Deep rationality is geared to the ancestral, not the modern, world. In many ways, we’ve designed the modern world to reflect our ancestral needs (we use our iPhones and automobiles to keep in touch with friends and families, for example). But there is sometimes a mismatch between our evolved inclinations and the current environment, as when those Bernie Madoff–style parasites exploit our inclinations toward familial trust. An evolutionary perspective helps us identify where we should expect these kinds of mismatches and how to work around our automatic reactions when they might get us into trouble. So respect your inner chimp, but also read Consumer Reports.

  Lesson 2: Rational self-interest is not in your self-interest.

  The classic economic model of decision making presumes a mind designed to maximize self-interest. It applies well to interchanges involving Wall Street traders or consumers buying used cars from strangers, but is surprisingly inappropriate in describing how most people make most of their important decisions.

  Contrary to what many psychologists and economists used to believe, market economics is the wrong way to approach most of the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis. This applies not only to your interactions with friends, family, and most of the people you know and care about, but also to your decisions on the job. Your workday life will be a lot more livable if you do not deal with your bosses, workers, or peers like you’d deal with a stranger haggling over the price of a used car. Even research on economic games finds that students trained in economics actually make less money, shooting themselves in the foot with selfish choices that irritate other people who would otherwise cooperate with them. Merely calling a game the “Wall Street game” led people in one experiment to cooperate less and walk away with fewer rewards in their pockets.

  Instead of asking what your friends, neighbors, and business associates can do for you, try asking what you can do to make them more like family. You may find they enjoy doing business with you more than they would if you negotiated hard over every nickel and dime on the restaurant bill.

  Lesson 3: Don’t leave home without consulting your other selves.

  There is no single utility-maximizing banker inside your head. People instead have at least seven different subselves. Each subself calculates costs and benefits according to different evolutionary priorities, and each takes turns steering our conscious decisions in subconscious ways.

  Just as it is incorrect to assume that there is an omniscient Wall Street banker inside your head, it’s equally incorrect to assume that there is a single decision maker of any stripe. There’s more than one you in there. There’s an affiliation subself, who shares and shares alike with friends and colleagues; a status subself, who plays to win; and a disease-avoidance subself, who will pass up possible rewards to avoid unwanted microbial gifts.

  Three other subselves are dedicated to very different parts of the reproductive game. The mate-acquisition subself, especially the “his” model, is concerned with getting a date and is willing to take a lot of risks and throw away resources. The mate-retention subself, on the other hand, is careful to sit on the nest egg and inclined to treat other nest mates using a generous exchange rule: the love you take is equal to the love you make. The kin-care subself is the most generous of all, giving with little or no expectation of return, and feeling especially rewarded when family members are happy and doing well.

  The self-protection subself, on the other hand, is the one most likely to look carefully under the hood before closing a deal, and it is this subself that comes closest to using a set of rules familiar to our friends on Wall Street.

  Our different subselves come out automatically when we are around different people, and they can also be awakened by specific threats and opportunities. However, we can exercise at least some control over their appearance, as we saw in many of the studies we discussed, in which people made very different decisions depending on which subself had been activated beforehand. In those experiments, researchers primed the different subselves by having people look at images that pertained to a particular subself, or watch a romantic or scary movie, or imagine themselves in a vividly threatening or promising situation.

  But you can voluntarily wake up different subselves yourself. How? By imagining a mental Rolodex album filled with photos of your best friends, your spouse, your children, someone you find sexy, someone who scares you, someone who is sick, or someone you really admire. By purposefully pulling one of those photos into consciousness at the right moment, you can awaken a sleeping subself with a vested interest in your current decision.

  Imagine you’re about to make a risky decision that has potentially long-lasting consequences. Maybe an attractive salesperson is trying to get you to sign on the dotted line for a shiny, pearl-encrusted Cadillac Eldorado with gold hubcaps, or a beautiful model you just met in a hotel bar in Cartagena is asking whether you’d like to be escorted somewhere. If you’re single and as rich as Elvis, maybe there’s no need to hesitate. But if you think maybe you might regret the decision in the morning, it’s time to pull out that picture of your preschool-age daughter and activate your more conservative kin-care subself.

  All of your subselves can be suckered by sneaky parasites, such as when De Beers entices each one to seek a diamond ring of its own. But your subselves can also work in your favor, as when Southwest Airlines activated the kin-care subself to make working for the corporation feel like a family affair. By consulting the right subself in the right situation, you can exercise more control over the important decisions in your life.

  THESIS, ANTITHESIS, CONSILIENCE

  Everyone likes a street fight. Throughout this book, we’ve taken a bit of a fighting stance with regard to rational and behavioral economists. But now it’s time to make peace among the Wall Street number crunchers, the foible-hunting experimenters in their lab coats, and the khaki-wearing Darwinians. Most importantly, it is critical that we not leave you with the impression that we believe the proponents of the two earlier positions are now lying fatally injured by the roadside, while the evolutionary psychologist rides triumphant into the sunset as the movie credits roll.

  We came not to bury the rational or the behavioral economists, but to stand on their shoulders. Rational economists have developed a powerful set of theories about how individuals can optimally allocate resources and how markets can function more efficiently. They have introduced a host of elegant ideas and beautifully precise mathematical models. We believe that those models will be even more precise if rational economists overcome their traditional aversion to asking where people’s preferences come from, why different people have different preferences, and why people’s preferences change in important ways depending on the evolutionarily relevant context. By considering those questions in light of what we are learning about evolutionary biology and cognitive science, economists can boost the explanatory power and elegance of their models and better c
ontribute to a complete explanation of human decision making.

  On the shoulders of rational economists stand behavioral economists, who have expanded our understanding of decision making in important ways. By carefully studying how individuals actually make decisions and identifying important biases and shortcuts people use in the process, behavioral economists have revolutionized our understanding of the connections between psychology and economics. To date, though, the behavioral revolutionaries have yet to come up with a new structure with which to replace the classic rationalist’s castle. It is time to move beyond the list of grievances against the mind’s limitations and to delve more deeply into the eminently sensible links between evolution and decision making.

  To fully understand the present, it is essential to understand the past. By connecting our modern behaviors to their ancestral roots, the next generation of thinkers will be able to stand on the shoulders of earlier giants, focusing their binoculars on a richer panoramic view of the awe-inspiring landscape of human decision making.

  WHAT’S IN IT FOR MOI?

  At the book’s opening, we mentioned J. K. Rowling, the British woman who penned the Harry Potter books. The series sold over 400 million copies and catapulted Rowling onto the Forbes list of billionaires, until her penchant for giving away money landed her back in the land of mere multimillionaires. Perhaps the two of us wrote this book about economic decision making because we were hoping to cash in on people’s interest in money, imagining long lines of people, credit cards in hand, camping out overnight outside the local bookstore to await our sequel: The Rational Animal Unravels the Secret of the Philosopher’s Stone! And watch for the Hollywood movie, starring George Clooney as Doug Kenrick and Daniel Craig as Vlad Griskevicius! That would be, as Brits like Rowling say, rather brilliant, allowing Doug to upgrade from his anticipated retirement hut in Ecuador and Vlad to buy a lifetime supply of Bubblicious pink watermelon bubble gum for his relatives on the farms back in Lithuania. But alas, we’d better wait for a while before we make a down payment on an English estate in Rowling’s new neighborhood, or start writing $15 million checks to our favorite charities.