The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Evolutionary Psychology & Its Applicability to Consumer Research - PhD Seminar (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1080)

00:00:00 Okay, so for those of you who don't know me, my name is Gad Saad. I'm a professor here at Ole Miss

00:00:07 now. Last year, I was a visiting scholar, meaning I had taken a leave of absence from my university

00:00:14 in Montreal, and I was doing sort of the remote back and forth thing. This year, I left my,

00:00:22 I've been there for 32 years. I left my, you know, chaired full professorship in Montreal.

00:00:28 Well, I'm here on a three-year professorship, which hopefully will extend indefinitely into

00:00:35 the future.

00:00:35 I'm at the, officially at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American

00:00:40 Freedom, because one of the things that I do, you know, beyond just evolutionary psychology

00:00:45 and consumer psychology, is that I, you know, weigh in on important issues that are plaguing

00:00:51 the West.

00:00:52 So I'm certainly a cultural commentator, and I've written several books, which we won't

00:00:57 talk about today.

00:00:58 that deal with those issues. And so I'm here in the Declaration of Independence Center under

00:01:03 those auspices. But my marketing-related work has been in applying evolutionary biology and

00:01:13 evolutionary psychology to study our consumatory nature. What are the fundamental biological

00:01:19 drivers that make us do the things that we do, whether it be in food marketing or whether it

00:01:25 being conspicuous consumption or whether it be how our hormones affect our behavior. And

00:01:31 perhaps it may or may not surprise you until I came along, there was no such field. Most people

00:01:39 who study marketing study it bereft of any biological based theorizing. So what I'd like

00:01:44 to do today is explain the epistemology of the evolutionary lens. How do we apply the evolutionary

00:01:53 lens in general to human behavior and specifically to consumer behavior. But I'll first begin,

00:02:01 since this is a course on the theoretical foundations, the theoretical slash epistemological

00:02:06 foundations of marketing, I'd like to begin with a few papers that I think every doctoral student

00:02:13 should be familiar with. And so I'm going to start by sharing the screen.

00:02:23 Can you all see the screen right now? Okay, perfect. So, okay, I've already said all this. Let me go to the next slide. So for those of you who've never read this paper, this is a paper by Michel Pham, who's a professor at Columbia University's Business School.

00:02:41 Actually, him and I were cohorts in that we both were the doctoral consortium fellows of our respective universities.

00:02:52 You know, for those of you, some of you are too junior at this point, but usually in your third, fourth year, each university will send, you know, the person they think is their top doctoral student to this consortium where all of the top fellows come.

00:03:06 And in my year, 1993, I was chosen as the doctoral consortium fellow of Cornell University, and he was the one for Columbia University.

00:03:16 And that's how we became friends.

00:03:18 He's had a very successful career.

00:03:22 Sorry, he was the fellow of University of Florida.

00:03:26 He ended up being at Columbia University.

00:03:28 he was the president of the society for consumer psychology uh more than 10 years ago and to his

00:03:37 credit he wrote an incredibly incisive and critical paper of consumer psychology now i say

00:03:45 uh i mean it shouldn't take so much courage to uh engage in self-reflection to say hey here are

00:03:52 some things that we do great in the field but here are some things that we can improve but of course

00:03:56 most people have a fragile ego, and so they never want to criticize their field and so on.

00:04:02 But he wrote this wonderful article, which I really highly recommend for all of you to read.

00:04:06 As I said, it's a 2000, I think that, well, the paper I think is called, oh, it's here actually,

00:04:12 Seven Sins of Consumer Psychology. And he lists these seven sins, you know, a narrow conception

00:04:18 of what, you know, the scope of consumer research is, the adoption of a very narrow set of theoretical

00:04:25 lenses, a very narrow epistemology of what constitutes consumer or slash marketing research,

00:04:30 an almost exclusive emphasis on processes rather than sort of big picture stuff, a strong tendency

00:04:38 to overgeneralize from finite, delineated studies to broader issues, a predisposition to

00:04:54 design studies based on methodological convenience rather than on substantive considerations and then

00:05:00 the fifth the seventh one is a really good one a pervasive confusion between theories of studies

00:05:04 and studies of theories and so if you at many of you are still quite junior but if you look at the

00:05:10 the top journals in marketing or consumer research the number of studies i i mentioned this to barry

00:05:17 i i gave a keynote address a few weeks ago in the business school and i mentioned that you know if

00:05:23 you look at the number of studies that are typical in a published paper today versus 25 30 years ago

00:05:28 it's it's gone completely wacko right you know and 40 years ago you could publish a paper in a

00:05:34 top psychology journal or top consumer research journal you know with two studies study one study

00:05:40 two now it's study one a b c d study two a b c study three a b c d e f g and it just goes on and

00:05:48 on. And so you become sort of driven by just quantity over, you know, some of the greatest

00:05:56 studies that have ever been conducted in the behavioral sciences consist of a singular study

00:06:00 that says something unbelievably profound about the human condition. And so what I'm going to do

00:06:06 in laying out this criticism that Michel Pham had offered is I'm going to show how evolutionary

00:06:12 psychology actually protects you against many of these sins. So stay with me. This next one is

00:06:21 actually a really good one because this is a quote from the paper, from his paper. The only

00:06:28 way that such a paper might get rejected is if some of the reviewers are blunt enough to state

00:06:33 that the research is not interesting, which is something that most reviewers would be reluctant

00:06:37 to do, at least openly. And even if a reviewer does question the overall relevance of the

00:06:43 research, the editor may not necessarily follow this reviewer's advice. So this idea, and this

00:06:48 is going to lead me to the next paper I'm going to talk about before I get into the evolutionary

00:06:51 psychology stuff. Very few reviewers ever say the topic here is utterly useless because they're

00:06:59 focused on methodological rigor. You know, did you conduct the right mediational analysis and

00:07:06 moderation? Did you do LISRO? Did you control for this covariant? And so you get stuck in the

00:07:12 methodological rigor of the paper and completely forgetting the most fundamental question that you

00:07:18 should ask as a scientist, is this interesting research or not? And not to toot my own horn,

00:07:26 probably in 90% of all papers that I've ever reviewed, my number one criticism was exactly

00:07:33 that. And so I won't read all this here, but I'll just say this is actually taken from one of my

00:07:40 actual reviews. Perhaps the first criterion that any scholar should pose when embarking on a new

00:07:46 research project is how interesting the expected findings are likely to be. While it is clear that

00:07:52 not every research project will be earth-shattering, one of the first metrics that should be used in

00:07:57 evaluating a study is how novel and non-trivial the findings will prove to be. And I won't go

00:08:02 through the rest of it. But again, there is this unbelievable focus on, did you cite the right

00:08:08 literature? Did you use a really beefy theoretical framework? Was your methodology really rigorous?

00:08:15 And of course, those are all very important to be focusing on. But they can't come instead of

00:08:21 the first question that should be driving your research, which is, would people be interested

00:08:27 in this? And let me put it in a slightly different way. Some of you may or may not know,

00:08:31 you know, I go on many very high profile shows. So for example, Joe Rogan. Can you go on Joe

00:08:40 Rogan and maintain the interest of the 20 million people who are going to download and watch the

00:08:46 show? Now, if the answer is unequivocally no, then you might want to question. And I'm not

00:08:55 suggesting that you should only be doing your research so that it's sexy enough that you could

00:09:00 appear on Joe Rogan, but surely if, especially in the topics that we study, right? I mean,

00:09:06 your consumatory nature in this modern arena, surely we should be able to be doing research

00:09:13 that can get the trucker who's driving from Kansas to Oregon to listen to a podcast and say,

00:09:21 my God, this is such cool research these guys are doing. Whereas you would be very hard pressed

00:09:26 to read most top marketing papers and short of you speaking to other academics who might be

00:09:34 interested in it you're not going to get the trucker or the corrections officer or the politician

00:09:39 to be interested in your work and that's a that's a real shame because we should be able to do both

00:09:43 which leads me to I think a paper that you should all be devouring and this is Davis 1971 he wrote

00:09:53 a paper called that's interesting exclamation point where he basically was arguing what are

00:10:00 some criteria that we could come up with look some of it is in the eye of the beholder right

00:10:07 I may find a particular topic interesting and the folks that are listening to this lecture may not

00:10:13 and that's fine they are idiosyncratic individual differences but is there a framework that we can

00:10:20 use that allows us to say that notwithstanding heterogeneity of preferences, this research

00:10:27 seems very interesting, whereas this one seems dull. I'll give you an example.

00:10:32 And this is from an actual paper that I had reviewed. They had done study one through study

00:10:38 4,000 with a LISRL and this and that. And the final conclusion is consumers who were pleased

00:10:48 with their experience at a restaurant were more likely to return to that restaurant holy shit who 0.96

00:10:56 could have come up with such brilliance i mean give this person a nobel prize what let me let 0.67

00:11:02 me see if i could jot that down so if a consumer had been favorably disposed to the restaurant

00:11:08 they're more likely to come back wow that's that's brilliant that's something but it smells

00:11:15 sciency because it's got Liz rule, it's got mediation, it's got moderation, it controlled

00:11:20 for 4,000 variables, it did multinomial probe it, told it, and so on. So we did all that. So it

00:11:26 sounds like it's sciency, therefore it must be sciency, but the bottom line is utterly useless.

00:11:32 Life is very short. Don't spend your time doing stuff that everybody could have guessed a priori.

00:11:38 So what Davis does is he offers 12 criteria, which I won't go into here, but he offers 12

00:11:45 a taxonomy, 12 criteria that can help us decide whether that journey that we're embarking on

00:11:53 is worthwhile or not. And usually, and this is not the only way that you could judge whether

00:11:59 something's interesting, but usually there's a surprise element. I thought that A causes B,

00:12:05 it turns out that B causes A. I thought that A and B were unrelated, it turns out that they

00:12:11 co-vary. So it's always of the genre, hey, it kind of violates my a priori folk wisdom,

00:12:20 and therefore it's surprising. And this is not to imply that only surprising findings are

00:12:27 interesting, but certainly something that you couldn't have easily guessed a priori

00:12:31 would be interesting. So having said all that, now we will... Oh, so let me give you examples

00:12:38 of interesting research that, well, let's see if you agree with me. So this first one is actually

00:12:45 coming from my own research. How provocatively a woman dresses is highly correlated to her 1.00

00:12:51 menstrual cycle. And I'll discuss this a bit more in a second. So meaning that, you know, there are 0.89

00:12:57 different phases of the ovulatory cycle. When women are in the maximally fertile phase of their

00:13:02 ovulatory cycle, they engage in very specific beautification strategies that they don't at 0.88

00:13:07 other periods of their menstrual cycles. And you see this across many mammalian species, not just

00:13:14 human species, but countless others across many animal taxa. Ha, that's interesting. Check out

00:13:21 the next one. So if I were a cross-cultural psychologist and I was studying culinary

00:13:28 traditions, I think Phoebe said food marketing and tourism and so on. Okay. If I were a cross-cultural

00:13:37 psychologist, here's where my research would end. Mexican food is spicier than Swedish food. 1.00

00:13:45 Good night, everybody. Meaning that I've identified a cross-cultural difference, 0.96

00:13:50 and that's where the story ends. But what about trying to understand why the distribution of

00:13:58 spice use varies the way that it does across the globe? And it turns out that there's a very clear

00:14:05 evolutionary reason for that cultural tradition. You ready? So there's something called the

00:14:12 antimicrobial hypothesis. The antimicrobial hypothesis is the idea that many foods are

00:14:18 laden with foodborne pathogens. Therefore, cuisine traditions, culinary traditions evolve to counter

00:14:28 those threats. So pickling, salting, spice use are ways by which you assuage that threat. So

00:14:39 therefore, if you take a map of the world and you look at where spice use is more prevalent versus

00:14:47 less prevalent, it is highly correlated, for example, to the ambient temperature within that

00:14:53 ecosystem. Hotter climates, more spice use. So it's not surprising that Mexico has spicier food

00:15:03 than Sweden. But even within a singular country, within China or within India, the further north 0.82

00:15:10 I go, the less spices I use. The further south I go, the more spices I use. Oh, that's interesting.

00:15:18 I already see I'm looking at your faces. It's, oh, that's cool. That's interesting. I didn't do

00:15:23 research that shows a customer who is happy at a restaurant is more likely to return to the

00:15:29 restaurant. That didn't surprise everyone. What I just told you, I guarantee you there's been

00:15:35 substantial incremental learning for you. Let's go on to the next one. Okay. Your maternal and

00:15:43 paternal grandparents share a quarter of their genes with you. So your four grandparents,

00:15:51 the R coefficient, meaning the genetic relatedness coefficient is 0.25. On average, they share a

00:15:58 quarter of their genes. But it turns out that the pattern of investment in those four grandparents

00:16:05 is not equal in their grandchildren. The maternal grandmother invests the most in her children.

00:16:13 The paternal grandfather invests the least in his grandchildren. The reason is that there are two

00:16:22 mechanisms that are evolutionarily important, the genetic relatedness, but also the genetic

00:16:29 assuredness. Your maternal grandmother has zero parental uncertainty. There is no such thing as

00:16:36 maternity uncertainty. Your paternal grandfather has two generations of paternal uncertainty.

00:16:45 Therefore, and this has been replicated across many cultures, right? So you could be from Ghana,

00:16:52 or you could be from Mexico, or you could be from Lebanon. And I promise you that the result 1.00

00:16:58 will replicate because it is a biologically universal factor. And so it turns out that we

00:17:04 can demonstrate that the pattern of investment in grandparents and their grandchildren follows

00:17:10 a very specific evolutionary calculus. Ha, that's interesting. Now, this fourth one turns out to

00:17:18 have been retracted as a paper. It was published in Nature, but the finding is still nonetheless

00:17:25 less interesting. It was a paper that showed that if you judge men's abilities to dance well,

00:17:34 it's correlated to their phenotypic symmetry, meaning good dancers are actually good phenotypic

00:17:43 specimens. Now, even though this paper was retracted for reasons we don't need to get into,

00:17:47 this is not my paper, you know, it's still interesting. Wow, what an interesting

00:17:53 relationship between a behavioral ability, how well I dance, and a morphological feature.

00:18:02 Oh, that's interesting. Let's go on. Self-preference for perfumes. I may prefer

00:18:10 perfume A over perfume B, whereas you might prefer perfume B over perfume A. It turns out it is

00:18:17 linked to one's immunogenetic profile. And what is that MHC? MHC is a set of genetic markers known

00:18:26 as the major histocompatibility complex. It's a set of genetic markers that capture your own

00:18:34 immunological profile. So meaning that the same perfume might smell really nicely on me,

00:18:42 but it doesn't smell nicely on berry because it matches my immunogenic profile more than it does

00:18:50 berries. And by the way, another very interesting finding, people tend to choose mates who are

00:18:58 maximally different from them on MHC. Why? This is called disassortative mating. Usually we assort

00:19:07 on mating we choose people who are similar to us on for example values but here we choose people

00:19:13 who are maximally different from us because this gives our eventual children greater immunological

00:19:20 defense if i that's why for example we're not attracted to our siblings because they share

00:19:26 our genes and that's why you have the incest taboo i promise you and i don't say this to be

00:19:31 arrogant or you've probably heard more in the 20 minutes that we've been speaking so far

00:19:37 stuff that said oh that's interesting then you might in the next year of courses where it's

00:19:44 going to be customer love the restaurant therefore customer returns to restaurant

00:19:49 it's changing your mindset oh wow i never thought these these variables could be linked

00:19:55 All right, look at the next one. When a baby is born, family members, especially those of the

00:20:03 mother, are likely to state that the baby looks exactly like the father, even though objectively 0.99

00:20:10 speaking, that's pure bullshit. Meaning, perceptually speaking, the baby hasn't yet 0.97

00:20:17 developed the morphological features for you to truly accurately say that he looks like the mom

00:20:23 or dad. But the reason why that cultural tradition has arisen is because you need to protect against

00:20:30 paternity uncertainty. Therefore, when the baby is born, we all say, oh my God, Johnny. Johnny is the

00:20:38 father. The baby looks exactly like you. And the ones who are more likely to say so are the mother's

00:20:45 side of the family. Oh, that's interesting. Here's the next one. Menarche, if you see here

00:20:55 in French, the proper way to say it is menarche. In English, you say menarche. Menarche is the start,

00:21:02 the onset of the menstrual cycle in a girl's life. So some girls will get it at 11. Some 0.63

00:21:08 girls will get it at 13. Well, it turns out that there's a very strong predictor of the timing of

00:21:17 menarche as a function of a singular environmental stressor, whether there is father present or

00:21:25 father absent. When father is absent, little girls enter their reproductive windows much earlier,

00:21:34 meaning that the timing of menarche changes depending on whether there is a dad that is

00:21:42 there or not that's interesting none of these findings you could have said oh yeah i could

00:21:49 have predicted oh i know this stuff it's unique it's powerful i could go on a show or in a

00:21:56 conference and talk about any of these findings for half an hour and people would say wow how the

00:22:02 hell, where did this come from? This is incredible stuff. All right, next one. When you ask men and

00:22:09 women their attitudes about mandatory hospital DNA paternity testing, guess which of the two 0.99

00:22:17 sexes is more likely to say, yes, great idea, institute that. And which of the two sexes is 1.00

00:22:24 likely to say, no, no, no, not a good idea. Well, this, now you could take a course in a doctoral 1.00

00:22:30 seminar in marketing and study all these fancy psychology of attitude formation stuff, but you'll

00:22:36 never study the evolutionary roots of these attitudinal formations. Well, it's not very

00:22:42 difficult to predict why women would be less favorably disposed attitudinally to mandatory

00:22:49 DNA paternity testing because women can call their husband. It turns out that the baby could

00:22:56 have been sired by the really sexy Greek gardener rather than your husband. And I certainly don't

00:23:02 want my husband to know that. That's interesting. That's powerful research. That's saying something

00:23:09 that we didn't know until you came along and did that research instead of doing the little 0.98

00:23:14 bullshit two by two by three stuff that nobody will ever care about. All right. Women can smell 0.98

00:23:21 the most symmetric men that's actually researched by some good friends of mine you take a bunch of

00:23:27 t-shirts you ask men to wear those t-shirts so that this their smell is imbued on that t-shirt

00:23:34 you then ask them to take off the t-shirt and then the researchers put them in different bags

00:23:41 they put them in those bags and then women come in and they smell these different t-shirts and 0.61

00:23:48 they say which is the one that they prefer. On average, the one that is favorably preferred by

00:24:02 women corresponds to the guy who's the most symmetric, meaning that irrespective of which

00:24:11 perceptual modality I use, whether I use smell or I use eyesight, it should always converge 0.82

00:24:18 to the same optimal product from an evolutionary perspective and in this case the product is the

00:24:25 man yeah i i see your faces how you're all going wow that's interesting that's exactly the point

00:24:31 not two by two by three covariate mediation control factor analysis this that's all nice

00:24:40 i have many degrees in mathematics it's not as though i'm afraid of math but life is short

00:24:47 You want to use all of your training to crack real important mysteries about human nature rather than nonsense stuff.

00:24:57 All right.

00:24:58 If I can get you, maybe you should elaborate just a little bit on what a symmetric man means.

00:25:04 Oh, thank you. Sure.

00:25:06 So symmetry could be bodily symmetry.

00:25:09 so for example take uh when when someone suffers from a stroke then they have an asymmetry that

00:25:17 arises right so facial symmetry is a you can actually just use an algorithm now you can

00:25:23 literally enter your photo into a thing and it will calculate how much is is it mirrored right

00:25:29 how symmetric and and by the way it turns out that our attraction to symmetry doesn't only

00:25:36 apply in judging, you know, prospective mates, but even the types of paintings that most people

00:25:43 prefer are those that exhibit symmetry versus not. And so, so, so there is a penchant, a,

00:25:49 an aesthetic penchant for people to prefer symmetry. Now, the next question, Barry, that

00:25:54 you could easily ask is, but why, why, why would we have a preference for symmetry? Because symmetry

00:26:01 is a good marker of phenotypic quality. So earlier I mentioned, if let's say you have a stroke,

00:26:08 you're asymmetric. As we get older, we become less symmetric. Women's breasts are more symmetric

00:26:18 depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle. And by the way, other animals use symmetry 0.99

00:26:28 in judging. So for example, the peacock's tail is big, it's massive, it has iridescent colors,

00:26:35 and it's got symmetric patterns. Because the more symmetric I am, the less I have been

00:26:42 infested with pathogens. And so when you say that, oh my God, this man, he's so handsome,

00:26:50 or this woman, she's gorgeous, you're basically saying they're symmetric. And by the way,

00:26:57 that applies across races. It's not as though if I go to Ghana, we will disagree on what's

00:27:04 beautiful. We will all agree which Ghanaian woman is gorgeous, irrespective of the race that's

00:27:10 evaluating her and an Indian woman and a Lebanese woman, because we're driven by symmetry. And so

00:27:16 these are some examples, but I could spend the next 16 hours giving you many other examples,

00:27:21 all of which, these ones are all coming from an evolutionary lens. Now, I'm not implying that the

00:27:28 only way to do research is if you adopt the evolutionary lens, but it certainly increases

00:27:34 your chances of doing stuff that's going to have an impactful punch at the end of the research.

00:27:42 Okay, let's keep going. So now there's one or two slides, a couple of slides here, but I checked

00:27:48 with Barry two weeks ago when I gave the keynote, a couple of these slides I had used. But again,

00:27:55 none of you were there, so it doesn't matter. So I'm going to show you this book right here,

00:28:00 this book right here. And actually inside, I've got, you see all this writing? So this is the,

00:28:07 you know, and all the highlighting and so on. This is the course that I took, not unlike,

00:28:12 I think, Whitney and Jackson. You're both in your first semester in your PhD, yes? Yes. So my first

00:28:18 semester as a doctoral student at Cornell, I took a course in advanced social psychology with this

00:28:25 gentleman, Professor Dennis Regan. Pretty much most of my courses were in cognitive psychology,

00:28:30 psychology of decision-making, social psychology, and then evolutionary psychology. And then I

00:28:36 applied it to consumer research. And about halfway through the semester, he assigned this book.

00:28:42 And that's the book that completely altered my eventual scientific career, because that's

00:28:48 when I was first exposed to the evolutionary lens. Now, in this case, the book is titled Homicide

00:28:55 because it's a book that looks at patterns of criminality using an evolutionary lens.

00:29:01 Are there certain patterns of crimes that happen, whether they happen in Central Africa or in the

00:29:08 Amazonian jungle or 6,000 years ago or 300 years from now, that are happening in exactly the same

00:29:16 way precisely for the exact same reasons. And the answer is an unequivocal yes. And the reason why

00:29:24 it's an unequivocal yes is because they are driven by an evolutionary calculus. The two examples that

00:29:32 I gave a couple of weeks ago, which I'll repeat here, number one, the most, the biggest predictor

00:29:39 of there being child abuse in a home, a hundredfold greater predictor. Again, it's very

00:29:48 important to understand how big that is. As I repeatedly explained to people, usually when you

00:29:56 have a statistically significant effect, it's a ratio of 1 to 1.3, meaning that it's 30% more

00:30:03 effective, 1 to 1.3. This is 1 to 100, okay? So it's orders of magnitude greater statistically

00:30:12 significant effect than most of the studies that you'll ever read. The number one predictor of

00:30:17 there being child abuse is not whether the parents have been abused, it's not whether there's alcohol

00:30:21 in the family, it's not whether you're born on the wrong side of the tract, and there's another

00:30:26 hundred causes that I could give. The number one cause is if there is a step-parent in the home.

00:30:33 and of course there are very clear evolutionary reasons for that so for and this i didn't mention

00:30:39 a couple weeks ago so barry you're going to learn something new here uh when you end up in a in a

00:30:46 lion's pride right lions are the only feline that are a social species the all the other felines are

00:30:55 solitary they only come together for mating and then they're solitary but lions run in prides

00:31:00 their social species. Well, the dynamic are usually there is a couple of resident dominant

00:31:06 males that do very little other than protect the pride and have sex. And that's it. That's all they

00:31:14 do. If you look at National Geographic, it's usually all the lionesses that are doing all the

00:31:19 heavy hunting and so on. And so all of the young lions are kicked out of the pride. 0.88

00:31:28 and so there's a bunch of these frustrated young males running around in the savannah

00:31:34 and once in a while they will try to do little exploratory attacks on the resident dominant males

00:31:43 to see if they can take over and they will lose for a while but eventually father time catches up

00:31:50 to you and those resident dominant males have one of two choices they can either fight those young

00:31:56 guys and probably die or they're banished and usually they their ending is a really kind of

00:32:04 tragic and sad ending because they're out alone and they die sort of the slow painful death

00:32:09 the first thing you're focused the first thing that the new incoming males do before anything

00:32:20 else is they go around and they kill every cub that's in the pride. Why? Because it is a species

00:32:33 where both males and females contribute to the rearing. Therefore, they don't want to spend their

00:32:39 time investing in the cubs that were sired by other males therefore they kill all of the cubs

00:32:50 and believe me the females put up a big fight but then they lose and guess what happens to the 0.52

00:32:58 females immediately after they've just genocided all of their children what do you think happens

00:33:04 I'm asking this openly as a question. 1.00

00:33:07 Anybody can answer?

00:33:12 Hello?

00:33:13 But I would think they might want to raise other caps.

00:33:17 They might want to bring forth other children.

00:33:20 Right.

00:33:21 After losing their children.

00:33:22 Meaning that they actually become sexually receptive. 0.98

00:33:28 So after the new males have killed all their children,

00:33:33 evolution has set it up not that they sit there and cry all day they say okay well i guess we've

00:33:40 lost time to have sex and raise the new right so now why did i just mention all this because

00:33:47 child abuse by step parents is just a manifestation of what those lions are doing by the way it

00:33:56 happens in many species. Now, that doesn't mean that if I offer an explanation for child abuse,

00:34:03 that means I'm justifying child abuse, right? It doesn't mean that because you offer the

00:34:09 scientific imprimatur of why child abuse happens, that you're okay with it any more than if a

00:34:18 cancer researcher explains cancer, that doesn't mean he's justifying it or she's for it, right?

00:34:26 You're just explaining why it happened. So that was one finding from this book. The other one is

00:34:30 one related to when women are killed. It turns out that by far,

00:34:38 unbelievable amount, the most dangerous person in any woman's life is her long-term partner.

00:34:44 It's not the rapist hiding in the trees. It's not the serial killer. The number one greatest

00:34:51 threat to a woman's safety is her long-term partner and the number one reason that he will

00:34:57 be driven to violence is either because of suspected or realized infidelity and why is that

00:35:06 because we are a bi-parental species therefore your ancestors and mine come from a descendant of

00:35:13 male ancestors who were not very keen on their women having sex with eight other guys because

00:35:20 then I'm stuck raising that child, never knowing whether it's mine or not, right? And so therefore, 0.61

00:35:27 human males have evolved the cognitive, the emotional, and the behavioral system to try to

00:35:34 thwart that. And in this case, of course, it takes a violent turn. But again, you're not justifying

00:35:41 it, but you're explaining why this pattern of violence happens in exactly the same way in every

00:35:48 known culture throughout all of time periods. So when I found the incredible theoretical elegance

00:35:57 and the parsimony of these explanations, that's when I had my epiphany. And I said, okay, well,

00:36:05 now I will take this framework and I will apply it to my area of behavior that I'm interested in,

00:36:13 consumer psychology psychology of decision-making and so on and so that i hope i haven't gone too

00:36:20 long but barry should i go about 60 minutes you think that'll be okay and then we open it up

00:36:24 i think you can go a little longer yeah okay perfect

00:36:27 so now that i've given you a bit of a sense of you know what constitutes interesting research

00:36:36 what how did i get into the whole evolution psychology realm so now i'm going to give you

00:36:41 some specific examples in my own research and then explain the the actual theoretical and

00:36:47 epistemological framework that drives the evolutionary lens so bear with me so here's a

00:36:54 study and barry is familiar with the study and i don't know if he's assigned it for your course

00:36:59 so this is a study that i did back uh you know 17 years ago published in organizational behavior

00:37:05 and Human Decision Processes, OVHTP, which is a top psychology of decision-making journal,

00:37:13 where with one of my former graduate students, we looked at peacocking in the human context.

00:37:21 So we took a principle from animal behavior. Here we've got a peahen, right? This is the female.

00:37:26 And what this male is doing is saying, hey, look, you should mate with me. Look at this big tail. 0.93

00:37:31 look at the iridescent colors look at the symmetric patterns the fact that i've got this

00:37:36 this big burdensome tail i'm still standing around suggests that you should be mating with me uh

00:37:43 choose me as a mate okay well i took this principle and i said well tons of behaviors in consumer uh

00:37:50 in the consumer realm is nothing but peacocking so i said okay well let's take this animal behavior

00:37:56 and apply it to the human context, let's get young men to drive. And by the way, as I explained a

00:38:02 couple of weeks ago at the base keynote, I didn't say as many of these studies do, oh, imagine

00:38:10 yourself driving, right? Or here, let me do a prime of how you'd be driving. We actually rented

00:38:16 a Porsche and we got a beaten up old car and got young men to drive both of these cars, both in

00:38:23 downtown montreal where everybody can see me driving the porsche or the beaten up car or

00:38:28 the or on a semi-deserted highway so that it's either with an audience or without an audience

00:38:33 now what's the dependent measure can anybody guess not barry because you know the the thing

00:38:39 can anybody guess what was our dependent measure

00:38:41 potentially if someone will go out on a date with you oh that's that's good that's very good and

00:38:49 there are studies that do that and i'll talk about one in a second

00:38:52 uh no a dependent measure that's coming from the actual driver

00:38:58 a physiological measure

00:39:05 a hormonal measure

00:39:11 was it the confidence level the what levels their confidence level

00:39:19 Well, confidence is not hormonal, right?

00:39:21 But it certainly could be related to that.

00:39:24 What's a hormone?

00:39:25 Testosterone.

00:39:26 Yes, very good.

00:39:28 I'm cheating.

00:39:29 I was there the other day.

00:39:30 Oh, you were there?

00:39:31 Oh, I didn't?

00:39:32 Yeah.

00:39:33 Where are you coming from?

00:39:34 You didn't introduce yourself.

00:39:35 Julie Mullard.

00:39:37 Yes, I'm at the Memphis airport.

00:39:40 Ah, okay.

00:39:42 But we lost one student.

00:39:44 One student's gone.

00:39:46 Okay, well, too bad.

00:39:48 oh yes i remember you how are you yes testosterone so you take salivary assays you measure the

00:39:56 testosterone not surprisingly your testosterone tracks whether you've engaged in a social win

00:40:04 or social defeat in this case when all these beautiful women are seeing me in downtown 0.83

00:40:10 montreal driving the porsche i'm top dog testosterone goes up when i'm a loser testosterone 1.00

00:40:15 goes down. Okay. So to me, it's extraordinary that a hundred years of research had been done 0.95

00:40:22 in economics and in consumer research. So on, no one had ever thought until I came along to say,

00:40:27 Hey, I wonder if hormones affect our behavior and serve as consequences of our behavior. No.

00:40:34 Why? Because most people trained in these social sciences don't study the biological roots of what

00:40:42 makes us do what we do. Okay. So that would be one example. Let's do another one. This is another

00:40:47 one that I discussed a couple of weeks ago. So Julie is going to be familiar with it, but believe

00:40:51 me, a lot of the other stuff is completely new and you missed some of that, Julie. Uh, this is a

00:40:57 study with one of my former doctoral students, uh, where we took, it was like personal ads, right?

00:41:03 Like a dating app, uh, exact same guy, exact same description. The only thing that we change is he

00:41:10 says, my favorite personal possession is this fancy car or this less fancy car. And then we're

00:41:16 going to ask men and women to evaluate this exact same guy. And we actually collected a whole bunch

00:41:24 of dependent measures. How intelligent is he? How likely is he to cheat? A whole bunch of stuff.

00:41:29 But the one that I like to focus on, because it so powerfully demonstrates the epistemological

00:41:37 benefits of an evolutionary lens is we asked men and women to tell us what was the height of the

00:41:44 guy when he is in this version and in this version. Now, again, this is going to be a massive

00:41:52 that's interesting exclamation point. Women evaluate the guy in the Porsche as magically 1.00

00:41:58 becoming taller, men evaluate the guy in the Porsche as magically becoming shorter. How could 0.98

00:42:07 that be? The guy didn't change. His morphology didn't change. Yet the exact opposite mechanism

00:42:16 happened. Why? Because women associate status with height. Therefore, when I'm in the Porsche,

00:42:23 I magically become taller. Men are intimidated by other men's social status. Therefore, they engage

00:42:30 in intrasexual derogation tactics. I derogate the other. So if this competitor of mine is driving a

00:42:37 Porsche, one of the ways that I can derogate him is I start believing, well, he must be

00:42:43 overcompensating for something. He must be a short little guy, right? So that status elongation and

00:42:49 status contraction could only have happened if you understood the sex-specific psychology

00:42:57 associated with this status symbol. That is stemming from an evolutionary calculus.

00:43:04 One more example. I already mentioned this one. Here is a female chimp. When she is in estrus,

00:43:14 meaning when she is sexually receptive her genitalia will become enlarged and engorged

00:43:20 in the human context maybe thankfully depending on your point of view we don't have it quite as 1.00

00:43:27 conspicuous as that but the human females will engage in behavioral choices that are akin to 0.99

00:43:36 this autonomic response which is they are much more likely to sexualize themselves and beautify 0.99

00:43:43 themselves in many different ways when they are in the maximally fertile phase of their menstrual

00:43:49 cycle. This was a paper that I published with one of my former doctoral students in the Journal of

00:43:54 Consumer Psychology. Again, once you see these results, you go, wow, that's interesting. But

00:44:00 what's even more interesting than the finding is how come no one had ever thought in 100 years to

00:44:05 do this research? Well, because one of the foundational tenets of the social sciences

00:44:11 is that human beings are somehow bereft of biology, right?

00:44:16 Biology matters for the giraffe.

00:44:19 Biology matters for your dog.

00:44:21 Biology matters for the zebra.

00:44:23 But it can't apply to human beings.

00:44:26 It can't apply to consumers.

00:44:27 Of course, it applies to consumers.

00:44:29 And that's what I've done my whole career.

00:44:31 All right, let me skip the next one.

00:44:33 So let me come now to the epistemology of EP.

00:44:38 This is in a paper,

00:44:39 in a journal of marketing research paper

00:44:41 that i published in 2017 i wanted to explain what are the unique epistemological benefits

00:44:51 that stem from the evolutionary lens that you can't have with any other lens

00:44:57 the first one is one that i briefly discussed a couple of weeks ago at the keynote is the

00:45:06 distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations which i'll explain in a second

00:45:10 this one i also explained a couple weeks ago but i'll use a different example now so i can keep

00:45:16 julie and barry on their toes and then the third one i'm also going to explain how it offers a

00:45:23 unique epistemological benefit let me start with this one proximate versus ultimate explanations

00:45:30 almost all science that's ever been done in any field throughout all time has been done

00:45:40 at the proximate level what does proximate mean

00:45:43 excuse me it means studying the how and the what of a phenomenon it's the mechanistic

00:45:53 explanation so anything that you read in journal of marketing research journal of consumer research

00:45:58 is mechanistic. How does this behavior affect this behavior and serve as an antecedent to this

00:46:05 behavior, right? You're explaining the how and the what, and that's perfectly fine, right?

00:46:10 How does diabetes work? What are the triggers that cause your sugar levels to go up and become

00:46:17 dangerous, right? I'm explaining the how and what. What's cancer? Why is there the unchecked cell

00:46:24 division, and so on. Perfectly fine. Most Nobel Prizes have been won for proximate explanations.

00:46:30 But what is massively missing is another layer of scientific explanations, and that is the

00:46:39 ultimate explanation for a phenomenon, meaning that for any phenomenon involving a biological

00:46:46 being, including consumers and marketing, you have to explain the how and what, but also the

00:46:54 ultimate why. Ultimate why means why would evolution have created the mechanism to be of

00:47:01 that form? You follow? So for example, you could say why men are more likely to beat their women

00:47:12 if they cheat on them because they have higher testosterone and therefore that predisposes them

00:47:19 to be more violent because they have fragile egos. Okay, those things might be true, but they're

00:47:24 explaining the how and what. The ultimate explanation, as I hinted at earlier in our

00:47:30 conversation today, is because it's a way to thwart paternity uncertainty. That's the ultimate

00:47:37 explanation for why men are driven to homicidal violence if their long-term partner cheats on

00:47:44 them. And you need both levels of explanations to fully explain something. The classic example

00:47:51 that I always give, because I think it's the most beautiful example of that distinction,

00:47:56 it's one that I discussed a couple of weeks ago at that keynote. And I promise you that

00:48:01 those are only the few slides that are similar. And then we're going to go back to all new stuff

00:48:06 for Julie and Barry. Take, for example, pregnancy sickness. Pregnancy sickness is a very predictable

00:48:13 reality that women around the world face when they are pregnant. We can exactly, we could set

00:48:21 our watches to when pregnancy sickness happens. It happens in the first trimester of gestation.

00:48:27 it starts at organogenesis. When the organs of the uterus, the utero are forming, of the baby

00:48:37 are forming, organogenesis, the start of organ formation, that's a very, very precarious period

00:48:47 in the pregnancy, because if the woman is exposed to food pathogens, that could wreak havoc to the 1.00

00:48:58 process. Therefore, she develops, talk about consumer behavior, she develops certain food 0.89

00:49:08 preferences that are unique to that period. She may despise pickles, but suddenly she has

00:49:15 nonstop desire for pickles. Why? Because pickling, as I explained earlier when I talked about

00:49:21 culinary traditions, pickling is a way to assuage exposure to microbes, foodborne microbes, right?

00:49:30 Pickling, salting, smoking food, spice use, those are all culinary traditions that assuage

00:49:38 you know being exposed to foodborne pathogens the ultimate insurance policy is when you get

00:49:46 the nausea and the throwing up that stems with pregnancy sickness because it basically says

00:49:53 if you engaged in the consumption of foods that could potentially be harmful to your growing

00:50:03 embryo well here's the ultimate insurance policy expel it now why now that's the ultimate

00:50:11 explanation for why women experience pregnancy sickness now you might say okay well that's

00:50:17 fantastic that's great we didn't know that that's interesting but who cares well there are very real

00:50:23 practical applications to that insight because as i explained a couple of weeks ago i've given this

00:50:30 lecture to healthcare providers, many of whom are physicians, many of whom are OBGYNs, they're

00:50:38 obstetrics and gynecology, they're reproductive medicine specialists for women, and they've never

00:50:47 studied that. Now, you might still say, okay, but who cares? Well, when you have very severe

00:50:55 pregnancy symptoms, you go see your physician, your OBGYN, who will give you a pill to attenuate

00:51:04 those symptoms because maybe you need to come to today's lecture and you don't want to be running

00:51:09 and throwing up every five minutes in the bathroom. So that makes perfect sense, but it doesn't make

00:51:15 perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective because those pregnancy sickness symptoms

00:51:20 are an adaptive mechanism that evolved to protect your embryo, meaning the more pregnancy sickness

00:51:29 symptoms you experience, the greater the beneficial outcome to your child, the less likely you are to

00:51:37 have a miscarriage. So imagine this, I'm sitting in a room full of physicians, they come up to me and

00:51:45 say, it's unbelievable, Professor Zad. We've never studied this in medical school. Well,

00:51:50 it's not because they're dumb. It's because medical school, like the business school, 1.00

00:51:56 like any other school, is stuck in proximate world. So the physician is learning the how and what,

00:52:04 which is fine, but you get completely different insights if you also study the evolutionary why.

00:52:11 So that's the first epistemological benefit of Darwinizing anything, including consumer behavior and marketing.

00:52:20 Now, let me go back to that slide.

00:52:22 So remember, so this is this one.

00:52:24 Now I'm going to show you this thing, which is unbelievable.

00:52:28 Okay, it really is.

00:52:30 I mean, okay, I'll let you decide if it's unbelievable or not, but it is unbelievable.

00:52:36 the example that I gave in the plenary or the keynote a couple of weeks ago is a different one

00:52:43 there I was trying to demonstrate that the sex specificity of toy preferences

00:52:51 is universal and innate and it's not due to social construction meaning that little boys

00:52:57 prefer trucks more so than girls and little girls prefer dolls more so than boys and it's not 0.95

00:53:05 because mommy and daddy are sexist pigs who are trying to promote patriarchal standards. There 1.00

00:53:11 are very clear, universally valid reasons why that's true. And I had, so if you go to the paper

00:53:18 that I published in JMR from a few years ago, you'll see that example. But today I wanted to

00:53:23 bring in another example just because if anybody had been at that previous talk. So today what I'm

00:53:28 going to prove to you through a nomological network, what's a nomological network? A nomological

00:53:33 network is when I try to find converging evidence that proves my position using different cultures,

00:53:45 different time periods, different species, different methodologies, different dependent

00:53:51 measures, all of which point to the fact that this position is true. So here I'm going to use

00:53:57 an example from mating behavior. So it turns out that men have evolved a preference for the

00:54:06 hourglass figure in women, right? The hourglass figure, meaning that there is no culture that

00:54:12 we've ever uncovered. And if any of you can uncover it, make sure to email me because I'll

00:54:17 make you famous, but you won't uncover it because it doesn't exist. There is no culture where men 0.99

00:54:23 say, I'm really attracted to women who look like male Olympic swimmers. That culture hasn't been

00:54:33 discovered yet. It hasn't been discovered not because men learn about their preferences by

00:54:39 watching Beyonce videos or by listening to Oprah or by reading Cosmopolitan. It's because it's an

00:54:48 innate preference. In the same way that women have certain innate preferences in what they seek in an 0.99

00:54:54 ideal male, the same thing applies the other way, one of which is a preference for the hourglass

00:55:01 figure. So if I wanted to prove to you that the hourglass figure is not socially constructed,

00:55:08 it's due to basic evolutionary biological reasons, how can I do that? Okay, so watch now,

00:55:16 I'm going to get you data from completely different areas that proves this point. So it's a lot more

00:55:22 than, it's not a literature review. A literature review is a very narrow exploration of the

00:55:30 phenomenon you're studying. Here, I am triangulating across time periods, across cultures, across

00:55:37 species. It's a very, very different process. Okay, so I can get you data from medicine that

00:55:43 shows you that women who have the hourglass figure are more likely to be fertile and more

00:55:50 likely to be healthy. So it is literally the case that when you have the hourglass figure,

00:55:56 you are expressing an evolutionary cue that's relevant. I am fertile. Now, the older women get,

00:56:06 even if they started with the hourglass figure, the less hourglass figure they will have as they 1.00

00:56:13 age. So it is a queue of fertility, a queue of youth, a queue of health. Clearly, that's an

00:56:21 evolutionary argument. This is actually research that I did back in 2008. I published a paper where

00:56:29 I showed that if you look at what women advertise online escorts across 48 different countries,

00:56:40 countries that vary in every possible way african countries south american countries middle east

00:56:46 countries european countries the women who are advertising their services usually say my name is

00:56:54 candace my height is this my weight is that and they give their measurements now some i remember 0.66

00:57:03 one reviewer an imbecilic reviewer said oh but how do you know they're not lying it doesn't matter 0.91

00:57:10 whether they're lying or not. It's what is it that they are advertising to the prospective customer 0.99

00:57:16 who is called men, right? So they may be completely lying about what those cues are, but

00:57:22 what are the cues that they advertise will tell us something about male psychology. And it turns out

00:57:30 that across the 48 countries the waist to hip ratio is the exact one that captures the waist

00:57:41 to hip ratio like i couldn't have made up the data to be this perfect and just for you to know

00:57:47 later when the course is finished you can go and do your measurements at home

00:57:51 uh the waist to hip ratio that covers the hourglass figure is 0.7 it's somewhere between

00:58:00 0.68 to 0.72 waist to hip ratio and the waist to hip ratio that women prefer men is obviously a

00:58:09 different one women are not attracted to a guy who's very hippie uh hippie meaning in terms of

00:58:15 hips because then he would have an hourglass figure that's not very testosterone-y, okay?

00:58:21 All right, so now I've gotten you data from medicine. I've gotten you data from online

00:58:25 escorts. How about I get you data from across cultures and spanning several thousand years,

00:58:34 showing you that the figurines that archaeologists have found depicting the ideal gorgeous woman

00:58:43 in Africa, in India, in the Middle East, when we take her measurements are exactly those.

00:58:50 So now I've gotten you data from medicine. I've gotten you data from contemporary online

00:58:57 internet escort service. I've gotten you data from archaeological digs from thousands of years

00:59:04 ago across many cultures and on and on and on. I won't go through all of them, but imagine how

00:59:09 powerful that is. So I've often been asked, and I can't remember if I mentioned this a couple of

00:59:15 weeks ago at the keynote, I'm often asked, how is it that someone like you, who there isn't a single

00:59:23 sacred cow in academia that you don't go after, how come you don't get canceled? There's so many

00:59:30 other professors who say a million times less things than you, and they're already been canceled.

00:59:36 Well, because I come prepared, because I've already built my nomological network.

00:59:42 I don't go into a room and espouse positions that I can't back up from here to the moon.

00:59:49 And therefore, it becomes very difficult for you to cancel me because good luck if we're

00:59:55 going to debate, right?

00:59:56 So, and that, by the way, is a very important lesson for the doctoral students.

01:00:00 having epistemic humility is as Confucius said know what you know and know what you don't know

01:00:07 right so I'm very disciplined and never commenting about things that I don't know so I could appear

01:00:14 on a show and somebody says hey what do you think about the consequences of the legalization of

01:00:21 marijuana in Canada because I used to be in Canada before I go oh well you know that's a great

01:00:26 question but unfortunately I don't know enough about this to to offer an opinion it's not

01:00:30 because I'm too weak to offer an opinion, because when I know, I know, and I'll come with all the

01:00:35 bravado of somebody who knows, but I'm very, very disciplined and well calibrated in speaking only

01:00:43 about things that I'm, you know, assured of. And that basically averts a lot of problems because

01:00:51 given the number of platforms that I appear on, millions of people hear my stuff. And if you're

01:00:59 going to start winging it, believe me, there are a lot of detractors who want to catch you saying

01:01:05 nonsense, but you can't catch me because I've built the nomological network. I know of what

01:01:11 I'm talking about. And so as you go on the job market in a few years and you're applying for

01:01:17 those academic positions, you know, if you have that epistemic discipline, it will serve you well.

01:01:24 I won't go, I don't want to take too much more time because otherwise I will be here for five

01:01:29 hours. So here, this is actually something that comes from my doctoral dissertation where I was

01:01:36 using what's called a sequential sampling model. Imagine this is car A and this is car B, and this

01:01:42 is a threshold that I have to reach if I want to stop acquiring additional information and choose

01:01:48 car A, or if I reach this threshold, I will stop and choose car B, okay? So this is called a

01:01:55 sequential sampling model. I took this model, which I had used in my doctoral dissertation

01:02:01 in 1994, and I applied it in a completely different setting. Here, the two choices are not

01:02:08 car A or car B or product A or product B. It's, do you now have enough evidence to support your

01:02:15 position or to refute it? And so this is exactly what the nomological network is doing, right?

01:02:21 I'd like to prove to you that the hourglass figure is an evolved biological-based preference,

01:02:30 and I'm going to get you completely differing pieces of evidence that support that.

01:02:37 And so look what I'm doing.

01:02:39 More evidence, more evidence, more evidence.

01:02:42 And at some point, I have acquired so much evidence across species, across disciplines,

01:02:48 across time periods, across cultures, that we could say, even though you should never say that

01:02:55 something is settled in science, it's always provisional, but you could safely say that there

01:03:01 is now compelling evidence that is irrefutable in support of your position, okay? And then if you

01:03:08 remember here, let me just go here. So I've talked about how evolutionary lens allows us to

01:03:16 distinguish between proximate and ultimate explanations. The evolutionary lens allows us

01:03:22 to build these nomological networks of cumulative evidence. And the evolutionary lens allows us to

01:03:30 build a consilient tree of knowledge. Now, those are a lot of fancy words, so let me explain what

01:03:36 I mean by that. Consilience is a term that was introduced back into the common lexicon by E.O.

01:03:44 Wilson, he wrote a book in the late 1990s called Consilience. Consilience refers to unity of

01:03:50 knowledge. So for example, physics is more consilient than marketing, not because marketing

01:03:57 is not epistemologically as valid a scientific discipline as physics. It's a lot harder to

01:04:03 understand consumers' behavior than it is to understand some of the things that physicists

01:04:08 studies. And that's literally true, right? The most complex apparatus known in the universe is

01:04:14 the human mind. So it's not that epistemologically marketing or sociology are less scientific than

01:04:21 physics. What makes them less scientific is that physics is built on a conciliant tree of knowledge,

01:04:29 right? You don't have in chemistry people who are pro-periodic table and people who are

01:04:37 anti-periodic table. We all start with the premise that the periodic table is set knowledge,

01:04:45 it's core knowledge, and then we can expand from there. But in the social sciences, apparently 15

01:04:52 minutes ago, we could no longer agree on what constitutes male or female. Well, if we can't

01:04:56 agree on what male or female is, then we're not going to have a very strong concilient tree of

01:05:02 knowledge. Well, evolutionary theory solves that problem because it exactly builds a very

01:05:10 conciliant tree of knowledge. And let me show you this using my own research. You know, I'll do this

01:05:16 slide and then I'll just, because I have tons of more slides, I think I could probably go on for

01:05:21 another three hours. So I'll do the slide, do one or two wrap up things, slides, and then we'll open

01:05:27 it up. So please bear with me here as I explain this. So you start with the most fundamental node,

01:05:37 which is general evolutionary theory. And let me explain what that means. Evolutionary theory

01:05:43 could be broken up into natural selection, sexual selection, and inclusive fitness theory.

01:05:49 This explains everything in biology. What does that mean? Natural selection explains how

01:05:57 species evolve traits that confer survival advantage you follow so for example phoebe was

01:06:08 talking she's interested in food stuff our gustatory preferences have evolved to solve

01:06:16 a fundamental survival problem which one is it anybody tell me

01:06:20 what do you think what do you think is the survival problem that our gustatory

01:06:27 taste buds have evolved to solve

01:06:30 it's not a trick question whether food is edible or not well certainly you could do is it is it

01:06:42 edible or not? Is it toxic or not? But most fundamentally, does it pack a big caloric punch,

01:06:52 right? So all species have to struggle through two, if you like, survival challenges.

01:07:02 Avoid becoming someone's dinner and get dinner, right? So for example, camouflaging,

01:07:09 the fact that animals evolve camouflaging traits that renders them invisible to other predators

01:07:17 is, I don't want to become somebody's dinner, right? But I also have to find dinner,

01:07:26 meaning we've evolved gustatory preferences that solve the problem of caloric scarcity

01:07:34 and caloric uncertainty, meaning that the people who are in this lecture today, I can't predict

01:07:42 which fatty foods you like, but I can certainly predict that that fatty food that is your

01:07:49 preferred one, you like it more than raw celery, right? So I may prefer a ribeye steak. You may

01:07:57 prefer chocolate mousse. He may prefer a juicy burger, which is one of the subtitles in one of

01:08:04 my books, The Consuming Instinct, What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift-Giving

01:08:10 Reveal About Human Nature. But our taste buds did not evolve to prefer raw celery and raw carrots

01:08:18 because we need to be hoarding as much food as possible that's high caloric, okay? So natural

01:08:26 selection is the mechanism that explains why all species, including homoconsumericus, including

01:08:35 consumers, human consumers, why we've evolved certain preferences. Sexual selection refers to

01:08:44 all of those traits that confer reproductive advantage. Life is a two-step game, survive and

01:08:53 mate right if if i survive but i could never mate it serves me no purpose my genes die with me and

01:09:01 therefore i have to both survive and find a mate therefore the earlier stuff that i mentioned with

01:09:08 the peacocking the earlier stuff that i mentioned with women beautifying themselves more when they 0.88

01:09:15 are in the maximally fertile phase of their ovulatory cycle that's part of sexual selection

01:09:20 and then inclusive fitness theory is the mechanism that explains why it is that we've evolved

01:09:28 kin-based altruism why would i jump into the river to save three of my children if if it's

01:09:35 about my own survival well then i'm putting myself at risk to save the three well but if you realize

01:09:42 that evolution operates at the gene level meaning that if each of my children on average share 50

01:09:49 percent of their genes with me, if I jump into the river and I save all three of them, and in that

01:09:54 process, I die, that's, evolutionarily speaking, that's perfectly rational. And therefore, there

01:10:00 would be selection pressures for evolution to select for kin-based altruism. So taking these

01:10:06 mechanisms, and there's another one called reciprocal altruism, but forget it for now.

01:10:11 Now, from these theories, we could have what are called mid-level theories. That's what, that's

01:10:18 called, this comes from Lakatos, a philosopher of science. So for example, from these theories,

01:10:25 one theory that comes across is parental investment theory. I'll just do one side of the

01:10:31 tree, but both sides are really cool because each of these final ones are actually studies that I've

01:10:36 done. But look how clean it is. I could go through the entire etymology of how my thinking went from

01:10:46 the supra theory to the mid-level theory, to the lower level theories, to the actual hypotheses

01:10:53 that I tested. So parental investment theory is a theory that explains how sex differences arise.

01:11:03 Okay. If you want to know if in a species, the males are bigger than the females,

01:11:11 or in a few rare species, it's the other way. Simply ask the question, which of the two sexes

01:11:19 is the one that carries the greater minimal obligatory parental investment? And in most 0.73

01:11:29 species, it's the females that do. So take, for example, the human species. It's the females, 1.00

01:11:35 it's the human females that have to go through gestation. If you even look at the gametes in a 1.00

01:11:42 single ejaculate of a man, on average, 250 million spermatozoa. A woman starts with about one to two 0.51

01:11:52 million ova, but only about 400 of those will be fertilizable from menarche, meaning the onset of 1.00

01:12:02 to menopause. Meaning, using economic theory, right, why are diamonds more expensive than coal?

01:12:12 Because they're more rare. Therefore, the gametes of a woman are rare and precious. The gametes of 0.99

01:12:20 a man are abundant and cheap. Therefore, the minimal parental obligatory investment is tilted

01:12:28 much more towards women. Therefore, we expect there to be sexual selection pressures for women 0.99

01:12:37 to be more judicious when searching for a mate. Now, none of you were evolutionary psychologists

01:12:45 before coming into this lecture, but if I had asked you before you came, who do you think

01:12:52 is more likely to be picky when choosing a mate, men or women. Very few people would ever say it's

01:13:01 men, meaning that you already have the instinct of, now you don't know the fancy evolutionary 0.99

01:13:07 reason why I gave you, but you know that women are going to on average be a lot more picky with 0.61

01:13:14 their sexual partners, right? And the reason for that is because the cost of making a poor 1.00

01:13:22 mate choice looms much larger for women than it does for men. So now let's go down the tree and

01:13:29 let's, so I start with these general broad big supra theories. I take sexual selection. It leads

01:13:37 to a mid-level theory, parental investment theory. Parental investment theory leads to the

01:13:43 absolute verifiable statement that women are more judicious when making made choice.

01:13:51 And that resulted in my publishing a paper in the premier evolution journal,

01:13:57 Human Behavior and Evolution, where we tested this. And let me explain how we tested this.

01:14:03 And then I'll just wrap up with one or two slides and I'll turn it over to you.

01:14:07 How many of you here, maybe other than Barry or maybe Julie, I don't know what happened to

01:14:12 two other students. Those two other students need to get some great spanking on participation. 1.00

01:14:18 And I'm slightly offended that I'm giving this lecture and they disappear. So they better have 1.00

01:14:23 some good reasons for not being here. The framing effect is Kahneman and Tversky.

01:14:29 Kahneman and Tversky won the, well, Tversky didn't win it because he passed away before

01:14:35 Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics, they demonstrated basically that the axioms of rational

01:14:43 choice theory, people don't adhere to them in the way that economists think that we should

01:14:47 adhere to them. One of them is called the framing effect. The framing effect is if I tell you that

01:14:53 three out of five dentists recommend this toothpaste, it's exactly as if I told you

01:15:00 two out of five don't. Those two statements, it's not half full, half empty. They're isomorphically

01:15:06 logically equivalent. But because of the framing effect, people end up judging the exact same

01:15:14 toothpaste differently, depending on whether I give it to you in a positive frame or negative

01:15:19 frame. When I tell you three out of five dentists recommended, you go, oh, this is really good

01:15:23 toothpaste. When I tell you two out of five dentists don't recommend it, you go, oh, this

01:15:26 this toothpaste sucks. 90% fat-free burger, 10% fat burger, exact same burger. One is positively 0.87

01:15:35 framed, one is negatively framed. And so this comes from Conrad and Tversky. So I wanted to

01:15:42 take that principle and say, I can demonstrate that there's an evolutionary calculus to that

01:15:49 framing effect, specifically when it comes to mate choice. I don't know if you know where I'm

01:15:57 going with this. If I tell you, hey, would you go out with this date? Seven out of 10 people think

01:16:05 that person is intelligent. It's the exact same thing as telling you three out of 10 don't think

01:16:12 he's intelligent. So I'm going to use the framing effect, but instead of using it in a evolutionarily

01:16:19 inconsequential setting like toothpaste i'm gonna use it in an evolutionarily relevant setting

01:16:25 like mate choice now oh i guess you could see here if you haven't seen what i wrote

01:16:32 can please don't look at the thing if you have it can you predict whether men or women are more

01:16:39 likely to succumb to the framing effect when it comes to mate choice if you saw it don't don't

01:16:46 cheat men uh that's perfectly incorrect but why did you say that i don't know i feel like if

01:16:56 someone's like okay i don't know how to say this properly but someone's like hey bro she's hot

01:17:02 like then someone else would more likely be like oh okay i'm gonna like think maybe the same because

01:17:08 like my buddy thinks that but i don't know that might be too simple so the positive frame

01:17:14 7 out of 10 think he's intelligent, he's hot, he's ambitious, whatever. The negative framing

01:17:24 looms much larger in women's psyche because attending to negatively framed information 0.99

01:17:33 within the mating domain is uniquely important for women because making a poor mate choice

01:17:42 looms much larger for women than it does for men even though objectively speaking seven out of ten

01:17:49 say he's intelligent is the same as three out of ten say he's not that negative frame will serve as

01:17:57 a neon sign in women's psychology much more than it will in men's psychology because if i as a man

01:18:06 go out with a woman and we're intimate and it doesn't work out that looms a lot less

01:18:16 evolutionarily speaking to me oh at least i had a fun night but it looms a lot worse if the guy 1.00

01:18:23 is a dud and i slept with him as a woman and now i have a child with this idiot right and so 0.97

01:18:29 therefore, the framing effect, which Kahneman and Tversky explained it in a domain general way, 0.98

01:18:38 in a non-evolutionary way, has a unique insight once it is applied in an evolutionarily relevant

01:18:46 way. All this to say, I started from this general framework that led to a mid-level,

01:18:53 to a lower mid-level down to the exact. So it's all clean. It's all elegant. There is no wishy-washy

01:19:03 bullshit as you find in all of. And I can do that exact argument for all of my published papers 0.97

01:19:12 because I always start from first principles, middle-level theories, hypotheses, boom. Okay.

01:19:19 so having said all that let me just briefly uh say one or two things

01:19:27 so i won't mention all of these because it might take too much time but

01:19:32 so what are some theoretical epistemological and methodological benefits of darwinizing

01:19:37 any field but in this case marketing consumer behavior it allows for more complete explanations

01:19:44 because it recognizes that any phenomenon could be studied at the proximate and ultimate level

01:19:49 it allows us to generate novel hypotheses and research questions that would have been otherwise

01:19:56 invisible to us if you remember the slide that i put up of the research that i consider to

01:20:02 pass the that's interesting test all of those were of that type you wouldn't have thought of

01:20:07 linking how well a man dances with his body symmetry but here it is okay it results in

01:20:16 greater consilience, as I mentioned with this tree of knowledge. It promotes greater methodological

01:20:22 pluralism, right? Most marketing doctoral students are taught within a methodology. You're a priming

01:20:30 person. You're a literal person. Therefore, all of the research that I will do will be constrained

01:20:36 by the methodology that I've been trained in. But that's not how life works. That's not how

01:20:41 NatureWorks. I've done studies using every possible methodology because what drives my research is the

01:20:49 research question, and then I will adjust the methodology that I will use depending on which

01:20:56 question I ask. The study that I talked about with the online escorts, that was a content analysis.

01:21:02 I literally had a research assistant go and visit online escort websites on the internet

01:21:11 and do the, right? 0.88

01:21:14 So sometimes I do fancy experiments.

01:21:17 Sometimes I do salivary assays.

01:21:20 Sometimes I use twins registries as I did for one of my studies.

01:21:25 I don't care what methodology I use.

01:21:27 The methodology is subsumed by the research question that I ask.

01:21:32 And it's precisely my evolutionary-based mind that allows me to have those degrees of freedom

01:21:39 in my methodological choices. It definitely breeds greater interdisciplinarity. So if you look at

01:21:46 the types of research questions that I've done in my own research, the types of journals that

01:21:53 I've published in, it's all over the place. Now, I don't know what Professor Babin thinks about this,

01:21:59 but usually doctoral students are taught, be very narrow, be hyper-specialized, publish in only

01:22:06 these four journals. That's great if you want to have a safe vanilla career. If you want to be

01:22:14 the quarterback on campus, that's not what you would do because the greatest scientists

01:22:21 are those that were polymathic that operated at the intersection of disciplines. The mapping of

01:22:28 the human genome required expertise in many disciplines, right? That's not how doctoral

01:22:35 students are trained, not just in marketing, in anything, okay? I won't, I'll skip the rest,

01:22:42 and so I'll end with one final slide, and I think that slide, you saw it a couple of weeks ago.

01:22:49 Dobzhansky famously said in 1973, he was an evolutionary geneticist, nothing in biology

01:22:56 makes sense except in the light of evolution, meaning you can't study anything in biology

01:23:00 at the cellular level, at the organismic level, at the ecological level, at the population level,

01:23:08 if it's not informed by evolution. Well, I argue, and I hope that I've convinced you that nothing

01:23:15 in consumer behavior or business makes sense except in the light of evolution. And these are

01:23:19 some of the books that I've written that deal with this issue. All right, I'll end here. Stop

01:23:25 sharing and i'll turn it over to our lovely uh audience if you have any questions or comments

01:23:32 please take advantage of the situation i have two questions if that's cool please

01:23:42 so my first question you covered prostitution family violence hormonal levels when you're

01:23:51 submitting say to a marketing journal is there any concern that although it's interesting there

01:23:58 might be some controversy in these topics that maybe like a journal say the journal marketing

01:24:03 doesn't want to publish something on porn would that be the case or would that be something they

01:24:09 would be interested in okay so let me answer this question then you can ask your second question

01:24:13 it's a completely valid question and my answer to it is going to capture my own temperament

01:24:22 which may not apply to you right so for me i believe in absolute freedom in every conceivable

01:24:30 sense of the word so meaning that i don't modulate the intellectual landscapes that i'm going to go

01:24:38 visit as a function of careerist interest, right? So I could say, look, by the way, just for you to

01:24:45 know, to answer your question even more broadly than what you asked, when I decided, okay,

01:24:50 now that I got my training at Cornell, I'm going to do, I'm going to found this field of

01:24:57 evolutionary consumer psychology. Everybody said, you're insane. It's a perfect way for you to have 0.98

01:25:02 to fail in your career because nobody none of the journals are going to go for this biology stuff

01:25:09 i said i don't care when i decided i'm going to start writing books people said that's crazy

01:25:17 nobody's going to care if you write books you should only be caring about publishing peer

01:25:22 reviewed articles that's that's the only kudos that you get in our in our discipline i said i

01:25:27 don't care. Then I went from writing academic books to writing trade books. The difference

01:25:32 being academic books are scientific. It's not textbook. Academic book is a tome that's read

01:25:38 by other academics or doctoral students and so on. It's, you know, you're staking your flag

01:25:44 on a new field, right? Those books are read by a thousand people. They're bought by university

01:25:50 libraries. Okay, fine. That seems academic-y. But oh, now you're writing trade books for the

01:25:56 common person oh no you shouldn't do that well i said i don't care i want to reach millions of

01:26:01 people and i have new york times bestseller books uh when i said i want to go and start doing media

01:26:09 i'm tired of only speaking to stuffy professors at acr conferences they said oh but what do you

01:26:14 mean why why would you talk to the the simple people down there i said well because i want to

01:26:20 make my ideas known to many people they said well you're going to lose then when i started going on

01:26:25 Joe Rogan and other shows, you're talking to podcasters? That's crazy. You shouldn't be doing

01:26:30 that. We are elite. But by the way, in chapter one of The Parasitic Mind, which is this book

01:26:37 right here, the yellow one, in chapter one, I tell the story, I'm invited to Stanford Business School.

01:26:44 So it's not as though I haven't published in all of the top academic journals, right? So I can do

01:26:49 both things right it's not i'm either going on joe rogan or i publish in jcp right so i'm invited

01:26:57 to stanford to actually talk about many of the stuff that i talked about in today's lecture

01:27:03 it was the the jmr paper stuff uh the guy who hosts me the night before you know you go out to

01:27:11 dinner we sit at dinner and he eventually became i think the editor of jcp and uh we're sitting at

01:27:19 one point he says uh oh i i was you know looking at checking you out on google and uh i didn't know

01:27:27 that you know you're uh you know you're you're regular on uh joe rogan said oh yeah yeah he goes

01:27:33 yeah well we we don't condone that at stanford i said you don't condone what at stanford he goes

01:27:39 well we don't do our research here at stanford business school so we could appear on joe rogan

01:27:45 i said well i don't do that either but surely and that was my exact words i don't know if barry's

01:27:50 ever heard that story before surely it's a lot more impressive to publish a paper in a top journal

01:27:58 and then talk about it in front of 20 million people as opposed to publishing that paper

01:28:04 which will be read by the editor the two reviewers and your mom as you might imagine he didn't take

01:28:12 well to that but that set him straight because that arrogance which is I only speak to the

01:28:20 anointed ones that are like me from Cornell and Stanford is precisely why I reach billions of

01:28:28 people, and nobody other than his girlfriend knows who he is. So the point is, professors

01:28:36 should be in the business of creating knowledge, of course. So yes, publish your peer-reviewed

01:28:43 papers, do great work, and so on. But there's a second part. It's called disseminate your

01:28:47 knowledge. Disseminate your knowledge sometimes might be Professor Babin being courteous enough

01:28:54 to say, hey, come and give a seminar in my course. And I'm only reaching now five of you. And that's

01:28:59 perfectly fine. And because, hey, maybe you'll remember some of the stuff I said. But sometimes

01:29:04 it means I'm going to appear on a show that's going to be downloaded 5 million times. That

01:29:08 doesn't make me a sellout. That actually makes me a more effective professor. I both reached the

01:29:14 young minds of a PhD at Ole Miss. And I've also reached the trucker, the corrections officer and

01:29:21 the military guy both of those should happen so to wrap up your first question uh it depends on

01:29:29 your temperament in terms of what your academic career you'd like it to be if if you believe that

01:29:36 life is short and you want to do impactful things that are going to matter to as many people as

01:29:41 possible then be bold and don't worry about that if on the other hand you know you by temperament

01:29:48 you're less you're less of a risk taker then yes sending that paper that might get somebody upset

01:29:56 at jcr or jcp might be the way to go so i can't tell you which one should be applied to you nick

01:30:02 but that's the calculus get me with the second question thank you no and that's really interesting

01:30:08 my second question is more methodological methodological and you showed your nomological

01:30:14 network, and you showed how a finding was found across different disciplines and contexts,

01:30:20 how do you get past a reviewer potentially saying, okay, you're confirming this with a

01:30:27 nomological network versus, okay, you're just repeating something that's been shown across

01:30:33 different disciplines in the past, if that kind of makes sense.

01:30:36 Well, so if you look, for example, at how a psychometric scale is validated. So we want to develop a new scale that measure dogmatism. Let's suppose that that scale doesn't exist. There is a procedure by which you validate that the scale that you come up with measures dogmatism and only dogmatism and nothing else.

01:31:04 And actually, since we have many doctoral students here, and I don't know if Professor Babin has this on your reading list, there's a 1959 paper by Campbell and Fisk called the Multi-Method Matrix, which is one of the greatest papers you could ever read in philosophy of science.

01:31:22 And it very much speaks to this kind of nomological approach, which is in establishing that the scale is that, you do it by triangulating, right? It has to have face validity and convergent validity and discriminant validity and this validity. And by all of these pointing to that, I have validated that scale.

01:31:42 So the reviewer who would say that is basically saying I'm an imbecile, right? Because if I am demonstrating that that phenomenon operates across species, across time periods, across cultures, across methodologies, across disciplines, what more evidence could I ever show you that the veracity of my position is correct?

01:32:08 So no, I shouldn't say I can't imagine that a reviewer would be that dumb because as Professor Babin could attest, many reviewers are very difficult to deal with.

01:32:19 And one of the abilities you have to foster as a prospective researcher is to kind of swallow your breath, take a deep breath and come back at them and sort of almost outlive them because it's just an endless process, the review process. 0.77

01:32:40 So I don't think that's a serious concern. That's why, by the way, I've walked in in astoundingly hostile environments. Like really, there are 400 people in the audience, 398 are ready to lynch me. But then I present my nomological networks and in my sort of inimitable way, I go, how come I'm not hearing anybody huffing and puffing anymore? How come nobody's attacking me?

01:33:08 Well, because how can you defend against a tsunami of evidence that I've presented you, right?

01:33:15 So I think you're safe.

01:33:18 If you develop the discipline of building these nomological networks, it will do great things for your career.

01:33:25 Other questions?

01:33:28 Others?

01:33:33 Go ahead. 0.93

01:33:34 no bad questions no dumb questions only good ones 0.77

01:33:41 i have questions julie take it away of course uh yeah i've heard you say that you've got some

01:33:51 hostile audiences and i just i don't understand why people are so hostile to

01:33:56 this topic of biology i find it fascinating and i've actually thought about hormones and

01:34:04 You know, I've been on the ketogenic diet and it totally, you know, dampened my hunger and realizing it has to do with insulin levels.

01:34:12 And, you know, I got interested in that.

01:34:15 But and how do you measure these hormones?

01:34:17 That's the other question I have.

01:34:19 But, yeah, the hostility for, you know, all of this, you know, anything biologically based.

01:34:26 And how do you deal with all these?

01:34:28 This sounds very complicated to measure hormones.

01:34:31 excuse me uh well hormones it depends which hormone you're measuring the ones that i've

01:34:38 measured uh are usually through salivary assays you you take a salivary assay and then you submit

01:34:43 it to a lab and then you ask them to look for the particular hormone and then you measure the

01:34:48 fluctuating rate but there are different ways to do that uh but so that's just a methodological

01:34:54 question uh the the broad the bigger question is your first question which is uh why the hostility

01:35:01 to biology and that's and i've tackled this and and i mean i'll give you some an answer now but

01:35:06 in case you want to read more about it in chapter one of this book of the consuming instinct i go

01:35:14 through many of the reasons why uh people are hostile to biological based reasoning and so

01:35:20 let me give you a few of them here most social scientists literally as they sort of take their

01:35:29 they're inaugurated into the social science club i hereby declare that biology does not matter

01:35:38 when it comes to studying psychology sociology economics political science but now the question

01:35:45 still is why because many of the parasitic ideas that i discuss in this book abdicate biology

01:35:55 as being relevant to the human condition. Why? Take, for example, social constructivism. Social

01:36:01 constructivism is the idea that we are born tabula rasa, empty minds, no biological imperatives,

01:36:09 and it is only the unique forces of socialization that make us who we become. So if I become

01:36:16 Lionel Messi, then I have to look at how mommy and daddy hugged me to know why I became Lionel

01:36:21 message. If I become Michael Jordan, same story. If I become Albert Einstein, same story.

01:36:27 Why would somebody believe in such nonsense? Because it's a very hopeful message. Because

01:36:32 imagine if I'm a social engineering utopian, right? I want to engineer society for the best

01:36:41 utopia possible. Or I'm a parent. I'd like to believe that if only I could find the exact

01:36:49 schedule of reinforcement, my child could be the next Lionel Messi, Albert Einstein or Michael

01:36:56 Jordan. I don't like the message that says, sorry, Professor Saad, you don't have the height

01:37:04 for your son to likely ever be in the NBA. So I can almost guarantee you that your son is probably

01:37:13 not going to be an NBA player. That feels mean. That feels lacking in empathy. Hence this book,

01:37:21 Suicidal Empathy, right? It's much better for me to swim in the delusion of nonsense because it

01:37:28 makes me feel better. So take another parasitic idea, cultural relativism, which was an idea that

01:37:34 was developed by a Columbia University anthropologist named Franz Boas, which then

01:37:42 infected the social sciences for the past 100 years. Cultural relativism basically says that

01:37:48 there are no human universals, contrary to what I've just been saying for the past two hours.

01:37:52 There are no human universals. Every culture has to be singularly evaluated and judged

01:37:59 based on its own idiosyncratic reality. Now, that is a very, very dangerous proposition, because

01:38:06 if you then come and say, hey, what do you think about these cultures that cut off the 0.98

01:38:12 clitorises of five-year-old girls. Shh, don't say anything. That would be bigoted. That would 0.99

01:38:17 be racist. So therefore, it renders you impotent to make absolute moral judgments if another culture 0.95

01:38:25 does something that you find objectionable. Now, why did Franz Boas come up with this idea?

01:38:30 Because he, in his own noble way, he thought that biology could be misused by a wide range of

01:38:41 Cretans, as was the case, right? So British social class elitists in the 19th century said, hey,

01:38:50 there's a Darwinian struggle between the classes. We are the upper class, the lower classes dying

01:38:57 of tuberculosis in their slums. Hey, if they die, that's just Darwinian, who cares? The Nazis came

01:39:03 along and said, hey, there's a natural struggle between the races. Sorry, Jews, sorry, gypsies, 0.99

01:39:09 sorry, homosexuals, if we now eliminate you, that's just Darwinian. Eugenicists came along 1.00

01:39:16 and said, hey, why don't we sterilize gay people? Maybe that way we can get rid of the propagation 1.00

01:39:22 of a gay gene. All of these ideas are total bullshit and nonsense, but these different people 1.00

01:39:28 took biological principles, misused them for their own nefarious purposes to advance their goals. 0.98

01:39:37 So then this anthropologist at Columbia says, well, why don't we now build these edifices 0.97

01:39:45 of beautiful bullshit, but that will at least protect us from people misusing biology? 0.98

01:39:54 You follow? 1.00

01:39:55 Therefore, it's Plato's noble lie.

01:39:59 If in the service of some greater noble goal, you end up lying, so be it.

01:40:05 So because of that, but there are many other reasons, it became completely heretical to apply biology in economics, in sociology, in the business school.

01:40:20 Now, the only place where you would see it is in psychology, but in psychology, it's broken up.

01:40:26 If you're a biopsychologist or a neuroscientist, then by definition, you're going to be open to biology.

01:40:34 but all of the other biological, psychological fields, you don't hear the word biology once.

01:40:40 But how could that be? How could you be in the business of studying the human condition as your

01:40:48 job, but you never once mentioned the B word? It can't be. Postmodernism is another reason why

01:40:56 biology did not spread in the social sciences, because postmodernism purports that there are

01:41:02 no universals. There are no objective truths. Everything is relative. So how could Gad Saad

01:41:08 come along and say, no, no, but there are truths. There are universals. There is such a thing as

01:41:13 symmetry. There is such a thing as men preferring these types of women. No, that can't be because 0.51

01:41:19 if you're a postmodernist, there can't be objective universal truth. So, and that's why

01:41:25 eventually once I moved from, you know, my evolutionary psychology work to then writing

01:41:30 all these other books, those other books were informed from being a professor for several 0.96

01:41:37 decades, where I saw these unbelievably parasitic, imbecilic ideas, completely stifling academia, 0.98

01:41:45 right? How could it be that when I sit on all of these graduate granting committees, it's 0.99

01:41:53 queering mathematics and and queering physics and the non-binary nature of prime numbers what 0.96

01:42:04 kind of bullshit is this mathematics is defined by the fact that it's axiomatic and it exists 0.94

01:42:12 independently of whether i'm trans or non-binary or gay or lebanese or jewish or muslim but 0.97

01:42:21 that's those are the grants that i was going over and hence that's how i ended up writing

01:42:27 those subsequent books so there are i could write a whole book on why academia suffers

01:42:35 from biophobia which is the fear of using biology what else thanks any last points

01:42:45 i think you you actually addressed my question to you there with your last response but

01:42:53 just maybe a quick comment because kind of following up on what nick says because they

01:42:59 have to navigate their careers and i guess i've been pretty vocal about the whole academic

01:43:05 publishing process being broken and really the only reason it exists is so we can outsource

01:43:11 evaluations of faculty to somebody that we don't know um and and so um i i follow your point

01:43:19 you want to take a chance but to navigate the career they can't always take a chance

01:43:27 like sometimes you have to i hate to use the word give in but but if you're gonna if you're

01:43:34 to make tenure and navigate this process that you have to know when to choose your fights,

01:43:42 I guess. And I fully understand that. That's why when I answered Nick's question, I said,

01:43:48 you know, it depends on your temperament. It depends on your risk calculus. So I don't think

01:43:53 there is a uniquely valid response to that. It really does depend. The only thing I would say

01:43:59 is that imagine if the world were solely made up of tepid, timid bean counters, then the biggest 0.99

01:44:10 breakthroughs in history, whether it be in politics, whether it be in medicine, whether,

01:44:15 but by the way, in, in one of the chapters of this book, Suicidal Empathy, my latest book,

01:44:21 I have a chapter on forbidden knowledge. And in a sense, it, it speaks to Nick's first question,

01:44:28 You know, can I send such a topic to this journal or so on? Well, the amount of unbelievable

01:44:38 breakthroughs that people eventually were hailed as the greatest heroes, but were when they first

01:44:47 proposed them, completely chastised, ostracised. Again, you could write an entire book on it.

01:44:54 I just had one chapter on it. So I'll just give you one example. Arguably, the guy who has saved

01:45:01 the most lives, certainly when it comes to child rearing, is a Hungarian obstetrician

01:45:12 named Semmelweis. Semmelweis had noticed that many women were dying of purpural fever,

01:45:22 which is a fever that you get shortly after childbirth, and it's devastating. And shortly

01:45:29 after you get it, the women would die. So imagine they're going through their happiest moment. They 1.00

01:45:34 just gave birth. Within two, three days, they're dead. And he noticed that on one ward, the rate

01:45:41 of death from perperal fever was massive, and the other one, it wasn't. So in a sense, he ran the

01:45:47 original field experiment and he noticed does anybody know this story by the way do you know

01:45:53 do you know julie

01:45:54 i can't hear you okay uh and it the reason was that physicians at the time would go from

01:46:09 working on cadavers doing autopsies to then going to deliver the births without hand-washing

01:46:21 because this was pre-germ theory so they didn't know that germs could be transferred in this way

01:46:27 so with his insight he goes well this is a very clear field experiment these women are being

01:46:35 uh delivered by midwives in homes whatever these ones are being delivered by by the doctors who

01:46:45 are the ones who are doing the autopsies before how about you start washing your hands

01:46:51 what do you think happened to this guy all the entire medical establishment

01:46:59 went down on him tsunami drowned him i godly physician who saves people you're saying i am

01:47:10 the one responsible for the death of these women fire this guy don't hire this guy he ended up in a

01:47:18 in his his end exactly in an insane asylum but guess what he was right today they have

01:47:28 universities named after him. Today, they have the big monument after him. There is literally,

01:47:34 in psychology, an effect. Actually, it's not just a psychology. It's a frailty of the

01:47:41 architecture of the Yuma. It's called the Semmelweis effect, which refers to the fact that

01:47:46 someone who is unwilling to change their anchored position, despite all of the evidence that you

01:47:52 show them. That's now known as the Semmelweis reflex. So should Semmelweis, to your point,

01:48:01 Barry, have said, you know what, I want a safe care. So, you know, we all have different temperaments.

01:48:08 Some people want to do the Monday to Friday, take their kid to Sunday school, get their little

01:48:15 tenure, live the inconsequential life. And that's great. Most academics are that and more power to

01:48:20 you. I didn't have the temperament for that. I thought that I had a voice that could be heard

01:48:25 by a lot more than just for reviewers in JCR. And so I took all the risks and it seems like it's

01:48:32 worked out for me. Well, I can say for one, I'm glad you did. Oh, well, thank you, sir.

01:48:38 And thanks so much for your time. You know, we really appreciate it and hopefully keep you

01:48:44 involved with our program. We've got students looking for committee members on dissertations

01:48:49 and uh and i'm sure you could serve that role very well thank you so much guys and thank you

01:48:54 all for coming and for all your attention and questions take care all right thanks thank you

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The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 12, 2026

Evolutionary Psychology & Its Applicability to Consumer Research - PhD Seminar (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1080)

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