The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 25, 2026


Successful Marketers Understand Evolutionary Psychology & Human Nature (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1068)

Mandy Patinkin is a Self-Loathing Degenerate, Lobotomized Wood Cricket Jew (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1067) Suicidal Empathy, Islam, & Parasitic Taxation on RealClearPolitics (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1069)

Episode Stats


Length

58 minutes

Words per minute

147.46

Word count

8,624

Sentence count

578

Harmful content

Misogyny

18

sentences flagged

Toxicity

26

sentences flagged

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Thank you, Barry and Matt and the rest of the people in the business school for inviting me.
00:00:13.380 And I also have the director of my center here today, so I better do a good job.
00:00:17.440 This is Professor Stephen Scaltetti.
00:00:20.400 He's the director of the center that Barry mentioned earlier.
00:00:23.280 here. So what I'd like to do is talk a bit about how you would apply evolutionary psychology
00:00:31.700 to study our consumatory nature. And then I'll also mention some of the later books
00:00:38.540 that I've been working on or published. First, let me begin with this to give you a bit of
00:00:44.220 a sense of how my career trajectory has gone. Axiomatic irrationality, I don't know how
00:00:51.520 How many of you have heard of that?
00:00:53.160 Basically it's the research that Kahneman and Tversky developed whereby they were trying
00:00:59.020 to show that consumers do not adhere to axioms of rational choice in the way that classical
00:01:06.600 economists think we should behave.
00:01:08.540 So for example, the transitivity axiom says if I prefer car A to car B, and I prefer car
00:01:14.420 B to car C, then I should prefer car A to car C. If I don't do that, I'm being intransitive,
00:01:20.740 Therefore, I'm being irrational.
00:01:23.240 A second one, it's called description and variance.
00:01:25.920 If I tell you that this burger is 90% fat-free,
00:01:29.720 it's isomorphically equivalent to saying
00:01:32.380 that this burger has 10% fat.
00:01:34.400 So consumer judgments should not vary.
00:01:37.260 And yet, depending on how I frame it,
00:01:39.660 you end up with completely different perceptions
00:01:42.860 of the burger.
00:01:43.960 Or look at the third one.
00:01:45.880 If I, for example, show you two cars,
00:01:48.520 I ask you to rate car A on zero to 100
00:01:51.800 and car B on zero to 100 and I do that separately
00:01:55.980 or I put both cars together and tell you
00:01:58.340 which one should you choose or do you prefer,
00:02:01.080 you should always come up with the same final preference
00:02:04.540 and yet you can get people to have a preference reversal
00:02:07.880 depending on how you offer them the choices.
00:02:12.300 All of these would be examples of axiomatic irrationality
00:02:16.700 but yet that's exactly what consumers do.
00:02:19.280 Now, the reason why I'm mentioning this
00:02:20.680 is because much of the work that I've done in my career
00:02:25.060 has been either to try to understand
00:02:27.180 what are the evolutionary roots
00:02:29.320 for why our brains are structured the way they are, right?
00:02:33.580 Or why do we now debate in 2026
00:02:39.520 what constitutes male or female, right?
00:02:42.200 That's not axiomatic irrationality. 1.00
00:02:44.280 It's an attack on the most fundamental fabric of reality.
00:02:49.200 How could people, I mean, until 15 minutes ago,
00:02:52.380 the 117 billion people who had lived on Earth,
00:02:55.120 that's an actual real estimate,
00:02:56.960 seemed to be able to fully navigate
00:02:58.840 through the very difficult conundrum
00:03:00.380 of knowing what constitutes male or female.
00:03:02.460 But 15 minutes ago, we lost that ability.
00:03:05.180 So where does that irrationality come from?
00:03:08.960 So I'll do a bit of a quick 30, 40, 50-minute sweep
00:03:13.540 across many of these areas so I didn't put this up to show off my CV but it's
00:03:18.160 because there's kind of a theme here the top three books are the evolutionary
00:03:23.080 based books either looking at how we apply evolutionary psychology and
00:03:27.040 studying economic and consumer behavior or in in business in general how do you
00:03:33.980 use evolutionary theory to study entrepreneurship or behavioral
00:03:37.660 economics or personnel psychology and then the later books the one in the
00:03:42.420 middle is a happiness book, which I won't talk about much today.
00:03:46.040 But the two that are sandwiching it, the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy, very much deal
00:03:51.040 with human irrationality.
00:03:53.880 And so I'll try to address very, very quickly several of these ideas.
00:03:58.780 Let me first, just a show of hands, does anybody know what evolutionary psychology is?
00:04:05.400 Very few.
00:04:06.400 One, two, three, maybe, four, okay.
00:04:10.460 So in the same way that we could use evolution to explain why we have opposable thumbs or
00:04:15.520 why our pancreas are built the way they are, we can use the evolutionary lens to explain
00:04:23.300 why the most important organ in our body, known as the human mind, why it is structured
00:04:30.660 the way that it is.
00:04:31.880 Why do we experience romantic jealousy the way that we do?
00:04:35.680 What are the types of attributes that men and women look for in their ideal mates?
00:04:39.800 So you're looking at the evolutionary underpinnings of our preferences, our motivations, our perceptual
00:04:46.400 system.
00:04:47.400 Now, it may surprise you, or maybe not, that almost zero mention of our biological heritage
00:04:55.780 is ever taught in any of the social sciences, including the business school.
00:05:00.640 So you can get an MBA degree studying entrepreneurship and finance and behavioral economics and organizational
00:05:08.160 behavior and consumer behavior, but you never mentioned the B word, biology, which seems insane
00:05:15.000 because for every other species that you are studying, you'd never study that species without
00:05:22.600 invoking its phylogenetic history, its biological heritage. But there's one species called human
00:05:28.860 beings where we can pontificate about why we do the things that we do without ever invoking biology.
00:05:35.660 So that can't make sense.
00:05:38.260 So here what I'd like to do is actually give kudos to the first professor who turned me into an evolutionary psychologist.
00:05:46.560 I was taking an advanced social psychology course at Cornell.
00:05:50.940 And he was my professor, Dennis Regan.
00:05:52.760 And about halfway through the semester, he assigned the book that completely altered my eventual academic career.
00:05:59.600 The book is called Homicide.
00:06:01.260 I highly recommend you all read it.
00:06:03.020 It's by a husband and wife team.
00:06:06.240 Actually, they were at the time at a Canadian university at McMaster.
00:06:09.620 They're two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology.
00:06:12.240 And they were studying the biological roots of patterns of criminality.
00:06:19.480 So irrespective of which culture you look at, irrespective of the time period you're looking at,
00:06:24.960 There are certain recurring patterns of criminality that happen in exactly the same way across widely different cultures, meaning that they transcend culture time and place.
00:06:37.640 There must be some biological reason for why these patterns of criminality are happening in that form.
00:06:43.640 I'll mention two very quick ones, but the book is filled with many others.
00:06:47.360 And that was, by the way, my epiphany to then apply this framework in the context of consumer behavior and economic behavior and so on.
00:06:56.640 So, who do you think is the most dangerous person in a woman's life throughout every known culture that's ever been studied?
00:07:08.120 Exactly.
00:07:09.300 You often will hear things like, oh, it's the rapist hiding in the bushes or whatever.
00:07:15.300 By far, the most dangerous man to a woman is her long-term partner, and the number one reason that he is likely to become violent with her is either due to suspected or realized infidelity.
00:07:32.440 Now, here's where things go awry, oftentimes with people who don't like evolutionary psychology.
00:07:38.440 They think that if you provide an explanation for a phenomenon, you're justifying it.
00:07:44.400 Of course, you're doing no such thing, right?
00:07:46.660 An oncologist studies cancer.
00:07:49.360 That doesn't mean he or she is for cancer, is justifying cancer.
00:07:53.460 You're trying to explain why it happens.
00:07:55.900 Now, why is it that men go into such homicidal rage if they are likely to be cuckolded?
00:08:03.760 Well, because we're a bi-parental species.
00:08:06.820 Human dads are actually super dads compared to other mammalian species.
00:08:11.180 so we are a bi-parental species
00:08:13.400 and we suffer from the very real genetic reality
00:08:17.280 of paternity uncertainty.
00:08:19.400 There is no maternity uncertainty
00:08:20.840 but there is paternity uncertainty.
00:08:23.060 Therefore, the ancestors of every single person in this room
00:08:26.640 are likely to have been men who cared
00:08:29.900 that their women do not stray behind the bushes
00:08:33.240 because then I stand a very good chance
00:08:36.060 of raising little Johnny
00:08:38.080 who looks like the sexy gardener.
00:08:40.140 and yet I'm wasting all of my resources and energies on this guy, right?
00:08:46.320 And therefore, I evolved the perceptual, emotional, cognitive, behavioral system
00:08:51.920 that seeks to thwart that.
00:08:54.100 So that was one big aha moment for me as I was sitting in Professor Regan's course.
00:08:58.960 Let me give you a second quick example.
00:09:02.260 And if you've ever heard me lecture about this, don't cheat.
00:09:05.720 Don't give the answer.
00:09:06.440 What do you think is the number one greatest predictor of child abuse in a home?
00:09:14.620 Just, I'll take, raise your hand, I'll take your guess.
00:09:19.280 Yes?
00:09:23.000 If the parents had been abused.
00:09:24.960 So there's kind of an intergenerational repeating of the pattern.
00:09:28.500 If I had been abused, then I'm likely to repeat that pattern.
00:09:31.520 Okay, fair enough.
00:09:32.340 That could be somewhat of a predictor.
00:09:34.460 Give me one or two others.
00:09:35.420 Yes?
00:09:36.440 All kinds of abuse. 1.00
00:09:37.820 Say again.
00:09:38.660 Any other part.
00:09:39.740 So if there's some kind of substance abuse in the home,
00:09:42.700 that might increase the likelihood of abuse.
00:09:44.860 Give me one more.
00:09:47.000 Anybody else have any possible?
00:09:50.120 No, 100 smart people here, we can't come up with one other.
00:09:53.400 Economic.
00:09:55.120 So maybe I am on the wrong side of the tracks,
00:09:58.040 socioeconomic conditions, that might increase.
00:10:00.820 Now usually I would, if I'm lecturing about this
00:10:03.520 in a classroom, I will list all of the answers that students come up with, and they're all
00:10:09.140 good ones. All of those answers put together don't amount to 100-fold the predictor of
00:10:17.780 the real answer, which is if there is a step-parent in the home. Now, the Cinderella fable is a
00:10:27.880 universal fable precisely because it speaks to an evolutionary reality, which is the evil stepmother
00:10:35.180 is strategically evil. She's not dispositionally evil across all her children. She's very nice to 0.96
00:10:43.400 her two biological children. She is less nice to her stepdaughter, right? Now, again, that doesn't 0.99
00:10:50.780 mean that we are justifying child abuse, but if you are a social scientist trying to best predict
00:10:57.400 what are the conditions that will increase child abuse wouldn't it make
00:11:03.760 sense for you to try to understand the real reason and yet I can show you a 0.98
00:11:08.020 hundred years worth of social science research all of which is pure bullshit
00:11:12.580 okay because they didn't study the evolutionary was what's called the
00:11:18.280 ultimate explanation for the behavior so the people who are here who are all
00:11:23.080 marketing experts, every single thing that you have ever studied or will ever study operates
00:11:29.880 at the proximate level versus what's called the ultimate level, and I'll get into that
00:11:35.040 in a second.
00:11:36.040 Hold that thought for a second.
00:11:38.040 So this is where I had my epiphany, and I said, okay, well, I'm going to take this framework
00:11:42.020 and now apply it to all sorts of behavioral areas as a behavioral scientist.
00:11:48.540 So here's one study.
00:11:49.740 This is probably one of the ones that got the most attention in the academic literature.
00:11:54.980 So if you see the top photo, it's a peacock.
00:11:58.500 The peacock is using its tail, its big burdensome tail with iridescent coloring, to impress
00:12:05.860 the peahen, right?
00:12:07.120 And he's basically saying, look, despite the fact that I've got this very burdensome tail,
00:12:12.720 I'm still standing here.
00:12:14.300 This is an honest signal of my phenotypic quality.
00:12:17.400 Choose me as your partner, right?
00:12:19.120 And so I took this idea and I said, surely, since consumer, human consumers are also animals,
00:12:25.900 by the way, you don't know how heretical it is for me to say that in front of business
00:12:30.000 school colleagues.
00:12:31.000 They all sort of squirm because in their view, humans transcend biology, right?
00:12:38.340 Biology matters for the mosquito, for the zebra, for the dog.
00:12:42.340 But surely you're not saying, Professor Saad, that humans are animals.
00:12:45.620 Yes, I'm exactly saying that, right?
00:12:48.240 So we did a big study, this is myself and a former graduate student of mine, John Vungas,
00:12:56.200 he's now at Ithaca College, where we actually rented an actual Porsche.
00:13:02.100 Try to get a granting agency to release money for you because you're going to do research
00:13:08.820 with that Porsche.
00:13:10.340 That might have been the most impressive part of the study.
00:13:13.940 So we actually rented a Porsche and we got a beaten up old car.
00:13:18.780 We brought in young men to the lab, but we didn't ask them, oh, imagine you're driving
00:13:24.200 a Porsche.
00:13:25.200 We actually made them drive both of these cars, either downtown Montreal where everybody
00:13:33.020 can see me peacocking in the Porsche or in the, sorry if anybody owns that other car,
00:13:38.360 in the loser car.
00:13:41.540 And now the question is, what's the dependent measure?
00:13:44.540 The dependent measure was salivary assays, which then allow us to measure the fluctuating
00:13:53.340 levels of testosterone.
00:13:55.760 The idea being that we know across many animal species when two intrasexual rivals fight,
00:14:03.300 the winner has a rise in his testosterone, the loser has a drop, and that has been replicated
00:14:09.800 in a million different ways.
00:14:11.280 So I said, okay, well, I'm going to take that principle, I'm going to apply it in consumer psychology. 0.68
00:14:15.120 Well, not surprisingly, you put young men in the Porsche and their endocrinological system explodes, right? 0.55
00:14:22.420 And so that would be an example where we're taking this principle that applies across many sexually reproducing species
00:14:29.120 and then demonstrating how it is operative in a consumer setting.
00:14:33.340 here's another example where this is with one of my former doctoral students eric stenstrom he's
00:14:41.640 now a chaired professor at miami university of ohio where we wanted to look in this case at
00:14:47.360 sexual signaling of human females now why do i have the photo of the female chimp there because
00:14:55.300 in many species females go into estrus so there's a period where they are sexually receptive
00:15:01.000 And during that particular period, you will usually see olfactory signals that are sent out, 0.95
00:15:07.800 or in this case, you see the engorgement and reddening of her genitalia.
00:15:13.120 This is basically saying, I'm in estrus.
00:15:16.560 Well, fortunately, depending on your point of view,
00:15:21.240 human females are not quite as conspicuous in their signals of sexual receptivity,
00:15:27.380 but they certainly do signal it in other ways.
00:15:29.480 How so? Well, with Eric and I, what we did is we looked at women's behavior across 35 contiguous 0.76
00:15:38.980 days. Why 35? Because the average length of a menstrual cycle is about 28 days. Therefore, 0.78
00:15:46.020 if we go 35 days, we've covered most women. And we wanted to see whether the likelihood
00:15:52.680 of women beautifying themselves would be much more likely to happen during a particular period of
00:16:00.560 their menstrual cycles. Not surprisingly, from an evolutionary perspective, when women are in 1.00
00:16:05.800 the maximally fertile phase of their ovulatory cycles, that's when they dress like the woman 0.99
00:16:11.660 on the right. And so again, the exact same principle that applies across a bewildering
00:16:17.800 number of other female species applies to the female consumer right now to me that seems like
00:16:24.920 such an obvious thing to study but no one in a hundred years of research has ever thought about
00:16:30.240 doing these kinds of things because there were some really words that we shouldn't mention
00:16:34.700 physiology biology morphology anatomy you never see those words mentioned and certainly in the
00:16:42.820 business school. But how could that be? How could your hormones not affect the types of decisions
00:16:48.420 you make as an employer or employee or consumer or boss or so on? All right, third example.
00:16:55.760 This one, regrettably, we've yet to publish it because I got busy with a million other things.
00:16:59.980 I still hope one day to go back and publish it because it's such a cool study. This is arguably
00:17:03.960 with my most illustrious former doctoral students, Tripad Gill, who's himself a chair professor now
00:17:10.800 at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.
00:17:14.780 So we wanted to see whether the types of traits
00:17:20.080 that are ascribed to an individual,
00:17:22.640 say on a dating site,
00:17:24.660 would change as a function of which product
00:17:28.060 I associate with him.
00:17:29.900 And specifically, we wanted to see,
00:17:33.360 so if you look at the two profiles,
00:17:35.180 they're identical.
00:17:36.320 The only thing that's different
00:17:37.400 is that my favorite possession 0.89
00:17:38.860 is a gorgeous expensive Porsche or apologies to Kia owners my favorite possession is this beaten
00:17:45.400 up Kia and then we asked people both men and women to judge this guy on a whole bunch of
00:17:52.260 attributes I'll only focus on one their perceived height you ready now the result I'm going to give
00:18:02.340 you you could have never come up with it or even predicted it had you not been coming from an
00:18:08.640 evolutionary perspective, when men judge the guy in the red Porsche, what do you think
00:18:17.100 happens to his height? It goes down. Because that's called intrasexual derogation, right?
00:18:25.060 So, I am intimidated by a guy who may have higher status than me, and therefore, when you show me
00:18:33.360 that guy i'm going to derogate him in whatever reasonable way i can so oh he probably is
00:18:39.760 overcompensating he's probably some small guy on the other hand magically the exact same guy
00:18:46.420 so objectively it can't change suddenly the guy to women becomes what taller this is why i tell
00:18:55.420 my wife she is actually dating a six foot eight guy because my social status adds many many inches
00:19:01.680 to me. Otherwise, I'd be screwed. I'd be celibate. But my point is that these insights, the fact 0.98
00:19:10.520 that men and women responded in perfectly diametrically opposed ways to the exact same
00:19:17.160 stimulus stems from an evolutionary logic. So there are endless insights that you can pick up
00:19:24.780 about consumer behavior, about marketing, about economics, which would have been invisible to you
00:19:30.280 had you not been coming from a biological perspective.
00:19:34.320 So remember earlier I mentioned
00:19:35.840 proximate versus ultimate explanation.
00:19:38.820 So let me give you here a bit of a more formal explanation.
00:19:43.540 Nearly all of science, including business sciences,
00:19:47.100 are done at the proximate level.
00:19:49.540 Nearly all Nobel Prizes that have ever been won
00:19:52.500 have been won at the proximate level.
00:19:54.960 What does that mean?
00:19:56.120 Proximate explanation means you're explaining
00:19:58.800 the how and the what of a mechanism. The ultimate explanation doesn't mean ultimate in a superior
00:20:06.360 sense. It's not epistemologically this is the best explanation. Ultimate means the ultimate
00:20:12.580 Darwinian why. Why would the mechanism have evolved to be of that form? In order to fully
00:20:20.320 explain anything, including anything that happens in the business school, you need both levels of
00:20:26.200 explanations. You need to explain something at the proximate level, which most people in this
00:20:30.440 room would do, but you also need to explain the ultimate Darwinian why. Now, let me give you a
00:20:35.540 concrete example. By the way, I lecture about this to MBA students who are coming from health
00:20:43.320 backgrounds, many of whom are all practicing physicians, many of whom are OBGYNs, and you'll
00:20:51.220 see in a second why I'm mentioning this, because then they'll come up to me and say, well, I didn't
00:20:55.060 learn all this in medical school, professor? Precisely. Because you only were stuck in
00:20:58.980 proximate world. You never studied the ultimate explanations. Take, for example, pregnancy
00:21:03.800 sickness. Pregnancy sickness is actually the correct term. Most people call it morning sickness 0.97
00:21:08.820 because people, women feel it in the morning. But the more general thing is pregnancy because
00:21:15.420 some women don't experience it in the morning. If I wanted to study a proximate explanation
00:21:21.660 for pregnancy sickness, here's one. How do certain smells affect the severity of a woman's 1.00
00:21:31.540 pregnancy sickness symptoms? That's approximate. It's a how, what. But the ultimate explanation
00:21:37.760 is the one where you say, why did women evolve this physiological response? What's the evolutionary 0.72
00:21:45.920 adaptive reason? And the answer is mind-blowing. You could set your watch to when pregnancy
00:21:55.340 sickness begins and ends. It happens during the first trimester, during a period called
00:22:01.000 organogenesis. This is when the organs are forming in utero. During that very important
00:22:08.460 developmental period, it's important for a woman to not be exposed to teratogens, a type of food
00:22:15.500 born pathogen. Therefore, her consumer preferences change perfectly in line with that. They become 0.67
00:22:23.600 attracted to foods that have an antimicrobial property. What's the typical desire that a woman 1.00
00:22:30.280 has that's weird when she's pregnant? Pickles. Well, pickling has antimicrobial. She becomes 1.00
00:22:39.380 less attracted to foods that have a potential high pathogenic load. And the reason why you feel
00:22:47.440 the nausea and then throw up, it's because it's the ultimate insurance policy if I had ingested
00:22:53.840 any teratogens. And it turns out that the more pregnancy symptoms you experience, the better the
00:23:03.500 outcome of your child because you are activating an adaptive insurance policy. But when you go see
00:23:10.960 your OBGYN, what does he or she typically do? Gives you a pill to do what? Suppress it. You are
00:23:19.560 doing the perfectly incorrect thing from an evolutionary perspective. Now, it might still
00:23:25.200 be pragmatic. You have an exam tomorrow. You don't want to be running every minute to the bathroom
00:23:30.500 to throw up. So I'm not saying that under all conditions, that pill is not appropriate. But
00:23:36.300 from an evolutionary perspective, the more you experience it, the better the outcome for your
00:23:41.580 child, the less likelihood of, for example, miscarriages. So that shows you how a Darwinian
00:23:48.480 ultimate explanation results in completely different intervention strategies within the
00:23:54.040 medical practice. So now imagine how much you could unlock things about the consumer's mind
00:23:59.640 once you have that explanatory power available to you.
00:24:03.760 So that's what I've spent much of my career doing.
00:24:07.640 Now, what are some of the opposing arguments in marketing
00:24:12.320 or consumer behavior or social sciences?
00:24:15.460 They basically will argue, no, no, no.
00:24:18.420 Human beings in general and consumers in particular
00:24:22.040 are born tabula rasa.
00:24:24.940 What does tabula rasa mean?
00:24:26.140 Empty slate.
00:24:26.740 There is nothing, there are no biological imperatives that we are born with.
00:24:31.760 And it's only the cascade of socialization forces that then turn us into who we become.
00:24:39.280 Now, first of all, that's astonishingly incorrect. 0.99
00:24:43.560 And it's this kind of stupidity that then results in us debating what constitutes male or female. 0.99
00:24:49.480 And that's why those are called parasitic ideas in my books. 0.99
00:24:53.120 But let's apply it to marketing.
00:24:55.340 Well, these are actual ads from a very progressive company, fully rooted in non-reality.
00:25:04.180 They basically argued, hey, we don't want to promote these fixed gender stereotypes.
00:25:12.620 So we're now going to create a new advertising campaign where little boys are shown playing
00:25:19.200 empathetically with dolls and little girls are shown playing with guns.
00:25:23.100 and therefore we will break those stereotypes.
00:25:27.280 Well, guess what? It didn't work.
00:25:29.340 Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't little girls who prefer to play with trucks
00:25:34.060 and little boys who prefer to play with dolls, right?
00:25:38.000 The distributions are overlapping, right?
00:25:40.540 Men are taller than women, even though your aunt Linda is taller than your uncle Roscoe, right?
00:25:47.100 But because these marketers were perfectly rooted in an erroneous view of the consumer's mind,
00:25:54.300 they come up with useless strategies that end up backfiring and costing the company millions and millions of lost dollars
00:26:02.440 because they don't understand human nature.
00:26:04.980 Now, let me show you here.
00:26:06.380 Sorry, I'm going to get a tiny bit professorial on you.
00:26:08.920 I want to be mindful of the time.
00:26:10.260 I'll probably try to do another 20 minutes.
00:26:12.100 this is called a nomological network of cumulative evidence. Bear with me because it is going to blow
00:26:23.480 your mind. In the middle, I'm trying to prove to you that it's not true that toy preferences are
00:26:31.020 socially constructed. The sex specificity of toy preferences is a universal rooted in biological
00:26:38.180 explanations. How would I go about proving you that? Well, I'm going to build a nomological
00:26:43.880 network. It's a form of triangulation where I will get you data across cultures, across time
00:26:50.900 periods, across methodologies, across species, pointing to the exact same pattern. So let's do
00:26:57.900 it. I won't do all of them. I'll just do a few. Look at the top left one. In developmental psychology,
00:27:04.840 many researchers have demonstrated
00:27:07.420 that the sex specificity of toy preferences of infants
00:27:11.540 are already established
00:27:14.400 before the infant has entered
00:27:17.740 the developmental stage of being socialized.
00:27:20.680 Do you follow what I'm saying?
00:27:21.920 Meaning that by definition
00:27:23.720 they could not have been socialized to these preferences
00:27:27.400 because they're in a pre-socialization phase.
00:27:30.780 That already destroys the idea
00:27:33.660 that toy preferences are just the arbitrary socialization of the mean patriarchy, okay?
00:27:39.360 But I'm not going to stop there. Let me give you a few more. Look at the middle one, top middle one.
00:27:44.460 It turns out that rhesus monkeys, vervet monkeys, and chimpanzees, our cousins, exhibit the exact
00:27:54.940 same sex-specific toy preferences in their infants as we do. Well, now it's becoming
00:28:01.080 harder for you to argue. It's the mean patriarchy that's teaching little boys and girls to play
00:28:06.180 with these dolls. I can get you data from other cultures, sub-Saharan nomadic cultures that are
00:28:13.680 fully different from Western cultures. The pattern repeats itself in exactly the same way. Well, 0.97
00:28:20.280 Professor Scaltetti is an Aristotle expert, so he may appreciate the next example.
00:28:26.340 So he knows about sort of classics and ancient Greece and so on.
00:28:30.720 Well, you might come to me and tell me,
00:28:33.540 but all of these examples, Professor Saad, are from contemporary time.
00:28:39.340 Oh, no problem.
00:28:40.080 How about I get you data from 2,500 years ago,
00:28:44.120 where on funerary monuments, mausoleums,
00:28:47.740 little boys and little girls are depicted playing
00:28:50.800 with the exact same toys as we have today.
00:28:54.260 So look what I've done.
00:28:55.120 And by the way, I could go on a lot more, but I won't do it here.
00:28:58.180 I've gotten you data from across species, across cultures, across time periods, and so on,
00:29:03.620 all showing the universality of that mechanism.
00:29:07.640 Now, why is this very powerful?
00:29:09.580 Because much of what we do, certainly in academia, but in other domains,
00:29:14.760 we are debating with someone.
00:29:16.360 We're trying to convince them of our position.
00:29:18.260 So imagine if you've got the epistemic discipline
00:29:22.600 to build these types of nomological networks.
00:29:25.640 You become unbeatable in debates.
00:29:28.120 One of the reasons, maybe there are several,
00:29:30.260 but one of the reasons why it's pretty hard to cancel me,
00:29:33.900 despite, believe me, many, many, many, many, many, many, many people
00:29:37.740 have tried to cancel me, I'm still standing,
00:29:40.420 because when I take a position,
00:29:42.520 I usually have built in the background the nomological network.
00:29:47.100 So good luck to you if you wish to debate me.
00:29:50.600 I don't just fly off the handle and say nonsense.
00:29:54.900 I can back up everything that I'm saying.
00:29:57.800 And so it becomes an incredibly powerful tool for you
00:30:01.080 when you are engaging in hopefully valuable debates.
00:30:05.580 I'll skip this one for now.
00:30:08.280 Now I'm gonna try to tie all this evolutionary stuff
00:30:11.120 with some of the woke stuff that I've also written about
00:30:15.260 which many of you of course are familiar with.
00:30:17.420 I'd like to begin by talking about what I call the four stages of corporate responsibility.
00:30:24.400 So the first stage, about 100 years ago, was that a company simply had to come up with
00:30:32.300 the efficient production system to meet consumer demands.
00:30:35.640 And the classic exemplar of that ethos would be Henry Ford, who famously said, oh yeah,
00:30:43.060 of course, the consumer can have the car in any color he wants as long as it's black.
00:30:48.400 Meaning, I don't care about your consumer preference. I dictate what you're going to
00:30:53.780 have the car in, and that's my only job. The second stage, which is of course relevant to
00:30:59.780 a crowd like this one, what's called the marketing-centric stage, which recognizes that no,
00:31:06.160 consumers are different. They have preference heterogeneity. So I need to develop a production
00:31:12.620 run that recognizes that people want cars in different colors. Okay, fine. That's sort of
00:31:18.720 basic marketing. Third stage, it said, yes, we have to meet the first two stages, but we need
00:31:25.620 to do even more. We need to make sure that no third party is harmed. So for example, Elon Musk
00:31:33.160 with his Teslas, oh, it's going to be more friendly to the environment. So I'm going to be
00:31:38.480 more empathetic to Mother Earth while meeting the other two
00:31:42.160 stages.
00:31:43.260 And then the fourth stage, where all hell broke loose,
00:31:46.700 stage four is what's called woke capitalism, which
00:31:50.120 is it's insufficient for me to simply not harm a third party.
00:31:54.580 I have to be a proactive ally in eradicating violations
00:32:02.180 of social justice.
00:32:03.880 And the classic examples, of course, 0.99
00:32:05.660 is this gorgeous woman with a penis, Dylan Mulvaney, 1.00
00:32:09.180 who turns out to be the endorser of Bud Light, which 1.00
00:32:15.420 is a great idea when trans people constitute 1.00
00:32:19.060 an infinitesimally minuscule number of your consumers. 1.00
00:32:23.740 Why don't you rile them up?
00:32:25.600 Because you want to show that it's not
00:32:27.380 about profit maximization.
00:32:29.120 It's about being enlightened in promoting the visibility
00:32:34.760 of marginalized voices.
00:32:36.000 Well, go find out what happened to their sales
00:32:38.560 and their stock prices.
00:32:41.140 But my favorite one, although there's a million others,
00:32:44.380 Jaguar, a couple of years ago, came out with an ad that was,
00:32:49.760 I mean, it was straight out of my satire.
00:32:52.440 It was so insane. 1.00
00:32:53.540 It's all of these sort of trans people sashaying and so on. 1.00
00:32:58.200 There is no car that is shown. 1.00
00:33:01.080 To which, one of the many reasons why I love Elon Musk,
00:33:06.940 he tweets to them.
00:33:08.140 He goes, hey, do you still sell cars?
00:33:12.020 And when Elon speaks, then maybe you listen.
00:33:14.940 Well, what he was pointing to there is that, look,
00:33:17.940 I mean, he didn't say it in those words,
00:33:19.560 but the fundamental fiduciary responsibility of a company
00:33:23.160 is to maximize profit for its shareholders.
00:33:27.680 This is probably not the way to go.
00:33:29.460 And they got a beating.
00:33:31.020 But guess what? They were very empathetic, hence suicidal empathy.
00:33:36.440 When you have conflicting goals, you'll pay for it.
00:33:40.960 All right. A couple of more slides and I'll turn it over to you guys.
00:33:45.240 Now, what's sort of the bottom line here?
00:33:48.820 Top marketers understand human nature, even though they may not call themselves evolutionary psychologists.
00:33:56.340 But fundamentally, they understand the drivers of human nature.
00:34:02.260 And let me give you a few examples.
00:34:04.960 If you wish to understand female sexuality and female romantic fantasies,
00:34:12.820 there is one product that you have to study.
00:34:15.580 It's called romance novels. 0.87
00:34:17.720 Romance novels are almost exclusively read by women around the world.
00:34:23.160 And by the way, those studies have been done, scientific studies.
00:34:25.700 So you can do what's called a content analysis of that literary genre.
00:34:31.300 Specifically, you could look at the male protagonist in romance novels.
00:34:37.700 It is the exact same guy across 37 trillion romance novels.
00:34:43.980 It's as if it was plagiarized.
00:34:46.900 It was copied using some AI.
00:34:49.120 You ready? You want me to describe him to you?
00:34:51.580 To my great chagrin, he's tall.
00:34:54.540 he has six abs
00:34:57.300 he's a count
00:34:59.220 meaning a royal
00:35:00.700 and a neurosurgeon
00:35:03.040 he is untamed in his
00:35:05.360 energy he can
00:35:07.020 wrestle an alligator and tame
00:35:09.380 him on a six pack but he
00:35:11.360 could only be tamed
00:35:12.640 by the love of this one good woman
00:35:15.420 I just saved you reading every
00:35:17.420 single romance novel that's
00:35:19.440 ever been written
00:35:20.460 now there was
00:35:23.520 a company, I don't remember what it was called, that said, no, no, no, we wish to break free
00:35:29.140 from, you ready, from that toxic masculinity. We want to create a new male hero, a guy who
00:35:37.860 is pear-shaped, who's got a nasal voice, who sucks his thumbs crying in the corner, in 0.99
00:35:43.600 a fetal position. He asks his girlfriend, do I look fat in those jeans while watching 0.98
00:35:48.180 Bridget Jones' diary. A sensitive man, an empathetic man. Guess what happened to that line?
00:35:56.820 It wasn't purchased. Why? Because women said, sorry, I don't fantasize about that guy.
00:36:02.540 I fantasize about the toxic masculine guy. So it turns out that having an understanding of human
00:36:10.000 nature, in this case, half of humanity called female psychology, matters rather than you 1.00
00:36:16.160 espousing your progressive bullshit. Okay. Now let's look at these next two. 1.00
00:36:24.420 Much of health marketing or what's called public service announcements are rooted in the idea that
00:36:32.620 when a consumer does something that is bad for their health, it's because they don't know any
00:36:37.980 better. In other words, they are lacking the relevant and actionable information. And if you
00:36:43.300 only give them that information, they will fix their behavior. That's completely erroneous.
00:36:49.200 Most people who smoke, it would not come to them as a surprise. Oh shit, I didn't know. Really? 0.99
00:36:56.740 Smoking is bad for my health? Who could have known that? But if you look at most public service
00:37:01.740 announcements, that's what they're targeting. If you keep smoking by the age of 72, you will get
00:37:08.280 heart disease. If you keep sun tanning, you will have melanoma, right? Well, that doesn't work.
00:37:18.140 You know what does work? Understanding the Darwinian pulls that make people alter their
00:37:24.220 behaviors. So it turns out that among young men, the number one predictor of having sexual
00:37:31.760 dysfunction, usually that happens as you get older, right? But for it to happen when I'm 22
00:37:38.120 and I'm suffering from sexual dysfunction, impotence, well, if I am a smoker, that's the
00:37:45.420 biggest predictor. So show young men what happens with this beautiful image and suddenly I pay
00:37:53.100 attention to your ad. Or in the case of women, don't show me the epidemiological tables of the 0.97
00:37:59.840 likelihood, the odds ratio of getting melanoma when I'm 73, because I'm young now and I'm immortal.
00:38:06.060 Rather, show me something that appeals to my female psychology, which is my aesthetic beauty.
00:38:12.000 So show me, there are apps now where you can show your face versus what your face will look like
00:38:20.000 after five years of suntanning, 10 years of suntanning, 15 years of suntanning. And not
00:38:26.400 surprisingly, that type of appeal works well. So understanding the triggers that make us pay
00:38:34.940 attention is important. All right, almost done. So here are two quotes from practitioners from
00:38:43.540 way back when who actually, again, they may not be evolutionary psychologists, but they are
00:38:49.040 evolutionary psychologists. So this is one of the big advertising executives from 1964, happens to
00:38:55.960 the year of my birth. Because advertising, effective advertising, is an appeal to human
00:39:01.280 fundamental needs, desires, and motivations. It is an appeal to basic human nature. People the
00:39:07.860 world over have the same basic need for food, blah, blah, blah. Basically, he's speaking like
00:39:12.460 an evolutionary psychologist. There are human universals that transcend cultures, that transcend
00:39:17.140 time periods. And if you want to be a good advertiser, you have to appeal to those fundamental
00:39:22.380 drivers. And so that's exactly what I do when I marry evolutionary psychology across many
00:39:28.120 behavioral sciences. And then look at the next guy, DDB, was one of the biggest advertising firms
00:39:33.920 in the 20th century. It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator skill.
00:39:40.300 Now again, this may sound obvious to you, but trust me when I tell you, and Professor Babin
00:39:45.360 here can confirm, go do a search across all of the prestigious marketing journals to see
00:39:52.200 how often the word biology, evolution, human nature is ever mentioned. It's only mentioned
00:39:58.380 when one guy publishes those papers. It's called me. How could that be? How could other people
00:40:04.200 not be applying the evolutionary lens to study consumer behavior? It makes no sense.
00:40:10.560 This has historically been the reaction of most marketing scholars to my work,
00:40:14.700 but things are changing. And I'm going to show you next arguably my favorite quote
00:40:21.040 by any scientist in any field.
00:40:25.160 This is J.B.S. Haldane, who was an evolutionary geneticist.
00:40:28.860 He argued that there are four stages that academics go through
00:40:32.620 when they are first exposed to a new idea. 0.99
00:40:35.880 Stage one, this is garbage. 1.00
00:40:38.760 This is pure bullshit. 1.00
00:40:40.520 Stage two, when the evidence starts coming in, 1.00
00:40:42.720 well, yeah, okay, sure, this is true,
00:40:44.920 but it's a perverse point of view, Professor Saad.
00:40:47.700 Stage three, this is true, but it's really unimportant.
00:40:51.680 How do we apply it?
00:40:53.000 Stage four, oh, I always said so.
00:40:56.020 I always was a fan of yours, Professor Saad.
00:40:58.580 Now, here's the bad news for many of the people that have gone through these stages.
00:41:02.080 I'm an electronic email hoarder, meaning that I keep track of all of the emails that I've received.
00:41:08.540 So I literally have in vivo the emails from different professors when they went through those four stages.
00:41:16.060 because that guy used to be the editor-in-chief of a journal
00:41:20.680 who, when I sent him a paper, I was in stage one.
00:41:25.520 This paper is not relevant for us in consumer psychology.
00:41:28.580 It's nonsense.
00:41:30.840 Fifteen years later, we would be terribly honored
00:41:34.500 if you came and gave the plenary address.
00:41:37.080 But what happened?
00:41:37.840 I thought I was a bullshitter 15 years ago.
00:41:39.840 Well, what happened is you went through the four stages.
00:41:43.220 So if you are a good, assiduous, dogged academic, keep plugging away and people will come around.
00:41:51.620 And finally, last slide, and then we'll have about 15 minutes to open it up.
00:41:56.920 Another famous evolutionist said in a classic 1973 paper,
00:42:01.660 nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
00:42:05.280 And I've been proposing for 33 years now,
00:42:08.220 nothing in consumer behavior and business makes sense except in the light of evolution.
00:42:12.960 Thank you very much.
00:42:18.360 I'll open it up to whomever.
00:42:20.700 I'm just going to take some water.
00:42:25.180 So open up for Q&A.
00:42:27.240 If you want to raise your hand, I'll bring the microphone to you if you have questions.
00:42:31.680 We do ask that you keep questions very short and concise, just in the interest of time,
00:42:36.020 so that we can get as many minutes as we have time for.
00:42:42.680 Are you religious, and if so, how does that play into your business?
00:42:52.660 Am I, what was the word?
00:42:53.840 Religious.
00:42:54.420 Oh, religious. 0.97
00:42:59.920 Two ways to answer that.
00:43:01.360 I'm very wedded to my religious heritage.
00:43:04.560 I'm Jewish.
00:43:07.440 There has to be protection in this room.
00:43:10.460 I won't point to, I don't know where the people are.
00:43:12.680 because I get a million death threats
00:43:14.640 for all sorts of things that I say,
00:43:16.300 part of which comes from the fact that I'm Jewish
00:43:18.540 and I support the Jewish people in Israel.
00:43:20.760 So it'll be hard to be someone
00:43:22.980 who lives their religion more than I do.
00:43:26.200 So that's the yes part to your question.
00:43:29.440 Do I think that when there is a conflict
00:43:31.520 between a religious narrative and a scientific narrative, 0.76
00:43:34.840 I'm going to side with religion?
00:43:36.880 No.
00:43:37.940 So if I know that geologically speaking,
00:43:41.740 this rock is 200 million years old
00:43:44.040 but the young earth creationist
00:43:45.860 tells me that it's 6,000 years old
00:43:47.520 because look, it's in my favorite book,
00:43:49.460 then no, I'm not religious in that sense.
00:43:51.600 So I am as religious as can be
00:43:53.720 in terms of belonging to a group
00:43:55.220 but not when it conflicts
00:43:57.340 with my commitment to science and reason.
00:44:05.260 Yeah.
00:44:08.740 Okay, I'm wondering
00:44:09.840 Is there a company out there that you just can't wait to see the apps they release
00:44:17.780 because they're always just perfectly kind of aligned the way you think of the...
00:44:22.600 So they're doing the Darwinian thing, not the woke thing?
00:44:25.300 No.
00:44:27.220 Well, certainly, I mean, and this is going to sound obvious,
00:44:30.000 many of the dating app companies will have slogans and advertising appeals
00:44:37.140 that are straight out of them having probably read my books and papers, right?
00:44:41.780 So for example, and I'm not condoning infidelity, so chill out.
00:44:48.420 But for example, Ashley Madison was a company where it tried to connect married people with
00:44:56.800 each other who were looking for extramarital, right?
00:44:59.880 So at one point, one of their slogans was, because life is too short not to have an affair.
00:45:05.040 Now that, by the way, is rooted in a fundamental evolutionary principle, which is that humans are both very drawn to long-term coupling, so monogamy, but also there is this Darwinian pull that causes us, both men and women, to seek sexual variety.
00:45:22.000 And so the most obvious example would be all of those dating app types, because they clearly understand our Darwinian drives.
00:45:33.400 Other questions?
00:45:35.040 I'm not scary. I'm very friendly. Yes, sir.
00:45:40.380 I was wondering, very interesting presentation, by the way. I was wondering how we can apply what you talked about today into a more B2B type of setting, like where sales people try to sell something to a company organization. They're still dealing with humans, but it's more rational than the decision making.
00:46:00.380 So, I mean, I'm going to go off the top of my head, right?
00:46:02.860 Because, I mean, I'd have to think about it more.
00:46:05.220 So take, for example, so in my earlier books, the evolutionary books, I talk about four key Darwinian drives that drives much of purpose of behavior of humans.
00:46:15.920 One is survival.
00:46:17.660 So, for example, our preference for fatty foods is related to our survival mechanism, right?
00:46:22.840 None of our ancestors preferred raw celery to some instantiation of fatty foods, okay?
00:46:28.580 And food marketers know this.
00:46:30.520 The second driver is reproduction.
00:46:33.740 So those examples I gave were related to mating.
00:46:37.280 The two other mechanisms are called kin selection and reciprocal altruism.
00:46:41.520 Kin selection explains why I would jump into a river to save three of my children.
00:46:47.000 Well, it makes perfect evolutionary sense because each of those children on average share half their genes with me.
00:46:52.040 So even if I die, if I save those three packets of genes, evolution would make sense.
00:46:56.200 The fourth one is the one that I'm going to try to explain your question.
00:47:00.400 Reciprocal altruism explains why I might jump into the river to save a friend who's not my kin or a random stranger.
00:47:08.360 And that stems from the mechanism of reciprocity, which, by the way, you see it in many primate species, reciprocal grooming.
00:47:15.720 So a baboon gives its back to a friend who then will pick out the parasites with the expectation that then there'll be reciprocity.
00:47:24.280 Well, there are many dyadic relationships in business, like B2B, where if you can invoke
00:47:32.400 this mechanism of reciprocity, it leads to a much more stable relationship.
00:47:36.700 So that would be, off the top of my head, one example.
00:47:43.240 Come on.
00:47:44.200 Give me two, three more good ones.
00:47:46.960 Yes, ma'am.
00:47:47.580 So, just given our culture and the way things change in 15 minutes, like you said, I like that, how are companies going to keep up with this, your version, versus competing with the cancel culture and the wokeness?
00:48:05.260 Like, where do you see the balance companies have to keep up?
00:48:10.860 Truth always wins, right?
00:48:12.980 So violating fundamental principles of reality because it will give me a few street creds on the woke street might give me a quick dopamine hit because I'm a good enlightened person when I look at myself in the mirror.
00:48:28.940 But ultimately, my stock prices will eventually catch up to me.
00:48:33.720 So I always say best policy, always be truthful.
00:48:38.100 And whatever happens, happens.
00:48:40.040 So I've never once thought about modulating a millimeter of my speech because it might result in a strategic loss for me.
00:48:52.880 Now, of course, that takes a particular personality to have that, right?
00:48:57.300 I am kind of a big personality guy, so I don't mind fighting with people.
00:49:04.040 I'm not intimidated.
00:49:04.840 but I've had a great career
00:49:07.740 and I've been able to attract the attention of many people
00:49:11.120 outside of the narrow lane of academia
00:49:14.320 precisely because I always speak the truth
00:49:16.420 and so I would say in any context
00:49:19.580 whether in a marriage, in a friendship, in a company, in academia
00:49:22.940 be truthful, that's the best policy
00:49:25.480 yes ma'am
00:49:28.140 do you think that though
00:49:30.700 as consumers evolve age-wise,
00:49:38.000 or employees evolve age-wise,
00:49:40.720 that they measure less about the woke stuff.
00:49:44.720 That's a great question.
00:49:45.740 I mean, the general longitudinal pattern
00:49:49.820 is that your intuition is right.
00:49:51.280 So for example, if you look at political orientation,
00:49:56.240 people usually go from being super leftist,
00:50:00.000 utopian unicornia, let's hold hands and share our resources.
00:50:05.360 When they're 20, then there's this thing, what's it called?
00:50:08.680 Oh, reality, that slaps you in the face
00:50:11.640 when you get that first paycheck,
00:50:13.620 and you see that 52% of your income is gone.
00:50:16.380 Suddenly, you're not quite as communistic
00:50:18.600 as when you hung out at the Grove and said, free, free,
00:50:22.240 Che Guevara, right?
00:50:23.940 So yes, there is a pattern whereby I become less woke
00:50:27.720 as I get older.
00:50:28.960 So yes?
00:50:30.140 So do you think companies that know
00:50:31.860 that their consumer base is older
00:50:35.500 is less likely to do the Bud White or the project?
00:50:38.640 Or why do they do that?
00:50:40.900 Their consumers are older.
00:50:43.860 So I'm guessing, I don't know, I'm speculating here,
00:50:46.840 because the marketing executives were not caring
00:50:52.480 about targeting those consumers,
00:50:55.360 but they were caring about signaling to their cool friends
00:50:58.400 at the Manhattan clubs.
00:51:03.480 Yes, ma'am.
00:51:04.320 I just want to talk about the four stages
00:51:07.880 of the corporate responsibilities.
00:51:09.900 How do you think those are evolving
00:51:11.440 with the AI and the JT world?
00:51:14.160 How are the corporate responsibilities
00:51:17.540 kind of evolving with it?
00:51:20.000 I mean, again, off the top of my head,
00:51:22.280 I would say, so I remember when I was doing my MBA
00:51:26.140 many years ago now,
00:51:27.320 One of the terms that stuck with me
00:51:28.900 is the idea of mass customization,
00:51:31.380 which seems like a contradiction in terms,
00:51:33.620 how could you customize something in a mass way?
00:51:36.960 Well, my feeling is that with the current technologies,
00:51:40.960 our ability to engage in mass customization
00:51:43.920 is only going to increase.
00:51:45.740 So maybe that would be one way.
00:51:50.100 Any last questions going once?
00:51:53.920 Yes, sir.
00:51:54.760 I think as students, we would apply your lessons in our daily lives.
00:51:58.880 But which lessons?
00:52:00.000 Applying the evolutionary psychology?
00:52:01.940 The evolutionary psychology and Darwinism.
00:52:04.440 Right.
00:52:05.860 Actually, I'm glad that you said in our daily lives
00:52:09.420 because when I usually start all of my life,
00:52:12.300 I've taught at the undergraduate level, MBA,
00:52:15.920 master's of science, and PhD level,
00:52:17.480 I always tell students,
00:52:19.520 once I teach you the evolutionary lens,
00:52:21.720 you will see how you could apply it across all of the facets of your lives.
00:52:26.460 And I usually predict to them, I promise you that somebody in this room,
00:52:30.720 and I'll predict it in this room, will write to me in five years and say,
00:52:35.880 oh, I just had a fight with my husband and wife,
00:52:39.340 and I remembered when you talked about the evolutionary roots of jealousy in your class,
00:52:44.260 and now I understand why I reacted this way.
00:52:46.240 So, the explanatory key of evolutionary psychology is truly universal.
00:52:53.240 It allows us to understand why we all fight to get the big corner office.
00:52:58.240 It allows us to explain why men are much more likely to purchase Ferraris than women.
00:53:04.240 It allows us to explain everything. It allows us to understand the dynamics of sibling rivalry.
00:53:09.240 It explains parent-offspring conflicts. It's everywhere.
00:53:13.240 Once that animal is unleashed, you'll see it everywhere.
00:53:17.220 When you don't have access to the evolutionary lens,
00:53:20.220 you always have an erroneous view of human nature.
00:53:23.680 So I promise you, if you delve into evolutionary psychology,
00:53:29.200 it'll allow you to understand human behavior in all of its facets.
00:53:33.840 Yes, sir?
00:53:34.580 So these truths, like, see if these tell, obviously,
00:53:36.440 the Giles of Ferraria, the Giles of Nice,
00:53:38.060 too, why, like, the advertising space,
00:53:39.940 are they so, like, looked over, especially in, like, recent times?
00:53:43.240 I missed about half of those words. 0.90
00:53:46.040 So, these are obvious truths.
00:53:48.760 The guy wants a Ferrari, a nice suit, nice watches, etc.
00:53:53.040 Why do you think in an advertising and marketing space
00:53:55.360 it's so overlooked to the point where you have to re-explain that this is an obvious truth?
00:53:59.800 Well, it's not always overlooked.
00:54:01.120 In many cases, to my point, the title of my talk is
00:54:05.680 Good Marketers are Evolutionary Psychologists, whether they know it or not.
00:54:10.480 Good marketers have an innate ability to understand human nature.
00:54:15.100 They may not be able to offer the scientific explanation for why it is.
00:54:19.220 So you mentioned suits.
00:54:20.880 Here's a fantastic study.
00:54:22.720 Not my study, but by another group of evolutionary psychologists.
00:54:26.440 So they took the exact same man and put him in one of three attires that vary in prestige.
00:54:35.780 He's a McDonald's employee, no disrespect if you're doing part-time McDonald's, all work is good, so that, or some other medium one, or a fancy, beautiful, high-status suit. 0.59
00:54:49.400 They did the exact same thing with women. 0.59
00:54:51.820 They took the women and they put them in these three suits.
00:54:54.840 And they asked men and women to evaluate the likelihood of you going on one of six types of romantic involvements.
00:55:02.600 I'll go out for coffee with this person.
00:55:04.900 I'll go out to dinner. 0.90
00:55:05.780 I will have a brief sexual liaison. 0.99
00:55:08.380 I will get married to this person. 0.99
00:55:09.600 There were six of them.
00:55:11.540 Can anybody predict what the data showed for men and women? 0.91
00:55:17.060 And if you predict it correctly, it's because you are all Darwinian beings. 0.98
00:55:22.200 Well, I'll ask you.
00:55:23.560 I'd say maybe one in a night or two would probably be a sexual encounter,
00:55:28.080 one in a last night or two would probably be a married material.
00:55:30.340 Well, not quite.
00:55:31.340 So, across all six romantic conditions, the likelihood of women saying yes increased across all six as the status of the attire went up.
00:55:45.980 Do you want to guess what it was for men in evaluating women? 0.99
00:55:49.460 They didn't give a shit. 0.99
00:55:54.660 Why? 0.99
00:55:55.460 Here is a sentence that has never been uttered in the history of human language.
00:56:02.660 Linda, you are stunning, but you're wearing a sartorial garb that lacks social status. 0.85
00:56:10.360 No sex for you, Linda.
00:56:12.320 That sentence has never been uttered. 1.00
00:56:14.560 The other way, if I am a gorgeous guy, I open my mouth, I'm a babbling idiot, my likelihood goes down. 0.98
00:56:21.460 If I look like I've got no ambition, I'm not assertive, I'm not dominant, 0.98
00:56:25.920 it doesn't matter how good-looking I go down.
00:56:28.040 So that would be an example of applying these principles in a mating context.
00:56:35.040 Last question. 0.83
00:56:37.060 Yes, ma'am.
00:56:37.720 How would you apply this to advertising something like the university?
00:56:42.020 Because you have to be very specific in the way you put things out there
00:56:46.640 that would be diverse, all of those different things.
00:56:49.700 So it depends, I mean, but appealing to your university using evolutionary principles or just the, because my selling point would be more knowledge is always better than less knowledge, right?
00:57:01.980 So, but that I didn't use an evolutionary principle, right?
00:57:05.560 But do you mean how might I appeal to men and women differently?
00:57:09.560 Is that what you?
00:57:10.200 Yes.
00:57:11.960 Well, certainly for men, it would be an obvious one.
00:57:15.120 the number one attribute that women most look for in men, irrespective of culture that's been
00:57:22.000 studied, doesn't matter which culture, it could be the Hadza tribe in Central Africa, it could be
00:57:27.680 the Yanomomo tribe in Amazon, is social status of the male. Now, what changes is the cultural
00:57:35.280 definition of social status, right? So in one culture, how many livestock heads I have makes
00:57:41.760 me big man. In another culture, it could be if I have Ivy League degrees, but there is no culture
00:57:47.600 where women prefer lower status men to higher status men. Well, so then if I am targeting men, 0.73
00:57:54.180 I'd say, if you don't want to sit twiddling your thumbs in a life of frustrated celibacy,
00:58:00.000 maybe go and get an education. Although I feel hesitant to say that because seeing the current
00:58:05.440 state of universities with all the woke nonsense, maybe becoming a welder or an electrician
00:58:11.320 might actually result in you having a more fruitful career.
00:58:15.100 But I would appeal to something related to status. 0.99
00:58:18.400 For women, I don't know, just love of learning.
00:58:25.740 Anything else?
00:58:27.640 All right, guys, thank you so much.
00:58:28.860 Cheers.
00:58:29.020 Cheers.