The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 28, 2024


The Consuming Instinct - TEDx Lecture at Concordia University (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_734)


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

166.96211

Word Count

3,014

Sentence Count

148

Misogynist Sentences

18

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Aaron Sorkin talks about the role of consumerism in shaping our children's behavior, and how it can be traced back to evolutionary psychology. He uses the story of his own daughter, Luna, as an example.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 You know that you've made it big when somebody introduces you with only one name.
00:00:07.480 So I'm like Madonna and Cher now.
00:00:09.040 He doesn't have to mention my last name.
00:00:11.520 So thank you for all being here and for waiting to the last talk.
00:00:16.300 I can't promise you that I'll be as exciting as Nomadic Massive or as Owen with his mash
00:00:22.420 mashing up, but I'll try to keep you entertained.
00:00:25.240 So basically the past 15 years or so I've been trying to infuse evolutionary psychology
00:00:31.640 into the study of consumption.
00:00:34.240 The idea being that if you look at these faces, of course there are very, very important cross-cultural
00:00:43.780 differences that define these people, but underneath these differences there's a bed of human universals
00:00:52.540 that are very much rooted in our common shared human nature.
00:00:57.680 And so to quote E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard evolutionary biologist, he said that the genes
00:01:02.000 hold culture on a leash, to which I would simply add the genes hold consumer behavior on a leash.
00:01:07.820 So of course culture is malleable, but it is malleable within our biological constraints.
00:01:13.080 So this idea of nature versus nurture is one that has come up in many, many different fields,
00:01:19.820 many different contexts.
00:01:21.220 Are charismatic leaders born or are they made?
00:01:24.220 So in the context of consumer behavior, I'll give you one such example.
00:01:27.100 So toy preferences is typically the example that social scientists use to demonstrate that we are socialized
00:01:32.780 to be consumers.
00:01:34.140 So little Johnny plays with the blue truck aggressively,
00:01:37.860 while little Linda plays with the pink doll in a very nurturing way.
00:01:43.220 And it is this cascade of gender socialization that eventually leads us to be little boys,
00:01:48.520 you know, grown-up males or females.
00:01:50.720 It turns out that that's not quite so accurate,
00:01:52.960 so let me just very briefly discuss a few findings that demonstrate that some of these preferences
00:01:57.240 are actually quite innate.
00:01:59.040 Children who are in the pre-socialization stage,
00:02:01.220 meaning that they don't yet have the cognitive development to be socialized,
00:02:04.960 also display these sex-specific toy preferences.
00:02:09.640 Little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia,
00:02:13.720 which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes little girls,
00:02:18.400 they tend to then have sex preferences, I mean toy preferences that are very much like little boys.
00:02:24.480 And then if you do studies with other, some of our cousins, primate cousins,
00:02:29.140 rhesus monkeys and vervet monkeys,
00:02:30.920 they have very much the same sex-specific toy preferences.
00:02:34.520 So that puts a bit of a damper on the idea that we are just empty minds
00:02:39.360 who are subsequently socialized.
00:02:41.840 And if you're wondering why the baby is extremely beautiful,
00:02:45.080 that's because of the beauty of my wife who's here in the room.
00:02:54.020 That's a belated Valentine's gift.
00:02:58.280 Now that puts me...
00:02:59.980 I don't have to pay her any fancy flowers and so on.
00:03:02.760 To give you a sense of how powerful evolutionary psychology is
00:03:08.660 in understanding even, you know, daily events,
00:03:11.880 I'll just share one example continuing with the story of my little daughter.
00:03:16.360 So when my wife was pregnant with our daughter Luna,
00:03:19.780 of course we got the requisite two-month ultrasound.
00:03:22.560 We put it up very proudly on the refrigerator.
00:03:25.560 Mother-in-law came over with my father-in-law and she looks at these images.
00:03:31.340 Now these images, I should point out, they could be those of a lizard.
00:03:35.040 They could be those of an amoeba.
00:03:37.020 They could be those of an alien.
00:03:38.660 Yet she looks at it and arrestingly says,
00:03:41.400 Oh my God, Gad, the baby looks exactly like you.
00:03:47.840 He has your profile, can't you see?
00:03:49.960 Now why would that be related to evolutionary psychology?
00:03:53.420 Well, it turns out that when children are born around the world, right?
00:03:57.180 So this is not specific to Peruvian culture or Israeli culture.
00:04:00.640 It's very much a human universal.
00:04:02.860 When kids are born, usually the mother's side of the family
00:04:07.740 will very, very quickly proclaim that the newborn baby looks exactly like the father.
00:04:12.960 The reason for that is because it's a mechanism, it's a cultural mechanism
00:04:16.820 to try to assuage threats of paternity uncertainty.
00:04:21.720 But in this case, this is the first scientific case
00:04:25.180 where this mechanism happened in utero.
00:04:28.560 So I've already made my daughter famous
00:04:31.520 even before she could at that point speak or think.
00:04:35.360 So for the rest of the talk today,
00:04:37.060 I'll talk about some of the research that I've been doing
00:04:40.240 linking how our survival instinct manifests itself in consumer behavior
00:04:45.200 and then also our reproductive instinct.
00:04:47.340 So if here, of course, food is probably, you know,
00:04:50.380 the consumption act that is most closely linked to our survival.
00:04:54.760 So if you look at the hummingbird,
00:04:56.840 he has to eat roughly 1.5 to 3 times its body weight per day
00:05:01.340 because of its high metabolism in order to be able to survive.
00:05:04.920 So he's got a good reason why he has to eat so much.
00:05:07.460 On the other hand, all-you-can-eat buffets,
00:05:10.680 all-you-can-have vacation packages, super-sized meats,
00:05:14.620 cater to the same instinct of hoarding and gorging.
00:05:18.360 Unfortunately, we don't have his metabolic rate,
00:05:20.320 so we end up with these dreadful diseases.
00:05:22.780 Continuing with the same line of thinking,
00:05:26.020 we have this incredible innate preference for fatty foods.
00:05:30.000 Few of us prefer raw broccoli to chocolate mousse
00:05:33.400 or to a juicy steak.
00:05:35.040 So if you look here at the grizzly bears,
00:05:37.260 they're eating fatty salmon, you know,
00:05:40.100 prior to going into semi-hibernation.
00:05:42.080 If you look at the top 10 restaurants around the world,
00:05:44.520 they have one thing in common.
00:05:46.020 They deliver fatty foods to us that is tasty.
00:05:50.100 It's not that they have good advertisements.
00:05:51.960 It's not that they have nice jingles.
00:05:53.540 It's that they deliver a product
00:05:55.220 that is perfectly congruent with our evolved taste buds.
00:05:58.480 And this is exactly what the Atkins diet did, right?
00:06:00.700 The Atkins diet did, said, hey, look, you could eat as much as you want fatty steak, eggs,
00:06:05.620 you could eat bacon, and you're going to lose weight.
00:06:08.120 Great, sign me up, right?
00:06:12.060 Interestingly, though, cross-cultural differences in culinary traditions
00:06:16.180 are also themselves due to biology.
00:06:18.380 So if you look at cultures that are predominantly meat-based,
00:06:22.560 so look at the top smoked meat sandwich,
00:06:24.860 or predominantly vegetable-based,
00:06:26.720 or how much spices are used in a culinary tradition,
00:06:29.800 how much salt consumption is used,
00:06:31.920 how much pickling happens in a culture,
00:06:34.600 each of these culinary traditions
00:06:36.620 turn out to be adaptations to the local environment.
00:06:39.940 And what specifically,
00:06:41.200 it's correlated to the latitude of the country,
00:06:43.400 which is, of course, correlated to the ambient temperature,
00:06:45.740 which is correlated to the density of the food pathogens in that culture.
00:06:50.080 So rather than simply saying that here we have an example of,
00:06:53.800 oh, it's due to culture,
00:06:55.100 an evolutionary approach allows you to understand
00:06:57.500 what is the ultimate explanation for that cultural difference.
00:07:03.660 Moving on to mating,
00:07:05.200 something that I think everybody here would be interested in.
00:07:08.080 If you look at the cardinal,
00:07:10.480 he's engaging in what's called nuptial gift-giving.
00:07:12.700 In many species, you offer a gift.
00:07:15.720 The male cardinal, if you see,
00:07:16.900 he's got a food morsel in his mouth.
00:07:18.560 He's saying, hey, look, I can provide for you.
00:07:20.920 And as a measure of how well I can provide for you,
00:07:23.940 how about you grant me sexual access to you?
00:07:27.160 And, of course,
00:07:28.100 we engage in endless forms as consumers
00:07:31.220 in exactly this behavior.
00:07:34.140 The diamond rings that we have to offer
00:07:36.280 have to be a costly signal.
00:07:38.080 Otherwise, the ladies wouldn't be able to, you know,
00:07:41.360 assort the difference between the faker and the true soother.
00:07:45.080 Therefore, I have to pay 25% of my yearly income
00:07:47.880 to show you that I am truthful.
00:07:50.000 And hopefully then,
00:07:51.280 you will give it up just like the female cardinal.
00:07:58.600 We use products as sexual signals, right?
00:08:01.060 So if you look at the peacock over here,
00:08:03.100 the hen seems to be rather uninterested.
00:08:06.160 And he's saying, look at my tail.
00:08:08.240 Look how big it is.
00:08:09.260 Look how symmetric it is.
00:08:10.780 Look how iridescent the colors are.
00:08:13.000 This is why you have to choose me,
00:08:14.680 because my phenotypic quality is so great.
00:08:17.040 Well, I've argued in several of my books
00:08:20.360 that consumers do exactly that, right?
00:08:24.160 Many times we use products,
00:08:26.400 either men or women,
00:08:27.640 to improve our position in the mating market.
00:08:31.160 So a few years ago,
00:08:32.020 with one of my former graduate students,
00:08:33.940 John Vungas,
00:08:34.900 we decided to test this idea.
00:08:36.520 We brought in people into,
00:08:38.220 not people,
00:08:38.920 we brought in males into the lab,
00:08:40.940 and we had them drive either a fancy,
00:08:43.160 it's not imagine driving a Porsche,
00:08:45.020 they actually drove a Porsche,
00:08:46.880 or they drove a beaten up,
00:08:48.600 rusted old sedan
00:08:49.900 in one of two environments,
00:08:51.660 either in downtown Montreal,
00:08:52.860 where everybody could see you,
00:08:54.360 or in a semi-deserted highway.
00:08:56.400 By the way,
00:08:57.420 try to get a granting agency
00:08:58.900 to release money,
00:09:00.760 and convince them
00:09:01.520 that you're not going to use the Porsche
00:09:03.060 for your own personal sinister pursuits.
00:09:07.300 Now, what were some of the dependent measures?
00:09:10.020 At the end of each of these conditions,
00:09:12.660 these driving conditions,
00:09:13.900 we collected salivary assays,
00:09:16.300 which then help us measure
00:09:17.700 their fluctuations in their testosterone levels.
00:09:21.100 And what do you think happened
00:09:22.200 when you put young males in the Porsche?
00:09:24.680 The endocrinological response is outlandish.
00:09:28.440 Now, we had thought
00:09:31.520 that, yes, testosterone would go up
00:09:34.640 in both environments,
00:09:36.120 but it would go up a lot more
00:09:37.960 when everybody could see you.
00:09:39.580 So in downtown Montreal,
00:09:40.680 it would go up a lot more
00:09:41.580 than on the semi-deserted highway.
00:09:43.620 The guys couldn't give a damn,
00:09:45.020 put me in a Porsche,
00:09:46.220 their testosterone shot through the roof.
00:09:50.520 Just to continue with this point,
00:09:53.560 cars as sexual signals,
00:09:55.240 continuing with that theme,
00:09:57.400 this is a study that was done two years ago
00:09:58.840 by some British psychologists.
00:10:00.900 These are the actual stimuli that they use.
00:10:02.740 You take the same guy,
00:10:03.760 you put him either in a Ford Fiesta
00:10:05.380 beaten up old car,
00:10:06.580 or in a Bentley,
00:10:07.800 and you ask women to rate this guy
00:10:09.660 in terms of how physically attractive he is.
00:10:11.760 You're not talking about his status,
00:10:12.840 just physically how beautiful is this man.
00:10:15.520 And you do the same thing with the woman,
00:10:17.520 and men have to judge it.
00:10:18.960 Men couldn't give a damn,
00:10:20.020 the car that the lady was driving.
00:10:22.860 On the other hand,
00:10:23.720 the women,
00:10:24.240 when the guy is in the Bentley,
00:10:25.760 oh my God, he's Brad Pitt.
00:10:28.380 When he is driving in the other car,
00:10:30.080 oh no, I don't like losers like this.
00:10:32.800 So again, it shows you
00:10:34.100 how these products are quite intoxicating
00:10:37.220 in terms of how it helps us
00:10:39.360 position ourselves in the mating market.
00:10:42.180 Of course, not only men engage
00:10:44.400 in sexual signaling,
00:10:45.740 the ladies are also guilty of such pursuits.
00:10:48.600 On the left-hand side,
00:10:50.020 we've got a female baboon
00:10:51.280 who's an estrus,
00:10:52.660 and she's an estrus
00:10:53.820 engaging in conspicuous advertising
00:10:56.440 of her genitalia.
00:10:57.880 I think I could speak safely
00:10:59.240 for all men here
00:11:00.220 that we would not want
00:11:01.780 our human females
00:11:02.920 to be conspicuously displaying
00:11:04.460 their genitalia in this way.
00:11:06.160 But sticking true to the pink theme,
00:11:09.200 what they certainly do do
00:11:10.660 is that they will dress
00:11:12.120 much more provocatively
00:11:13.180 when they are maximally fertile
00:11:14.560 in their menstrual cycle.
00:11:15.500 So with one of my doctoral students
00:11:17.680 who's here in the room,
00:11:18.480 I can't see him
00:11:19.020 because I'm blinded by the lights,
00:11:20.520 Eric Stenstrom,
00:11:22.340 we've done a very, very thorough study
00:11:25.180 where we've looked at
00:11:26.040 how the menstrual cycle
00:11:27.040 affects women's behaviors
00:11:28.760 as consumers,
00:11:29.680 one of which is
00:11:30.640 how much do they engage
00:11:31.740 in beautification
00:11:32.520 as a function of whether
00:11:33.860 they are in the luteal phase
00:11:35.100 or the fertile phase
00:11:36.560 of their menstrual cycle.
00:11:38.740 Continuing on
00:11:39.820 with this idea
00:11:41.480 of sexual signaling,
00:11:42.560 a few years ago
00:11:44.540 I had an undergraduate student
00:11:46.740 who at the end of the course
00:11:47.860 came to me and said,
00:11:49.580 Professor Saad,
00:11:50.340 I have to work with you.
00:11:51.600 Could you hook me up
00:11:52.580 with some project?
00:11:53.340 I want to work,
00:11:53.900 I want to do anything.
00:11:54.900 So I thought about it for a while
00:11:56.100 and I said,
00:11:57.480 this is a male student,
00:11:58.840 I said, okay,
00:11:59.500 well how about
00:12:00.220 if I were to give you
00:12:02.140 the following project,
00:12:03.160 you're going to surf porn sites
00:12:05.100 for the next one month.
00:12:08.440 To which he looked at me
00:12:10.000 and his eyes told me,
00:12:11.740 Professor Saad,
00:12:12.800 I love you.
00:12:18.580 So what was the point
00:12:19.700 of the project basically?
00:12:21.400 I wanted to test
00:12:22.540 whether the,
00:12:23.620 what evolutionary psychologists
00:12:24.660 have talked about,
00:12:25.440 this idea of a preference
00:12:27.220 for the hourglass figure,
00:12:28.700 which is a waist to hip ratio
00:12:30.240 of 0.7,
00:12:31.840 whether I could actually
00:12:33.340 pick it out
00:12:34.140 by doing a content analysis
00:12:36.200 of how female escorts
00:12:38.460 advertise themselves
00:12:39.480 on the internet.
00:12:40.280 So typically,
00:12:41.160 you know,
00:12:41.420 my height is five foot three,
00:12:43.180 here are my measurements,
00:12:44.180 here's my weight,
00:12:44.880 here's my feet.
00:12:45.840 And so what I had this
00:12:46.840 very lucky male
00:12:48.620 undergraduate student do
00:12:50.220 is just surf
00:12:51.520 different sites.
00:12:53.160 He ended up gathering data
00:12:54.700 of more than
00:12:55.340 1,000 female escorts.
00:12:58.460 Right,
00:12:59.000 he was really assiduous
00:13:00.440 in his pursuit of science.
00:13:03.780 And it covered
00:13:05.000 48 different countries.
00:13:06.640 So nobody could say,
00:13:07.460 oh, but this is a western standard,
00:13:09.400 oh, it's due to
00:13:10.040 the Oprah effect,
00:13:11.120 it's due to
00:13:11.780 Cosmopolitan magazine.
00:13:13.600 We specifically chose
00:13:15.420 cultures that were
00:13:16.420 extraordinarily disparate
00:13:18.880 in terms of
00:13:19.680 the different metrics
00:13:20.660 that a culture
00:13:21.520 might be defined on.
00:13:22.800 And it turns out
00:13:23.960 that the average
00:13:24.480 waist to hip ratio
00:13:25.240 is exactly in line
00:13:26.500 with what is expected
00:13:27.740 from an evolutionary perspective.
00:13:29.120 Men like
00:13:29.860 a waist to hip ratio
00:13:31.400 that signals
00:13:32.640 nobility and fertility.
00:13:33.860 So,
00:13:37.000 continuing very,
00:13:38.160 very briefly,
00:13:39.140 how do some of these
00:13:40.140 sex differences
00:13:40.840 that I've been talking about
00:13:41.780 manifest themselves
00:13:42.580 in other settings?
00:13:44.120 Well,
00:13:44.540 if you were a paleontologist
00:13:45.800 and you wanted to study
00:13:46.620 the evolution
00:13:47.680 of a species,
00:13:48.900 well,
00:13:49.120 you typically would have
00:13:49.900 gone through
00:13:50.620 skeletal remains,
00:13:52.120 you might go through
00:13:52.960 the fossil records,
00:13:53.880 and then that would allow you
00:13:54.820 to reconstruct
00:13:56.240 the phylogenetic history
00:13:57.520 of a species.
00:13:58.580 Well, of course,
00:13:59.100 our minds
00:13:59.620 don't fossilize,
00:14:00.720 and so we have to find
00:14:02.160 some alternate
00:14:03.160 fossil record.
00:14:04.940 And so what I've argued
00:14:05.760 is that we could turn
00:14:06.540 to cultural products
00:14:07.720 as our fossil records
00:14:09.160 because cultural products
00:14:10.820 are ultimately created
00:14:12.080 by human minds.
00:14:13.840 And so we could do
00:14:14.440 a content analysis
00:14:15.480 on these cultural products
00:14:16.700 to help us identify
00:14:18.360 some of the evolutionary forces
00:14:20.280 that would have led
00:14:20.860 to the evolution
00:14:21.540 of the human mind.
00:14:23.220 So romance novels
00:14:24.340 are almost exclusively
00:14:25.280 read by women
00:14:26.080 around the world,
00:14:26.820 whether you're from Peru
00:14:27.580 or Egypt or Montreal,
00:14:28.840 it's read by women.
00:14:29.760 If you, for example,
00:14:31.120 look at the male archetype,
00:14:33.360 the male hero,
00:14:34.600 it's almost identical
00:14:36.680 across all romance novels.
00:14:38.680 He's never a short,
00:14:40.020 hourglass, beta male
00:14:41.780 who's afraid of his shadow.
00:14:43.540 He's larger than life,
00:14:45.000 he's tall,
00:14:45.780 he's muscular,
00:14:47.000 he's a neurosurgeon
00:14:48.160 or a king or a prince.
00:14:49.800 That's because
00:14:50.440 that particular product
00:14:51.880 caters to women's
00:14:53.100 evolved fantasies.
00:14:54.400 On the other hand,
00:14:55.300 hardcore pornography
00:14:56.300 doesn't exist
00:14:57.560 because there is
00:14:58.240 a patriarchal conspiracy
00:14:59.680 to demean women.
00:15:00.940 It exists because
00:15:01.920 it caters to
00:15:03.140 a particular
00:15:04.020 penchant in men.
00:15:06.220 And so if you want
00:15:06.800 to understand
00:15:07.280 some of these
00:15:07.780 sex differences,
00:15:08.680 look at these
00:15:09.180 cultural products
00:15:09.900 that are very successful
00:15:10.880 and you really understand
00:15:12.180 quite a bit,
00:15:12.740 not only about
00:15:13.180 our commonalities,
00:15:14.280 but also about
00:15:14.880 our differences.
00:15:16.060 Next, since we've had
00:15:17.280 the massive,
00:15:18.680 nomadic massive
00:15:19.840 and Owen
00:15:20.860 talking about music,
00:15:22.180 this is particularly
00:15:23.000 apropos,
00:15:23.600 if you look at songs,
00:15:26.080 they're a fantastic
00:15:27.560 stimulus for looking
00:15:29.900 at some of these
00:15:30.480 sex differences.
00:15:31.340 So the things that
00:15:32.100 men and women
00:15:32.740 sing about
00:15:33.520 are perfectly congruent
00:15:35.440 with universal
00:15:36.460 mating preferences.
00:15:37.700 So around the world,
00:15:38.560 men tend to place
00:15:39.400 a lot more value
00:15:40.580 on youth
00:15:41.420 and physical beauty
00:15:42.420 in prospective mates
00:15:43.400 and around the world,
00:15:44.620 women place
00:15:45.200 a lot more value
00:15:46.380 on social status
00:15:47.640 of men.
00:15:48.500 Therefore,
00:15:48.880 if you look at
00:15:49.360 the left-hand
00:15:50.340 examples,
00:15:52.660 all of these
00:15:53.320 top songs,
00:15:54.580 so Gwen Guthrie,
00:15:55.420 Destiny's Child,
00:15:56.360 TLC,
00:15:57.060 and Marina Shaw,
00:15:58.140 they're denigrating
00:15:59.020 men for having
00:16:00.040 low social status.
00:16:01.280 If you think
00:16:01.820 you're going to
00:16:02.300 get with me
00:16:02.820 and you don't
00:16:03.180 have any money,
00:16:03.980 walk away,
00:16:04.800 idiot.
00:16:05.400 Okay, I'm not
00:16:05.880 interested in you.
00:16:07.120 Okay?
00:16:07.520 There are no songs
00:16:08.740 that say,
00:16:09.560 hey Linda,
00:16:10.460 you're not working
00:16:11.340 hard at school,
00:16:12.220 I won't have
00:16:12.780 sex with you.
00:16:14.260 Right?
00:16:14.700 Thank you.
00:16:23.840 Thank you.
00:16:24.340 I feel like
00:16:24.740 I'm a comic
00:16:25.960 up here.
00:16:27.920 And of course,
00:16:28.800 when men sing
00:16:29.520 about social status,
00:16:31.020 they then show off.
00:16:32.000 I've got the goods,
00:16:32.940 I've got the Aston Martin,
00:16:34.620 there's a million songs,
00:16:36.140 Money in the Bank.
00:16:37.040 I mean,
00:16:37.280 literally,
00:16:38.000 there's at least
00:16:38.520 ten different artists,
00:16:39.700 hip-hop artists,
00:16:40.400 that have the exact
00:16:41.400 same title,
00:16:42.360 I've got Money in the Bank,
00:16:43.540 you want to get with me.
00:16:45.040 Look at the,
00:16:45.920 on the right-hand corner,
00:16:47.060 the way that men
00:16:47.660 and women navigate
00:16:48.600 in terms of their sexuality
00:16:50.820 in their song lyrics
00:16:51.900 is drastically different.
00:16:53.700 So Mickey Gilley,
00:16:54.480 who's a country music star
00:16:57.680 from the mid-70s,
00:16:58.800 had a song called
00:16:59.800 Don't the Girls
00:17:00.600 All Get Prettier
00:17:01.480 at Closing Time.
00:17:02.780 In other words,
00:17:03.700 the girl that men
00:17:04.600 are willing to sleep with
00:17:05.740 at 11 o'clock
00:17:06.660 is very different
00:17:07.840 from the creature
00:17:08.640 that they're willing
00:17:09.320 to satisfy with
00:17:11.080 at 3 in the morning.
00:17:12.720 You don't have
00:17:13.460 too many songs
00:17:14.200 that say,
00:17:14.700 don't the guys
00:17:15.540 get more handsome
00:17:16.420 at closing time
00:17:17.320 precisely because
00:17:18.680 the cost of making
00:17:20.160 a suboptimal mating choice
00:17:21.740 looms much larger
00:17:23.040 for women.
00:17:23.700 That's not due
00:17:24.220 to socialization,
00:17:25.120 that's due to
00:17:25.560 a basic biological reality
00:17:27.060 called parental investment theory.
00:17:29.600 Same thing
00:17:30.280 for physical attractiveness,
00:17:31.420 it's almost always the case,
00:17:32.940 and by the way,
00:17:33.480 it's not only true
00:17:34.240 in English songs,
00:17:35.120 it's not hip-hop
00:17:35.900 or English or soul songs,
00:17:37.120 you could do Hindi songs
00:17:38.100 and Arabic songs
00:17:39.480 and you'll find
00:17:39.940 the exact same phenomena.
00:17:43.360 So in conclusion,
00:17:44.680 exactly on time,
00:17:46.940 T. Dobzhansky,
00:17:48.280 who was a famous
00:17:48.780 evolutionary geneticist,
00:17:49.840 said that nothing
00:17:50.620 in biology
00:17:51.460 makes sense
00:17:52.700 except in the light
00:17:53.560 of evolution.
00:17:54.540 Well, I would slightly
00:17:55.360 tweak that
00:17:55.960 and say nothing
00:17:56.600 in consumer behavior
00:17:57.660 could ever make sense
00:17:58.780 without an understanding
00:18:00.080 of our evolutionary heritage.
00:18:02.140 Thank you very much.