Evolutionary Psychology
www.epjournal.net – 2013. 11(4): 885-888
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Book Review
How an Evolutionary Model is Better at Explaining Decisions than
Neo-Classical and Behavioral Economics Models
A review of Douglas T. Kenrick and Vladas Griskevicius, The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made us Smarter than we Think. New York: Basic Books, 2013, 255 pp., US $26.99, ISBN 978-0-465-03242-6 (hardcover).
Jasper J. Duineveld, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Email: jasperduineveld@gmail.com (Corresponding author).
Peter K. Jonason, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia.
Perhaps the most fundamental question in psychology is why people do the things they do. Douglas Kenrick and Vladas Griskevicius discuss decision-making and why people make apparently irrational choices in their book The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made us Smarter than we Think. With their years of experience in evolutionary psychology, they examine decision-making through an evolutionary lens. To illustrate the points that are made, the authors use examples often involving individuals and situations that are well known (e.g., MC Hammer, Steve Jobs, the Disney brothers). Most chapters are opened with extreme statements which are slowly unpacked throughout the chapter by applying the main concept of the chapter to the statement. In this fashion the book gives answers to outlandish statements (e.g., why uneducated tribes people from the Amazon jungle easily solve logical puzzles that sophisticated Harvard students have problems with, why there are people that go from rags to riches, and why people in Africa choose to starve), that are often not as bad as they seem. The illustrative examples, extreme statements, and more informal style of writing makes The Rational Animal an easy-yet-informative read about a rather new way of looking at decision-making.
Rational decision-making
Evolutionary Psychology – ISSN 1474-7049 – Volume 11(4). 2013. -886- To advance this case, they make two arguments about human decision-making. Firstly, many of our cognitive and behavioral biases have deeper evolutionary functions, which on the surface may make an action look ridiculous, but on a deeper level will show an evolutionary function. Secondly, because there are different subselves for important evolutionary challenges our ancestors had to face, understanding the adaptive function of a certain tendency puts us in a better position to predict when the tendency will be stronger than other times. Our ancestors had to make decisions in sometimes incompatible ways, using different psychological systems, termed subselves, to meet evolutionary challenges. These subselves led to apparently inconsistent and sometimes unhealthy behavior depending on the evolutionary challenge being faced. For instance, when the self-protection subself is activated, people are more loss aversive than usual. Loss aversion was adaptive for ancestral challenges related to survival, because a sudden loss of food makes a bigger risk impact than a sudden upturn of food. On the other hand, when the mate-acquisition subself is primed, the importance of gains becomes higher than that of losses, because gaining a mate is required for gene survival. With these arguments the authors challenge the behavioral economics and rational economics views. Behavioral economics argue that irrational behavior is simply something stupid and funny people tend to do. Rational economics on the other hand, view people as rational, with the idea that people make decisions based on what is in it for them. In The Rational Animal it is argued that behavior is often driven by deep-seated evolutionary reasons; people are motivated to serve their subselves thereby increasing their inclusive fitness depending on the active subself. The authors introduce in Chapter 1 how choices made in a modern world are made through the ancestral mechanisms that operate outside of our conscious mind, which leads to seemingly irrational decisions. In Chapter 2 they establish how these decisions vary. Initially these concepts seem confusing, but the applied examples help in showing that the two main arguments are based on two basic evolutionary principles: that human decision-making serves evolutionary goals, and that decision-decision-making is designed to achieve several evolutionary goals. Without a defined structure to the book, the authors use the following chapters to apply these points to familiar evolutionary concepts and new research in evolutionary psychology.
Rational decision-making
Evolutionary Psychology – ISSN 1474-7049 – Volume 11(4). 2013. -887- is a mismatch between the modern world we live in and the brains we use that are evolved to solve ancestral problems. The authors explain that not all errors in decision-making have evolutionary reasons behind them, but may stem from thinking in ways that are evolutionarily novel, like writing rather than speaking, or thinking in percentiles rather than ratios. Uneducated tribesmen are shown to solve logical puzzles more easily than Harvard students, because they think about logical puzzles in natural ways. When math problems are reframed into a natural problem, as tribesmen automatically do, people are more likely to answer the math problem correctly. The authors show that when people make mistakes they should not simply be considered as morons, and provide a novel rational choice model based on evolutionary theory to explain these mistakes.
The model detailed by Kenrick and Griskevicius also provides an explanation to why people prefer different decisions depending on the situation. Each subself in a person calculates the cost and benefit according to their evolutionary priority, which cover the important ancestral evolutionary challenges. The authors examine how men and women besides their standard subselves also have his and her subselves, based on the differences in reproductive strategies. These differences in subselves make men and women react either differently, or the same but with different underlying reasons, regardless of the same subself being activated. For example, when men tip generously, they want to advertise their wealth, but when women tip high, they show their caring nature. These subselves are
shown to be activated through priming. The authors examine how “parasites” ranging from
caring politicians to helpful individuals or corporations are aware of our evolutionary needs and how to activate them, and take advantage of that knowledge. For example, shoes originally function to protect the bottom of our feet, not something that people would pay highly for. But when shoes, like dress shoes, also cover ancestral needs, such as gaining status or mate-acquisition, people are suddenly happy to pay top prices. The whole history of the jewellery business is based on a similar exploitation of ancestral needs. Originally jewellery has no direct function, but smart marketing has created jewellery to cover every type of ancestral need: jewellery for mate-acquisition, mate-retention, status, and even self-protection and disease avoidance subselves (e.g., “this necklace protects you from evil
spirits”). To prevent falling for these tricks the authors propose in a self-help book style that it is important to see how many subselves benefit the decision to be made if you want to make smart choices. They show that decision-making is not as straight forward as considered by some decision-making models.
In essence the title is a misnomer. They are not advancing a rational model in the
traditional sense of the word “rational” but, instead, they show how we can make rational
Rational decision-making
Evolutionary Psychology – ISSN 1474-7049 – Volume 11(4). 2013. -888- directions. On the other hand, the book would also be enjoyable for people new to evolutionary theory. The book introduces a variety of concepts in a clear and cohesive way, using popular references to introduce and explain the concepts.
