Should consumer behavior research consider human biological and evolutionary roots?
Yes, according to Prof. Saad, who is now likely to be banished from the Faculty Lounge in the business building to the one in the biology building for potentially forcing scores of marketing majors to wake up for those 7:45 evolutionary biology labs. Prof. Saad’s recent paper chastises colleagues for a “collective amnesia” in failing to consider that “consumers are biological beings shaped by a common set of evolutionary forces.” One can imagine “Black Friday” evolutionary forces: delay discounting, hunting and gathering, and reward syndromes.
So, do consumers still shop? The social aspect of physically going shopping seems to be important. For instance, although broadband internet availability reduces commute-time driving (with the availability of telecommuting), recreational driving does not decrease. J. Giglierano J. and M. Roldan, “Effects of Online Shopping on Vehicular Traffic,” Mineta Transportation Institute 1-20 (October 2001) (N.b., no new data found, particularly in view of high gas prices). People still like to go to the mall. Biology? Evolution? Who knows.
Saad, Gad, “The collective amnesia of marketing scholars regarding consumers’ biological and evolutionary roots,” Marketing Theory 8: 425-448 (2008), DOI: 10.1177/1470593108096544
Despite the extraordinary advances in biology in the 20th century, along with the infusion of Darwinian theory across countless domains of human import, marketing and consumer scholars have doggedly forgotten, rejected, or ignored that consumers are biological beings shaped by a common set of evolutionary forces. Accordingly, this collective amnesia has yielded disciplines that largely focus on the disjointed and incoherent cataloguing of empirical findings, all of which operate at the proximate level. A complete and accurate understanding of any biological organism requires that it be studied at both the proximate andultimate (in the Darwinian adaptive sense of the term) levels. Hence, at best, marketing and consumer scholars generate incomplete accounts of Homo consumericus and at worst they provide erroneous theories that eventually fall by the epistemological wayside. Should the collective amnesia persist, marketing and consumer scholars will further contribute to the sinking of our disciplineinto the abyss of irrelevant sciences, disconnected from the revolutionary work that is being conducted within the natural sciences.
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