[MUSIC PLAYING] JORDAN THIBODEAU: Awesome. Hey everyone, thank you
all for coming through. Really appreciate it. My name is Jordan Thibodeau. I'm here hosting Gad Saad. This talk was brought
to you by Talktopia. Go/talktopia have a lot
of great talks on there. Tim Ferriss writing
all day and what not. So if you don't want to
miss out on a great event, go ahead and subscribe. Gad Saad is someone who doesn't
really need an introduction, but I'm going to do it anyways. He's a professor of marketing
at Concordia University and a research chair in
evolutionary behavioral sciences and
Darwinian consumption. He also has an amazing
YouTube channel, which is called "The Godfather?" GAD SAAD: "The Saad Truth." JORDAN THIBODEAU:
The Saad Truth." People call-- his
nickname is the god-- OK yeah, "The Sad Truth." so anyways, thank you all
for coming through and let's give a round of applause
to Dr. Gad Saad. GAD SAAD: Thank you. Thank you very much, Jordan. It's a true pleasure and
honor for me to be here. I guess my life has
gone full circle because my doctorate, which
I defended 23 years ago, was actually in an
issue of "Search," which should be relevant
to the top search company in the world-- of
course, you do more than that. My doctoral dissertation was
on a very specific problem, specifically something
called stoppings behavior. When is it that we've
acquired enough information to stop acquiring
additional information and commit to a choice? Which is a fundamental
search problem, right? When you're choosing
a mate to marry, of course there are many
more people to sample from in the world, yet
we don't, regrettably. When it applies to which
political candidate we choose, which car we buy,
which person to hire, we don't look at all of
the available and relevant information. Instead, we look at
enough information until a point when we say
I'm ready to choose Toyota, I'm ready to marry this person,
I'm ready to hire this guy. So this was the topic-- the cognitive processes of how
we stop information search. That was my doctoral
dissertation at Cornell. Then, I went off. Well actually, let me
tell you how it all started the evolutionary
part of my research career. When I went to
Cornell, it was really to study consumer choice
as a mathematical modeler. And then I hooked
up with the guy who became my doctoral
supervisor, who was a mathematical and
cognitive psychologist, and he suggested that I go
into the behavioral sciences. First semester at Cornell, I
had taken a course with this-- Oh! What did I do? What did I do? OK. I had taken a course with this
gentleman-- professor Denis Regan. It was an advanced
psychology course. And about halfway through
the course he assigned-- this is in fall 1990, my
first semester at Cornell-- he assigned this book. Has anybody heard of this book? Has anybody read it? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GAD SAAD: Sorry? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GAD SAAD: Looks? AUDIENCE: Cheery. GAD SAAD: Cheery. Yes, exactly. "Homicide" is a book
written by two pioneers of evolutionary psychology,
Martin Bailey and Margot Wilson, where they offer
evolutionary explanations for patterns of
criminality to the extent that there are certain
types of crimes that happen in roughly
the same way across time, across cultures. There might be some
underlying universal processes that explain these crimes. And when I saw the
explanatory power of evolutionary psychology
in explaining criminality, I had my eureka moment. I knew that I would
use that framework to study consumer behavior. Now I define consumer
behavior very broadly. It's not just consuming
Coca-Cola and Starbucks, but we consume religion,
we consume friendships, pretty much anything
you can think of, I could fit it under a
consumatory umbrella. And so this is how
I started looking at how I could apply biology
and evolution, and psychology in particular, to study
our consumatory nature. And so what I'll do for today's
lecture is offer you, hopefully by the end of today's
lecture, you'll get a good sense of how we
could use Darwinian thinking in studying consumption. Now as you might imagine,
in the social sciences, I really straddled both
the natural sciences and the social sciences
given the work that I do. Amongst my natural
science colleagues, of course they all say yes,
of course biology matters. Amongst my social
science colleagues, the story is a bit
more complicated, because most social
scientists, in a sense, define their belongingness
to the social sciences club by their abdication
of biology, right? According to them,
what makes us humans is that we transcend
our biology. And so as you
might imagine, I've had quite a bit of a rough ride. Now, the reality is that science
is an auto-corrective process. So without being too
gleeful, the better ideas eventually went out, and
I think most people now are starting to come around. It's becoming less
tenable to say openly that you don't think
biology matters when it comes to human affairs. But there are still
some old remnants who refuse to admit
that biology matters. Some of the key canards
that you typically hear, some of the key objections--
there are many more of these. I discuss this-- by the way,
the book that Jordan kindly got for you guys, "The
Consuming Instinct," I discussed many of
these detractors, but let me just mention
a few very briefly. So here's one typical
argument you hear. Well, biology is
great to explain the behavior of the mosquito
and the zebra and the dog, but surely, you
can't use biology to explain human behavior. This is called the
human reticence effect. The exact same
evolutionary principle might apply to every possible
species except humans. Evolution stops right here. Somehow our brains come
through a magical process that's outside of
evolution, which, of course, is ridiculous. Here's a second
one you often hear. Evolutionary
psychology is dangerous because it quote "justifies"
and condones reprehensible behavior." So for example, if you explain
why child abuse might happen or why rape happens or why men
and women cheat on one another in an otherwise
monogamous union, then somebody will come
along in a very irate manner and say you're using science
to condone and justify these behaviors. Of course you're not doing that. The oncologist who
studies pancreatic cancer is not for cancer. He's not justifying cancer. He's studying honestly cancer. And so if you study
child abuse and rape and marital infidelity,
that doesn't mean that you're for it. That doesn't mean that
you're trying to come up with an umbrella to justify it. It means that you're trying to
honestly understand these very reprehensible behaviors. Here's another one
that comes up often. This is what I call
the but men are not taller than women because Tom-- not Tom Jones. What's his name? What's the actors name? Tom Cruise. Tom Jones. I'm showing my age. Tom Jones was a was a
sex symbol in the '70s. So Tom Cruise is shorter
than Katie Homes who was his ex-wife, therefore aha! it's not true that men
are taller than women. The cognitive bias there is
that people take a single datum to falsify a statement that
holds true at the population level. So if you explain,
on average, men prefer to mate with
nubile, fertile women more so than
post-menopausal women, someone will put up
their hands and say, but that's not true because
my Uncle Joe is dating an older woman named Glenda. Oh gee, Darwin is dead. We're back to the
drawing boards. Of course that's not true. But again, that's the cognitive
vice that people succumb to. And this is the one that
irritates me the most because it is the
one that typically is levied by otherwise
sophisticated academics. They say that evolutionary
psychology is just a bunch of fanciful
post-hoc stories that you come up
with after the fact. Nothing could be
further from the truth as I will show you
in a few slides. This is going to be a
bit the technical part of the presentation. And then later, I'll
give you some sort of sexy, practical examples. So the epistemology of
evolutionary psychology, or for short, I'll
just call it EP. So the method of EP is really
comprised of three components. When you're doing
evolutionary research, you really are doing
these three things. You first have to
differentiate-- and I'll explain each
of these in turn. You have to differentiate
between what are called proximate
and ultimate scientific explanations. That's a fundamentally
important distinction. And I'll talk about
this in a second. You build what are called
nomological networks of cumulative evidence,
very, very important. Again, I'll explain this. And then you also
build what are called consilient trees of knowledge. Consilience basically
means unity of knowledge. Physics is more
consilient than sociology, not because physicists are
smarter than sociologists, but because physics has
organized its knowledge base in a way where there are
these organized, coherent trees of knowledge. Sociology hasn't. We can't agree in
sociology whether there is such a thing as innate
sex differences or not. OK? So I'll explain each
of these in turn. So let's begin with
this first one. So here I'm going
to discuss this one. The difference between proximate
and ultimate explanations. Much of science operates
at the proximate level. Most Nobel Prizes that
have ever been won have been won at
the proximate level. What does proximate means? Proximate means you're trying
to understand the how and what of a phenomenon. How does diabetes work? What are some factors
that increase the severity of the symptoms of diabetes? These questions--
the how and what, which is where much of
science operates-- those are proximate questions. Ultimate questions--
and by the way here, people think ultimate means
superior, it's the ultimate. That's not what it means. Ultimate means the
ultimate Darwinian why. Why would the mechanism have
evolved to be of that form? So it's not that
ultimate explanations are superior to
approximate ones, it's that you need both
levels of explanations to fully understand
the phenomenon. So again, you will only study
these types of explanations if you come with an
evolutionary lens. Now you might say OK, I'm
not really quite following what this is. So let me give you a
very concrete example. Take, for example,
pregnancy sickness. This is a universal
phenomenon that happens throughout time
and across cultures. Women, at a very predictable
point in their gestation, will experience
pregnancy sickness. The reason why we call pregnancy
sickness rather than morning sickness is because
it doesn't only manifest itself in the morning,
although typically, it does. So we call it, more
generally, pregnancy sickness. Well, what would be
a proximate story to tackle when it comes
to pregnancy sickness? Well, how do the hormonal
fluctuations of a woman affect the severity
of her symptoms? That's approximate question. The ultimate question is
why have women evolved this physiological response? Why is it that women,
at a very specific point in their gestation, actually
experience these very, very ugly and unpleasant symptoms? And the answer from an
adaptive evolution perspective, is that this is the mechanism
to protect the fetus in-utero from exposure to pathogens. At a very specific point in the
gestation called organogenesis, during the first trimester, if
the fetus is exposed typically to food pathogens-- things
that the woman will ingest, consume-- that could wreak havoc with
the development of the organs. Therefore, evolution has
yielded a very elegant, adaptive solution. Women tend to be repelled from
foods or other sources that have high teratogen values. They'll be attracted to
other foods that serve anti-microbial properties. Pickling-- the typical,
stereotype of a pregnant woman wanting pickles-- pickling has an
anti-microbial property. Women who experience
more pregnancy sickness are less likely to
have miscarriages. The outcome of the
child is greater if the woman experiences
pregnancy sickness. So when a woman
goes to her OBGYN and he or she will
give her a pill to attenuate those symptoms,
from an evolutionary perspective, you're doing
the exactly incorrect things. Now you might need
it because you might have to give a
talk that day at Google and you can't run every
three seconds to throw up. So from that perspective, from
that proximate perspective, it would make sense, but from
an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't. So here you see the difference
between a proximate perspective and an ultimate one. Sorry, you might not be able
to read this very clearly. But this now goes
to the second point. Here I'm going to
talk about how you build these nomological
networks of cumulative evidence. How do you build
evolutionary explanations? And is exactly the
opposite of this idea that we just sit
there, smoking a pipe, coming up with fanciful stories. It's the exact opposite of that. So here we go. So here, I'm looking
at the biological roots of toy preferences. Are toy preferences
innate-- biological-- or, is it, as social
scientists tell us, the means by which little
boys and little girls learn about their sexist,
arbitrary stereotypes. From the social
scientists perspective, biology has nothing to
do with toy preferences. The evidence points very
much against that position. So what I've done here is I've
built a nomological network. What's a nomological network? It's evidence stemming from
many, many different lines of evidence that
makes it unassailable that there is an inherent
biological root to toy preferences. So I took a lot of
effort to actually build this nomological network. Let's go through
it very quickly. This is from
developmental psychology. You could take children who
are too young to be socialized. In other words, by
definition, they haven't yet reached
the cognitive stage where they could be
taught by mommy and daddy to play with trucks and
dolls, and guess what? They already exhibit those
sex-specific preferences. Now you might say ho do you
elicit those preferences? It's either usually
when they reach to one of the toys or the
other, or through gaze studies. So little boys do look at trucks
much more than little girls, and little girls will
look at dolls and so on. So already, just that
one line of evidence is casting doubt on
the idea that there is no innate preference involved
with toys, but let's go on. Look at this one--
cross- species. Studies done with vervet
monkeys, with rhesus monkeys, and with chimps shows
the same sex-specificity of toy preferences. That's not looking like it's
all due to arbitrary, sexist stereotypes from the patriarchy. Let's go on. Clinical endocrinology. Girls who are afflicted
with congenital adrenal hyperplasia-- this is an
endocrinological disorder that masculinizes
morphological features, that masculinizes behaviors-- little girls who suffer from
congenital adrenal hyperplasia, what do you think happens
to their toy preferences? They become a lot
more similar to boys. It's not looking like it's all
due to random socialization, does it? Let's keep going if
you're not convinced. Cross-cultural study, Sweden. By the way, are there
any Swedes here? No? OK, so then I'll bash
on Sweden without-- In Sweden, there's something
called the Hofstede score. Hofstede was a
cross-cultural psychologist who scored countries along
different cultural values. Of all countries in
the world, Sweden scores the highest
on femininity. So if there is a
natural experiment where you could see whether
toy preferences in a feminized society
would somehow flip, Sweden would be the case. So this person
inventoried 40,000 toys in actual bedrooms
of little boys and little girls in
Sweden, and guess what? They had the exact same toy
preferences as everywhere else in the world. Already we've reached
enough evidence, but let's keep hammering it
so it becomes unassailable. You could do
cross-cultural studies with non-western samples,
because you might say oh, but Sweden is still a
westernized country. So you could go to
cultures in Sahara and in North African region that
have absolutely no Venn diagram interactions on many of
these cultural values, and yet, the sex specificity
of toys is exactly the same. Let's keep going. You could look at classics,
meaning ancient Greece. And you could look at
funerary art in tombstones. What is the art that's depicted? Little boys are depicted with
the typical sex-specific toys. And little girls with a
typical sex-specific toys. It's not looking like it's
due to the patriarchy is it? Pediatric endocrinology. You could take urine
samples from little boys and little girls starting at
age seven days until six months, and you show that the more
testosterone you have, that will affect
your toy preferences. I won't go through all of that. I mean, I guess I missed one
or two, but you get the idea. By building these nomological
networks of cumulative evidence stemming from completely
different fields, you then build an
evolutionary argument. This doesn't look like it's just
random, sort of storytelling, does it? Let's keep going. Here's another example. This one is a bit
more controversial because we're talking
about mating preferences. Men have an evolved preference
for the hourglass figure in women. My goodness, that's
very sexist to say. No it's not. Women, by the way, have very
clear morphological preferences in the types of men they prefer. For a sexually
reproducing species, you would expect
that the two sexes would have evolved preferences. It's called sexual
selection, one of the fundamental
mechanisms of evolution. So let's see
whether we can build an adaptive
evolutionary argument to explain this reality. Well, it turns out that the
hourglass figure medically has been shown to be a reliable
cue of fertility and health. So we're not just building
these evolutionary arguments while taking acid. There is actually
epidemiological studies that demonstrate that if you
have an hourglass figure, you're more likely
to be fertile. You're more likely
to be healthy. And so it doesn't take
much of an evolutionist to understand why there'd be
selection pressures for men to prefer women who have
the body shape of Beyonce more so than a male
Olympic swimmer. OK, let's keep going. This, actually, one of these
cited studies comes from me. Let me tell you the
background to it. A few years ago one of
my undergraduate students had finished his course
with me, and then came to me at the end of the
course and said, hey, I'd like to hang out
with you professor Saad and maybe serve as a research
assistant on some project. At the time, I didn't
have any research funds. I didn't have my chair
professorship yet. I said, well, I don't have any
immediate money to give you. He said, well, it doesn't
matter, I'll do it pro bono. Just give me a project. I just want to hang
out and learn from you. So I thought about what
project to give him and I contacted him and I
said, all right, I think I've got a project for you. How would you like to surf porn
sites for a couple of weeks? To which he answered, I
love you professor Saad. What did I ask him to do? I wanted to see, speaking
of search engines, the Internet allows us
to really get access to cross-cultural
data very quickly. I said go to as many sites
as you can find online where they advertise online escorts-- women advertising
their sexual services. My name is Linda, here is
my height, here's my age. And usually, they always
give you their measurements. Now of course it doesn't matter
whether their measurements are true or not. Because sometimes people
say, but what if she's lying? Who cares. That's not the point. The point is what
is she advertising? Because what she's
advertising is what's catering to men's
evolved preferences. And so I simply asked him to
code the waist and the hip. And, by the way,
in case you want to know later if you want
to take the measurements, the preferred waist to
hip on a woman is 0.7. On a man-- in other words,
what women like in a man-- it's 0.9 OK. So 0.7 is that marker. Well, the average
across 48 countries that couldn't be any more
different than one another was 0.72, exactly within
what you would expect. Let's keep going. Here's the hourglass across 286
Egyptian, African, Greco-Roman and Indian sculptures spanning
several thousand years. And also looking at
Joman figurines-- 155 prehistoric
figurines-- guess what? The hourglass figure comes
out across all those cultures. That doesn't seem like it's
due to the pervasive patriarchy as shown in
"Cosmopolitan Magazine." Let's keep going. I won't go through all of these
because you get the point. This one is the real killer. You ready for this? Congenitally blind men-- men
who've never had the gift of sight-- exhibit the hourglass
figure preference. Now you might say, well, how do
they elicit those preferences? They do it haptically. They give different mannequins. The congenitally blind
men check them out, and then they choose the
one that's the hourglass. That doesn't suggest that
it's due to media images. Those guys have never
seen media images. So again, I won't go
through all of these, but systematically, by
coming up with data sources from completely
different fields, you end up building an
unassailable argument. By the way, none other than
the great Charles Darwin himself had precisely done that. Now he didn't call it
nomological networks of cumulative evidence. This is a term
that came in later. For those you're interested,
you could check out a paper by Schmidt and
Pilcher that have done this. But when he wrote
"Origin of Species," the book that introduces the
idea of natural selection, that's exactly what he did. He came up with
years of observations coming from many,
many different fields, which, when put together,
makes his natural selection idea seem unassailable. So contrary to what
most people who don't understand evolutionary
psychology argue, which is oh, we just come
up with fanciful stories, it's the exact opposite. The evidentiary
threshold that we set before we decide that
something is an adaptation is actually much higher than
the rest of the sciences. All right, let's keep going. So this is exactly what
this curve is showing. Here's the threshold
that you'd like to reach in support of your hypothesis. Here's the threshold
that you'd like to reach to refute your hypothesis. And basically, each
of those squares that I showed you earlier is
systematically leading us up to that threshold. So now that was sort of the
more technical part of the chat. Now let's kind of give
you some breathing room. Are consumers born or made? You often will hear this-- is it nature or nurture? That's actually a
false dichotomy. And the example I like to
use is the cake metaphor. If you look here,
each of these are ingredients that constitute
elements of baking a cake. Then, I bake the cake. If I now tell you here,
please point to the sugar, please point to the
eggs, you can't. It's an inextricable
mix of all of it. That's what humans are. For most relevant phenomena,
we are inextricable mix of our nature and nurture. That's called the
interactioners viewpoint. Our genes interact
with the environment. So it's not only the environment
as many social scientists think. And no serious
evolutionist thinks that the environment
doesn't matter, but what we do say is you have
to take biology into account. Now of course in
my work what I do is I introduce biology
to the business school. If anybody here has an
MBA, undoubtedly, you can't get you MBA
without ever hearing the word biology mentioned. That's crazy because our
hormones affect the investment decisions that we make. If we're situationally
hungry or not, we decide to make
the decision a or b. So all sorts of very basic
physiological realities affect the decisions
that we make, whether we're employers,
employees, consumers, managers. And so what I try to do is
systematically introduce evolutionary theory into
the business school. I'll skip this part because
it might take a bit to cover. Evolutionary
psychology is not only about looking at
human universals-- things that are the
same across cultures. Evolutionary
psychology can also be used to explain why
cultural differences exist. So for example, some cultures
have very spicy foods, other cultures have
very non spicy foods. If I were cultural
psychologist, I would simply stop at that fact. I would simply point the
Malaysians have spicy food, the Swedish folks
don't have spicy foods. Good night, everyone. It ends there. An evolutionist says, no, why
do culinary traditions evolve to take different trajectories? Is there a fundamental
reason that can help us understand why
some culinary traditions are spicier than others? In this case, here's a
very spicy Mexican soup, and here is a very non spicy,
classic Swedish meatball plate. And there turns out to
be a very good answer. If you map the
spiciness of a cuisine against pathogenic density
across different environments, the data couldn't
be more perfect. Why? Because in hot
climates where there is a greater proliferation
of food pathogens, cultures evolve to
come up with a solution to a biological problem. Therefore, spices,
pickling, smoking, salting are all cultural adaptations
to a basic biological problem. So culture doesn't exist outside
the boundaries of biology, cultures exist
because of biology. Nothing is outside of biology. Here's a cool example
to explain something known as the variety effects. The variety effect is the idea
that when you go to a buffet, most of us will tend
to over eat, some of us more than others
because it triggers our penchant for variety
seeking when it comes to foods. Now for some animals, they have
a very high metabolic rate. So if you are a hummingbird, you
have to eat roughly three times your body weight in
a typical day just to survive until tomorrow. If you did that as a
200 pound individual, you'd have to eat 600 pounds. Well of course, we don't
have that metabolic rate, but yet we still
have this penchant to eat many different
foods, which results-- for example, if you go to
an all-inclusive vacation. Has anybody been to Club Med? Anybody? On average, I think
five pounds a week. So if you go for two weeks, I
don't care how much exercise you do, while
you're there, you're putting on roughly
about 10 pounds. Because at an
all-inclusive resort, it's almost impossible
for you to not succumb to the pull of
sampling way more foods than you otherwise would. And so here's very two examples. These are such simple
studies, but they explain something so profound. Take M&Ms that are one
color or multi-colored. The colorants is
tasteless, it's odorless. In other words, it doesn't
affect in any way objectively what happens. But which of these do you
think people eat more of? This one, because
the visual system is being tricked into
sampling more because of the variety of colors. Exact same study, but
using shapes in this case. Here is one-shaped pasta,
multi-shaped pasta. In other words, the pasta
is exactly the same. I eat a lot more of this one. Now this is actually one of
the studies that perhaps-- I mean, I'm fortunate enough
that my work not only receives attention among scientists,
but because of the type of work I do, often the
media comes calling. This is one of
those studies where the media came calling a lot
and you'll see in a second why. So I took here a principle
from animal behavior, literally called peacocking. In this case, you've got the
male peacock, here's the hen, and he starts exhibiting
this type of signaling to show the iridescent coloring,
the size of the patterns, the size of the tail-- all of this is what's known
in biology as a handicap principle. Why? Because for this animal to have
evolved such a burdensome tail, this tail actually goes
against its survival. It actually reduces
the likelihood of him taking flight
and avoiding predators. It actually increases
the likelihood of a predator seeing him. So how could it evolve? Through natural selection it
certainly couldn't evolve. It evolved through
sexual selection because it is actually
an honest signal of his phenotypic quality. He is saying, look,
despite the costs I am carrying for having
this tail, here I am. I'm the real deal. Pick me. So I take this idea and then
I apply it to human consumer behavior, and therefore, for
all of you rich Google types that are buying the Maserati,
you're just lowly peacocks. I got you pegged from day one. What are you doing? You're basically saying,
look, you little-- pretend they are males-- you can't compete
with me, because it requires for you to
play at a higher level to reach my signal. By the way, the upper
uppers, the highest echelon, actually drive very
non-fancy cars. Why? Any ideas? Yes? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GAD SAAD: No. Good answer. No. It's-- yes? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GAD SAAD: It's almost that. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] GAD SAAD: Exactly. Especially within
their social class. So let me say it. So if I am a billionaire
driving a Ferrari amongst my billionaire's circle. It's not really a barrier
to entry for their signaling because they could
match that as well. Therefore, it is
an irrelevant cue to use to demonstrate
my honest status. The way that I
would do that is I will buy a painting
that a three-year-old could have painted and
pay $100 million for it. Now that's an honest signal. It has to be wasteful. Just like the peacock
still has to be wasteful, throwing away $100
million on something that a three-year-old
degenerate could do, now that's impressive. I'm mixing it up for you. You guys are too
politically correct. Let's bump it up a bit. OK. All right, so therefore,
what I did in this study-- not a three-year-old degenerate,
a prospective three-year-old degenerate. Because at three years old, his
trajectory hasn't been set yet. So what we did here is we took
this idea and we actually-- and I say we, this is with my
former graduate student John Vungus-- we actually got a Porsche
and a beaten up car. This wasn't imagine
you're driving a Porsche, we actually rented a Porsche. And I always tell people, try
to get a granting agency to give you money because
you write, we're going to rent a
Porsche for the weekend for scientific purposes. Well, we did. And what we did for this study
is after they drove these two cars, we took salivary assays
to measure, what do you think? Testosterone. And what do you think happens? You put a young male in this car
and his endocrinological system explodes. Now in retrospect, you
all say, of course that makes sense, but guess what? Nobody in the business school
is looking at things like that. Somehow hormones magically
cease to be relevant when you enter the business world. It doesn't. It's an indelible
part of who we are. Let's go on This
is not my study. This is from some
British psychologist, but along the same lines in
terms of the status of a car. You take the exact same guy. You put him in a Ford
Fiesta or in a Bentley. You take the same girl,
you do the same thing, and you do opposite sex ratings. So for this guy, you ask women
to rate just how attractive he is. It's not how
attractive as a mate, which is a multi-attribute. Obviously, his physical
looks don't magically change if he's in
a Bentley or not. Apparently they do
if you're a woman. This guy is gorgeous. This guy is a degenerate. But for men, this didn't matter. In other words, men
did not evaluate the physical
attractiveness of a woman as a function of which status
symbol she was associated with. Now, I can guarantee
you that I could run this study in 50
countries of your choosing and we will exactly
replicate this finding. We will replicate
exactly this finding because the underlying
phenomenon behind this finding is rooted in
evolutionary psychology. It's not as though in Bolivia
and in Nigeria and in Japan this finding would be different. Same thing done with
a guy being shown next to a shady apartment
or a fancy apartment. And a woman-- same thing-- this guy is gorgeous,
this guy is not. Men couldn't give a damn
where the girl was shown. So you could do this with a
million different products and you'll get the
exact same phenomenon. This is a study that
we're currently-- this is myself with one of my former
doctoral students Tripat Gill. We've collected more data
since, so this could be probably updated to 2015 maybe. Here's what we did here. We created, ostensibly,
an online dating profile. Here's the guy. Here's stuff about me. Here's my favorite possession. The only thing we changed
is his favorite possession. He either has a red Kia. No disrespect to any Kia owners,
or he's got this Porsche. And then we asked
people to rate this guy. Now let me give
you the background to how I got the idea
to run this study. There was a famous
study done in psychology where they brought
a guy into a room and introduced him by ascribing
different academic statuses to him. Here is Joe Smith. He's a lecturer. Here's Joe Smith. He's an associate professor. And then when he
left, they would ask the people to tell their
perception of his height. Well it turns out that
with academic status, you grow taller. That's why I told my
wife, don't worry, you're not married
to a short guy. You're married to an NBA star. Because the reality is that
your perceptual system gets tricked by this status cue. And so what happened here? This guy was judged as taller-- there was what we called his
status elongation effect. He became taller, but
only in the eyes of whom? Women. What do you think
men rated the guy? Shorter. Which again speaks
to the psychology of intra-sexual rivalry. Both men and women
denigrate same-sex partners in a way that is
perfectly consistent with evolutionary principles. In this case, I am
threatened by a guy who may have higher status
than me, so I denigrate him. How do I denigrate him? Oh he's driving a Porsche, he
must be a little short runt. And so again, you see how
all of this psychology is playing into these basic
evolutionary principles. Very, very quickly let me do a
few more of these car studies. This is a study that was
done a long time ago. It might seem dated, but
it's actually very powerful, especially in
California, especially in a place like the Bay Area
here where a lot of people drive fancy cars. So here's what they
did in the study. At a red light-- this
was a field experiment-- at a red light,
they actually put-- these are the experimenters--
either a-- it wasn't these cars, this was
then 1968, so I just chose a fancy car
versus a non-fancy car. And they simply
looked at how long it took a person who
was-- wait, this person doesn't know that they're
going to be in an experiment. How many seconds when the
light turns from red to green do you exhibit
cues of impatience? Maybe you flick the
light, maybe you honk. Of course people were
a lot more impatient when the car that was blocking
them was lower status. That again speaks to certain
submissive dynamics that happen within social species. In this case, it's happening
in a very modern context in the way that we
respond on the road. In this case, in another
study almost 30 years later, they kept the status of the
car constant that's blocking. And then they looked at whether
the car that's being blocked would exhibit greater impatience
as a function of which car I was driving. If I am in a fancy
car, it'll take me less time to be irritated. And again, you could
see these types of dominance,
submission interactions across many social species. Let's move on. Now so far, a lot of the stuff
that I've been talking about it seems as though I'm looking at
male-based sexual signaling. But of course, that's not true. Women-- I mean in the
human context, and not just human context,
but across animals. Women, of course-- or females,
in the greater context-- will engage in sexual signaling. So in this case, this
is a female chimp. She will exhibit estrus-- that she is in a sexually
receptive state-- by sending certain
olfactory signals that are very
attractive to the males. Her genitalia will become
engorged, will become enlarged. And this is basically saying
that she is sexually receptive. So I took this idea
and I thought, well, how could we apply this
principle, which manifests itself across many, many
species to the human context and, specifically, to
the consumer context. And the idea was to
look at how women dress as a function
of where they are in their ovulatory cycle. And what do you think we found? When women are in the
maximum fertile stage of their menstrual cycle-- when they're ovulating--
they dress more sexily. They beautify more. Now that doesn't
mean, by the way, that they look at an ovulation
chart and say, oh geez, OK, there's ovulation, let
me dress with shorter skirt. It's a subconscious mechanism. I feel more sexy. I feel less bloated. I feel more desirable. My self-esteem is higher. And so all of these
mechanisms ensure that a woman is more likely to
advertise herself in the mating market when,
evolutionarily speaking, it makes more sense to do so. Now these studies are
unassailable because they're looking at very
basic physiological, hormonal, biological facts. That's why I very
carefully selected to do these studies because
it makes them a lot more difficult for my social science
colleagues to say, oh yeah, but this is just
due to learning. This is just due to culture. Because they're so basic in
their physiological genesis. Let's keep going. Switching gears. At the end of a successful
mating encounter, you might have a
child and so this is kind of the segue to this. Here's a study that was done in
Mexico in the Yucatan region. When a baby was born,
people would say, oh my god, he looks so much
like the father, even though objectively
that's absolutely untrue. That's absolutely untrue in
that the morphological features of a newborn haven't yet
sufficiently formed for you to be able to objectively
he looks more like the dad or he looks more like the mom. So something's going on. Not only do people
say, oh my god, he looks so much
like his father, but which side of the family
is more likely to say it? The mother's side because
the mother's side, from an evolutionary
perspective, wants to send a very clear
signal to the father that don't worry, this is your child. So before we had
DNA paternity tests and before we had the
Maury Povich show, where every second episode
is exactly that, we had to come up with
a cultural mechanism to ensure paternity certainty. And the way we do that is
by fakely stating, my god, he looks exactly like you. And by the way, if
you're wondering why these two gorgeous,
stunning kids are so gorgeous, that's because those
are my children. This is Luna when she was
very young, and this is Leor. They're now a bit older. They're in Southern
California waiting for me to go to the beach. I am from the beach to
come to Google and speak. Now I want to tell you
a little fun story. I mentioned this story
before, but I always love repeating it
because it demonstrates the power of
evolutionary thinking in understanding
our daily lives. These are the actual images, the
first images of Luna in utero. So for those of you
who are parents, you know that when the mother
goes the first time to OBGYN, usually you get those images. Most people are very
happy and proud. They celebrate this. They'll put it up on the fridge. We were no different. We put up this image and one
day my mother-in-law comes over to our house, looks at-- some people are
laughing because they know where I'm going with this. She looks and she goes, oh
my god, Gad, the baby looks exactly like you. So I made my daughter
famous because this was the first case
in science where the maternal side
of the family was trying to assure a father of
paternity certainty in utero. So I said, should I
be worried that you're trying so hard to convince
me that your daughter didn't go behind the bushes on me? She looks at me
she goes, oh enough with your bullshit
science stuff. Look at that. She looks exactly like you. Oh actually, she didn't
know it was a she because we didn't know what sex it was-- it looks exactly like you. Here's a study that was actually
just accepted for publication. This is Sigal Tifferet. This is myself and two other
young folks who helped us out. This is actually the
photo of my parents when they got married in 1950. They're still both alive. This was a study
where we looked at-- that this is going to speak
about paternity certainty. So you might say,
how do you apply this in consumer behavior? Watch. The data here is from Israeli
weddings where this author along with these guys-- they asked me to
come in on the paper to help with the
evolutionary story. And this paper by the way is the
longest, most circuitous paper that I've ever had in my
scientific career before it being accepted for publication. We've worked on this paper I
think for more than five years after the peer review process. That's how long it took to get
this paper through for reasons related to people's antipathy
towards biological-based thinking. So let me explain to you
what we did in this paper. We had data from 30
actual Israeli weddings-- Excel sheets--
where every person who attended the wedding, we
had how much money they gave. So in other words, in
the Israeli context, you don't give toasters and
whatever other appliances. You just give money. So Uncle Mordecai,
$180, Aunt Hannah, $200. And so we had all this data,
and so we tested two things. One of them is pretty
obvious for you to guess, the other one is not so obvious. The first thing we
looked at is the size of the wedding
gift as a function of the genetic relatedness
between the giver and the bride and groom. And what do you think happens? To the greater the
genetic relatedness, the larger the gift. In other words, people
modulate their investment in others as a function
of the genetic lineage. Now you might say, well
I could have probably predicted this without being a
fancy evolutionary scientist. The second hypothesis
you couldn't. Here it goes. If you take, for example, your
four grandparents, on average, they share-- each of them-- a quarter
of their genes with you. In other words, the
genetic relatedness is 25%. If you stop the
story there, they're all equally invested in you. But there is a second
element to the story. It's not just
genetic relatedness, it's genetic assuredness. How assured are you
of a genetic lineage? Well, your maternal grandmother
is assured of her lineage. There is no such thing
as maternity uncertainty. Your paternal grandfather
has two generations of paternity uncertainty. Therefore, we expect
the maternal grandmother to invest the most, the
paternal grandfather to invest the least, and
the two other grandparents in the middle. So we took this-- the fancy term is differential
solicitude-- we took this idea and applied it in
the following way. Does the matrilineal side
of the bride and groom give larger gifts than
the patrilineal side? And the answer is yes. This is the one for matrilineal. This is the one for patrilineal. So holding genetic
relatedness constant, when you come from
the mother's side, you give greater gifts than when
you do from the fathers side. No one would have
generated this hypothesis if you weren't coming
from an evolutionary lens. You couldn't have even
posited that hypothesis. I don't want to spend
much time on this. But remember earlier I talked
about that conciliar tree of knowledge? This is exactly an example
of a consilient tree when it comes to
evolutionary theory. You start with some general
evolutionary principles that are now unassailable. They've been tested
for over 150 years. These lead to what are
called middle level theories. Kin selection is
the mechanism that explains why people or
animals invest in their kin more so than in
random strangers. Based on kin selection, I
could generate hypotheses about genetic relatedness
and genetic assuredness, and then based on
that, I just told you the study that I mentioned. Therefore, what
evolutionary theory does is it provides you with these
elegant, organized trees of knowledge, very much like
you would expect in physics and chemistry and biology. And so one of the arguments
that I make and some of my evolutionary
minded colleagues make is that the social
sciences will eventually have to go through the same
revolution that biology did. To date, no working biologist
says that evolutionary theory is maybe right, maybe wrong. There is no chemistry
professor who is for the periodic
table and some who are anti-periodic table. The same thing has to happen
in the social sciences. For us to have the same
impact and same influence, we have to agree that there
is a set of core knowledge that after awhile
becomes unassailable. And the way you do that is by
building these coherent trees of knowledge. All right we're almost done. Let me just read you a few
quotes that are very, very powerful to really
drive the point home of the
importance of biology to everything that we do. This is an exchange that
took place on Charlie Rose. If any of you watch it,it's
usually late at night on PBS. He brings all sorts of guests
and they get into a really fun conversation. This is EO Wilson, who's
a very famous Harvard entomologist still alive. One of the biggest scientists
of the 20th century. This is James Watson,
the co-discoverer of the double helix structure
of DNA, Nobel Prize winner. And they're talking
to each other. So let me just read it for you. "Psychologist, most of the
practicing psychologists and theoretical psychologists
and the vast majority of social sciences,
who really determine a lot of the intellect that
goes into our policies, you know, and our
philosophies, our philosophies, have no collection at all to
their true nature of humanity or what human nature is
at a biological level. This is still a huge gap. And I believe that
we will start to fill that in a way that
will be useful in years immediately ahead. I see the coming-- the past
century was the coming together of chemistry and biology. This century will be the
coming together of psychology and biology. " This is
exactly what I do in my work. I marry psychology and biology. Now interestingly-- this might
interest some of the folks here who are more
practitioner-oriented-- practitioners of business
are typically a lot less-- they exhibit a lot less animus
to these ideas than academics. Because academics are typically
vested within their paradigms and therefore, if you come
along on your biology horse and if they feel
threatened, then they will put up resistance. Well, the practitioner
doesn't care. The practitioner simply
cares about what works. So if you're an advertising
executive and my theories can help you develop better
advertising appeals, go for it. And so here's an example
from way back in 1964. This could have been written by
an evolutionary psychologist. Let me just read it for you. "Because advertising,
effective advertising, is an appeal to human
fundamental needs, desires, and motivations, it is an
appeal to basic human nature. People the world over
have the same basic need for food, clothing, and
shelter, the same ambitions, the same egotism, and
the same temptations. The setting changes, the
climate, the culture, the idiom, but the basic
human nature is the same. " This is basically
evolutionary psychology. It's looking at these
human universals. And then this one is
the founder of one of the biggest advertising
firms of the 20th century. He's basically
saying if you want to understand how
to communicate, you have to understand
human nature. Again, this is very much
of a evolutionary argument. Almost done. Before I put up-- let me just-- Sometimes I get people
who would say, well, OK, but give me some very clear,
practical applications of the fancy
scientific work you do. Well here's one, which
will be the next slide. If good marketers, whether
they know it or not, understand human nature well. If you develop products
that are contrary to some basic principle
from human nature, the product will fail. So for example, McDonald
works well not so much because it gets celebrity
endorsers to support it, but it's because it
offers you a product that my evolved gustatory
preferences expect. Give me fatty, tasty foods. Well it's not difficult to teach
most children around the world to like that product
because, again, as I said, our taste buds have
evolved to like that because of the
environment of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty
that we've evolved in. So here's an example
that speaks to this idea. Romance novels are
almost exclusively read around the
world only by women. There is no culture. And if you can find that
culture, send me an email, I'll make you famous. You won't find it
because it doesn't exist. There is no culture where men
are the predominant consumers of romance novels. Now you might say, OK, so what? Well, if you want to
understand female sexuality, study the archetype of the
male hero in romance novels. It is the exact same guy. It's a cut and paste job
irrespective of which country-- and very different countries. It can be Pakistan. It could be Lebanon. It could be Bolivia. It could be Japan. The male hero is
the exact same guy. He's tall. He's a prince and
a neurosurgeon. He wrangles alligators
on his six pack. He's reckless in
his risk-taking, but he could only be tamed
by the love of this one good woman. Boom, I just read for you
every single romance novel. Not surprisingly, every
single cover the guy looks exactly the same. He never looks like this guy. Who? Is this is this
some VP of Google? I shall never be
invited again here. So this is not because
there is a conspiracy to promulgate unrealistic
images of masculinity. It's because marketers
understand what, in this case, appeals to women's
evolved fantasies, and they provide a product
that is consistent with that. There was a company-- I don't remember
what it was called-- that tried to move
away from that. They wanted to create a
new line of romance novels that broke the shackles of this. Guess what happened
to that company? It died. It died because it had an
erroneous view of human nature. It thought that human nature
is infinitely malleable when human nature is
constrained by biology. So I'm almost done. I think maybe two more slides. This quote right
here, I've always joked that if I ever
wrote an autobiography of my scientific life, it
would consist of one page. Basically, this quote. Why? Because this quote
perfectly captures what I have faced in
my scientific career. This is JBS Haldane,
who is a very famous evolutionary geneticist and also
a guy kind of like Mark Twain. He had this beautiful ability
with words, great quips. He said, when scientists
go through a new radical scientific idea, they go through
four stages of acceptance. When they first hear about it,
this is worthless nonsense. This is garbage. In my case, you're applying
biology to consumer behavior? What kind of heretic are you? You're a moron. Stage 2, as the evidence
starts coming in, well, this is interesting, but
it's a perverse point of view. Stage 3, this is
true, but who cares. Quite unimportant. Stage for, when the
paradigmatic wall breaks, oh, I've always said so. I've always loved
your work, Dr. Saad. I still have emails-- and I say this with
all due modesty-- I still have emails from
guys who had written to me when they were at stage
one, but they don't know that I've kept that email. Now they're writing
to me at stage 4, will you do us the honor? But I thought I was
a bullshitter who applied biology. Because that's
how science works. It's an auto-corrective process. Hopefully, the good
ideas eventually win out. And were almost done. Last slide. Dobzhansky famously
stated, "nothing in biology makes sense except in
the light of evolution." And if you walk away with
nothing other than this one quote, I slightly
tweak this to say, nothing in consumer
behavior or in business makes sense except in
the light of evolution. Here are some of my books. Thank you very much
for your patience. [APPLAUSE] JORDAN THIBODEAU: Thank you
very much for your time. We're going to go through
some questions real quick. If anyone has any
questions for the doctor, please head over to
the mic right there. If not, I'm going to jump
on the dory and we're going to go from there. GAD SAAD: That's either really
good news or really bad news. JORDAN THIBODEAU: Oh
I got one for you. Can you talk about what
male lions and step-parents have in common when
it comes to children? GAD SAAD: Oh, very good. Yes. I guess you saw my latest
Joe Rogan appearance. Is that where you saw it? JORDAN THIBODEAU:
No, from the book. GAD SAAD: From the book, OK. So what Jordan's talking
about is the following idea. When you have a pride
of lions, usually there is one, two, three
dominant males that really rule the pride. And there will be these
bands of young males who are now looking to
have their own tribe who will consistently test
these dominant males. Usually, they will lose until
one day nature catches up to the older guys and
they're either killed or they're ostracized out. The new males come in,
take over the pride. What's the first thing they do? They kill all the cubs. They kill all the cubs
because for a species that is going to engage
in substantial parental investment-- none more so, by the
way, than human males-- across animals and from
a male perspective, it makes no sense for me to
invest in the genetic package of other males. Therefore, I kill them. And that will lead females
coming into estrus. Now I've joked that
that's how you get a female lion into the mood. You kill her cubs
in the way that we-- in the human case we
play Barry White music. Some idiot on my comments
wrote, that's not how it works. He actually literally took
my words as literally true that that's how you-- of course that's
not the mechanism. The mechanism is different. But it is really what happens. You kill her cubs,
she comes into estrus. Now how do you link that
to the human context? Member the first
book that I mentioned at the start of the
talk, "Homicide?" The book that sort of
led me on my epiphany to apply evolution psychology
to consumer behavior. In that book, they talk about
how the number one predictor of having child abuse in a
home by a factor of 100 times greater than anything
else is if there is a step-parent in the house. And this has now become
known colloquially in science as the Cinderella effect. Because the story
of Cinderella is there is the evil
step-mother who loves her biological children,
but is differentially nasty to her step-daughter. And so again here, this is an
example where people get upset. Because then somebody
will raise their hand, well this is bullshit! I was raised by a
step-father and he's lovely. But nobody cares about
your personal example. It's the aggregate. OK. Smoking causes cancer,
but your Uncle Joe smoked and he lived to be 100. It doesn't matter. But again, people have this
visceral response against it. But that's an example of how
you apply a behavior in lion context to the human context. JORDAN THIBODEAU: Let's
have a seat over here. We have a live question. AUDIENCE: With the
example of the Porsche. It's an expensive item
and it sounds really cool. That's kind of like I
guess more of a complex. There's like a cultural, or
some sort of higher level recognition there so it
evokes like a primitive kind of response. Is there any research
into that or anything you've heard about that? GAD SAAD: Not sure I
follow the question. Can you rephrase it? AUDIENCE: Yeah, like a Porsche. We know a Porsche is an
expensive, kind of sexy object, and having one increases status. But, the recognition that
a Porsche is expensive and it sounds really
cool and stuff like that, that requires a
higher level of processing. So how does our biological-- GAD SAAD: Right. So the underlying mechanism is,
of course, not Porsche-related. In other words, it's in the
current cultural context that status has become
associated with the Porsche that that's what we get. In other cultures, it might
be the number of cattle heads that I own. In another culture, it might be
whether I'm a famous painter. Picasso was a profoundly
unattractive male by any measure. He was short. He was bald. He was overweight. He was not particularly
attractive in any way, yet he had an extremely
long line up of women who were more than
happy to mate with him-- very beautiful women--
because he was Picasso. So the underlying
phenomenon is not as though we have genes
for Porsches any more than we have genes
for pornography. It's that these
modern day products tickle evolutionary
principles that exist in us. That make sense? JORDAN THIBODEAU: Do
the next live question. AUDIENCE: Yeah. So as an individual
and consumer, how does one use this
knowledge to protect oneself from step-mothers, advertisers
and mother in-laws and things like that? GAD SAAD: Well, I mean
it's a broad question. I think to use a cliche-- knowledge is power. So to the extent that each of
us has a key-- in this case, evolutionary
psychology-- to help us understand human behavior,
then it's a very powerful thing to have. I will get students who took
my course 10 years earlier who will write to me and
say, hi professor Saad, I remember the lecture
where you talked about the evolutionary
roots of romantic jealousy, and I'm currently having such
and such fight with my wife because of such and such. And it perfectly
matches what you are-- So in other words, it's
not as though there is a prescription
for every syllable that I utter to a specific
practical application, but rather, having
that knowledge, allows us to better
understand everything. It allows us to understand
group dynamics of Google and why I'm going to fight
for the corner office because it serves
as a status symbol. So in other words, I'm
giving you a universal key for understanding human nature. AUDIENCE: Thanks. GAD SAAD: Cheers. AUDIENCE: First
of all, thank you so much for giving this talk. It was very interesting. GAD SAAD: Thank you. AUDIENCE: I want to ask you
about one of the studies that you talked about--
the wedding gifts. GAD SAAD: Yes. AUDIENCE: My question is,
how do you come from-- the data that you've
collected-- how did you come to a certain conclusion? For example, in Lebanon,
I grew up there. You know if my granddaughter
were to get married, my granddaughter is more
valuable to the family. So typically, families
give more gifts to the female that's getting
married than the guy. That might be a reason. There might be other reasons. How do you come
to the conclusion that it's an evolutionary
thing not something else? GAD SAAD: So several
ways to answer that. One is that, as is the
case in all science, you have to rule out
alternate explanations. If you can't rule out an
alternate explanations. Then your data is
not as convincing as it otherwise could be. But I also showed
you how we build these nomological networks. These nomological networks,
not one of the boxes is enough to convince you,
but once I show you the eight boxes, it becomes
difficult for you to argue against my position. So that's how you do
it in evolution theory. You accumulate
evidence stemming from many, many different
regions, many different lines of evidence, that it
makes it impossible for you to generate an
alternative explanation to explain the phenomenon. Thank you. AUDIENCE: Thank you so
much for coming today. GAD SAAD: Thank you. AUDIENCE: It's been amazing
to hear your presentation live and not just on podcast. Second, my question
is, through the lens of evolutionary biology,
what is your perspective on people that choose to use a
plural pronoun such as "they" or "them" since,
evolutionary speaking, they're born female or male? GAD SAAD: Right. So I recently gave a-- for those of you who are not
familiar with the question that was just posed-- this is really sort of
a big issue in Canada right now because there
is a bill that was just tabled and passed
called Bill C-16 which incorporates gender
identity and gender expression as part of
the rubric of hate crime. So in other words, if you do
or say or not say or not do something, that
could be construed as hateful towards
say the transgendered, then you could be
liable for a hate crime. And to the context of your
specific question of gender pronouns, a good friend
of mine and a colleague by name of Jordan Peterson
got into a lot of hot waters because he said-- and he's a very
accomplished scientist. He's a tenured professor at
the University of Toronto in psychology-- he said
you cannot force me, the government can't force
me, cannot compel me, to use specific pronouns
like zir and ze and so on. So I appeared in front
of the Canadian Senate and I testified
regarding that issue. My position is there's a
huge panoply of personhoods. Transgendered people exist,
the non-gendered exist, the non-binary exists. We should honor everyone. We should treat everybody
equal under the law. That doesn't mean,
though, that I have to celebrate your
personhood by you compelling me to come up with pronouns
that are nonsensical. So my personal
position is that we're threading on dangerous
waters with this bill. My point during the
Senate hearing by the way, was every single
word that I uttered in today's lecture
could be construed as a transgression of Bill C-16. Because when I'm talking,
for example, about innate sex differences, someone could
raise their hand and say, never in your course did you
mention the transgendered or the non-gendered
or the non-binary, and that marginalizes me. So literally,
evolutionary biology and evolutionary
psychology could become transgressive of this bill. So while I respect
everyone's personhood, that doesn't mean that it
should be anti-science. AUDIENCE: Thank you. JORDAN THIBODEAU: You can
have a seat if you want. GAD SAAD: It's hard for
me to sit on this thing. I feel as though like it's-- I've got this,
you've got nothing. Now it's forever on Google. JORDAN THIBODEAU: It's because
I'm sucking it in actually. Your book is critical
religion and what are the positive psychological
aspects of religion? GAD SAAD: Yes, great question. So in in chapter 8 of my book--
for those of you who took a copy, the chapter is titled
"marketing hope by selling lies"-- so that might give
you a general summary of what I think of religion. It's very hard to
eradicate religion because, ultimately,
we are the only being that we are aware of that
is aware of its mortality. And to the extent that we suffer
from this existential angst, our only solution to
that is to subscribe to some religious narrative. Because all religious
narratives ultimately offer you a solution,
quote, "to this problem." But here I'm torn,
because on the one hand, I appreciate the fact that
religion has some functional benefits. But on the other hand, if you
truly wish to pursue truth, then maybe believing
in wrong ideas, even though they
feel good, might not be a good thing to do. So I guess my thinking is few
people have the testicular fortitude to be
nonbelievers because it's a lot easier to be a believer. JORDAN THIBODEAU: What's
the most exciting frontier of evolutionary
psychology for you? GAD SAAD: Oh great question. I think it is to
apply the principles of evolutionary psychology
in practical fields. So for example, in
my case, I apply it in consumer behavior
in business. Now there is the application
of evolutionary theory in medicine. Now you might think, oh, but
hasn't that been done already? No. Most physicians will never
hear the word evolution ever uttered because they work
at the proximate level. My good colleague who was, by
the way, a guest on my show, Randy Nesse, one of the pioneers
of evolution and medicine. And is now trying
to make it part of the curriculum
of medical school that physicians,
future physicians, be trained in
evolutionary theory, because there are
insights that come from evolutionary principles
that you would typically not have access to if you
didn't have that lens. There's a field now
called evolutionary law where you apply principles
from evolutionary theory to understand whether
legal codes are consistent with
human nature or not. So I think the next
frontier is to move beyond the study of
mating behavior and so on. It's to take the key of
evolutionary psychology and use it to unlock
different practical fields. JORDAN THIBODEAU: Going back
to you comment on the car-- I have to reflect on my
own personal anecdote-- my first car when I was 18 years
old was a 1987 Volkswagen Fox. It had about
200,000 miles on it. Went around the sun multiple
times I guess or something. The engine was so loud
that I could literally have like George Clooney
and Angelina Jolie in my car with a pile of cash, and
I couldn't get anyone to come inside because the
car looked so terrible. But when I would drive to De
Anza for community college, I got stopped multiple
times for the car I was driving because it
looked like a good stop. But then once I upgrade my
car to like a Ford Focus and put my Santa Clara
University alumni plaque on that, I
haven't been stopped for like 10 years almost. So it's really interesting
because in your book you talked about if you're
driving a high end car, people are less likely
to honk when you're late at a red light compared to
if you're driving a cheap car, people will honk right
away because it's like, who is this person? But I wanted to ask
you, you had a point about how birth order affects
our psychology in families. Can you talk a
little about that? GAD SAAD: Sure. There's this gentleman by the
name of Frank Sulloway who is a historian of science
and a Darwinists who came up with an incredible idea
to explain birth order effect. Typically, when you
talk about birth order-- sorry, should I be looking at
you or is it OK to look at-- JORDAN THIBODEAU: Everyone. Yeah. I know I'm just too handsome. It's hard. GAD SAAD: Typically, when you
study birth order effects, it is studied from
the perspective of how parents treat children
of different orders differently. So they might treat the
firstborn differently than the last born,
and that's the genesis of birth order phenomenon. Frank Sulloway flipped that
whole script upside down. He argued that
no, actually, what drives birth order effects
are the children themselves. And let me just explain
that very quickly. It's actually an interesting
marketing problem. The fancy term is
called Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis. So it basically
works as follows. When a child is
born, one of the ways that it has to secure
maximal parental investment is to convince the
parents that it is uniquely different from
all the other children. So there are many
different niches I could occupy as a child. I could be the good boy. I could be the rebellious boy. So if I'm the first born, all
of the niches are unoccupied. Correct? Therefore, I could
pick any of them. If I'm the second born,
I have n minus niches. As I go down the sip ship,
there are fewer and fewer niches from which I could fill. And he argued that
that adaptive problem causes later-borns
to score higher on openness to experiences,
to be greater thinkers outside the box because
of this original problem that they have to
solve, which is how could I be maximally
different from all my other siblings? And whenever I
lecture about this, I always end with
the following-- can we guess what professor
Saad's birth order is? Boom. I was destined for greatness
cause I'm last born. I'm the last four. So that's the explanation
for the birth order effect. JORDAN THIBODEAU: That caught my
eye because my brother is like 6'3", amazing
athlete and whatnot. He was getting
recruited for college when he was playing for
Bellarmine for football, and I was always known as
Gabriel's little brother. And I was like crap, well,
I'm 5'7" nothing and I weigh nothing, so I guess I'll be
the one who either makes people laugh or is either
like studying-- GAD SAAD: The guy at Google. JORDAN THIBODEAU: The guy
at Google, you're right. So it's funny how
that plays out. Can you talk about the mobility
in friendship issue the US? How we're constantly
relocating and whatnot. And how can we overcome that? GAD SAAD: So that
part I was talking about cross-cultural
differences in friendships. And one of the arguments
that I've often heard-- when I was in graduate school,
most of the graduate students who were not American, would
always say the same thing-- you could make friends very
easily with an American, but the friendships somehow
seemed to be shallower. There are sort of
more ephemeral. And so I was thinking,
well, why is that? I mean it can't be
because Americans are more shallow folks. That certainly can't be it. And so the argument
that has been proposed is that the greater geographic
and socioeconomic mobility in the United States-- today I'm in Atlanta,
tomorrow I'm in Mountain View. Today I am a lower
economic status, now I'm a dot.com billionaire. That mobility causes people
to have a different outlook on friendships, whereas when
you come from the old country, meaning Lebanon, Italy,
Greece, India, typically the place where you're born,
that little village where you were born, is where
you're going to typically die. And therefore, that's closer
to the evolutionary environment in which we've evolved. The networks are much tighter. They mimic much
more the environment in which we evolved,
whereas the environments that we see in our
modern environment today are not the ones that
we have evolved in. That's why in California,
for every single of the most banal exchanges,
you have a 600 page legal disclaimer form. I remember where
we moved from what we moved from Montreal to-- I was a professor at UC Irvine-- the first place that
we rented, a townhouse, the rental agreement
was probably three times the size of the Camp David
Accords between Egypt, Lebanon, and the United States. In 1953, we passed a
certain fumigation, you can't sue us if in 17
generations one of your kids develops cancer. You're reading through
this, you're saying, I mean, am I renting an apartment or
is this like a nuclear reactor? What's going on? Well, the reason
for that is because of the anonymity of the current
environment that we live in. The social interactions have to
be mandated by these contracts. If you're back in Lebanon, well,
I just have to shake your hand and that's enough. Now that's not because the
Lebanese are more honorable. That's because, if
I cheat you once, that's the last
time I'm ever going to cheat you because I'm going
to be in that environment. So you don't need the
7,000-page contract to mandate relationships. So I argue that
that's what drives the cross-cultural differences
and the depth of friendships. JORDAN THIBODEAU:
For last question, there seems to be a push
against dissension in academia. Can you talk about that? Is this a recent development? GAD SAAD: What was
the first part? JORDAN THIBODEAU: There seems
to be a push against dissension in academia. Is this a recent development,
or is this something that's been going on since the
beginning of the university system? GAD SAAD: Well it's
certainly gotten worse over the past 30, 40 years. And so for those of
you who follow my work, I really have two hats. I both have the
hat of an academic who publishes in
journals and so on. But I also weigh in on
many of these issues-- the political correctness,
the trigger warnings, the microaggressions and so on-- that are taking place
at the university that it is making
it very difficult to have interesting debates
about controversial topics because everybody is afraid
that they might offend somebody. And actually, the
topic of my next book-- which I'm currently working
on-- is the tentative title is "Death of the
West by 1,000 Cuts." I go into what has led
us down this quagmire. So no, I don't think
it's a recent thing. I think it's taken
about 40 years of horrifying faux
intellectualism to lead us to the
place where we are at. And some of these movements,
in case some of you want to know, postmodernism,
everything is relative, there are no objective truths. Cultural and moral
relativism, identity politics, intersectionality,
radical feminism-- each of these movements are perfect
anti-science, anti-reason positions. Put them all together,
you get a cocktail. You get a melange
of utter nonsense that has led us to where we are. So I'd like to think
that there's a few of us now that are working
to fight against this. The news is still not good
because I will often receive emails from professors-- tons of them-- who will write to
me we were so inspired by you, thank you for your
courage, but shh, they'll never say it publicly. As if supporting
freedom of speech, freedom of
intellectual diversity is a controversial topic. They support freedom
of speech, but they're afraid to state so openly. So we're in a
difficult position. But a few of us are
fighting very hard to try to reverse the trend. JORDAN THIBODEAU:
Well, thank you very much for coming
here and speaking. GAD SAAD: Likewise. JORDAN THIBODEAU: You
flew across the country to make it here on
short notice, so if we can give him round of applause. [APPLAUSE]
