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The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think, by Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius
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Why are Amazonian hunter-gatherers better at logic than Harvard students? Why did the Zambian president reject food donations during a famine? And why do billionaires work so hard—only to give their hard-earned money away? In this animated tour of the latest in behavioral science, psychologist Douglas T. Kenrick and marketing professor Vladas Griskevicius argue that while our decision making may seem superficially irrational, our misjudgments are the result of a psychological mismatch between ancestral drives for survival and our modern lifestyles. Ultimately, The Rational Animal offers an uplifting message—that while our brains may still house caveman impulses, we have evolved to be smarter than we think.
- Sales Rank: #463019 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-09-10
- Released on: 2013-09-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Sheer stupidity is what economic rationalists see when Elvis Presley buys 100 glitzy Cadillacs, when New York governor Eliot Spitzer pays as much as $80,000 for escort services, and when Steven Spielberg invests with Bernie Madoff. But Kenrick and Griskevicius see something more complex. In these apparently stupid decisions, they discern the results of an evolutionary history that impels men and women to ignore their own immediate self-interest in ways that ultimately foster the biological success of the species. That biological success, the authors argue, depends on a human identity that evolution has partitioned into seven separate subselves, each serving a different fundamental human need: self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and kin care. When the environment triggers behaviors inscribed in any of these subselves, economic rationality may go out the window. Some readers may protest that the authors are offering biological justifications for foolishness. But the authors actually provide readers with helpful strategies for managing their evolutionary subselves prudently. A persuasive—and entertaining—look at the Darwinian dynamics of decision making. --Bryce Christensen
Review
"A persuasive--and entertaining--look at the Darwinian dynamics of decision making."--Booklist
"Why do we overspend, underinvest, and make seemingly poor decisions? The Rational Animal shows that the answer comes from a simple, but often overlooked place: Our animal ancestors. ... But rather than making us foolishly irrational, looking deeper inside ourselves reveals a surprisingly brilliant beast."--Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On
"...a fascinating, compelling, and fun case that people's decision-making embodies a deep evolutionary rationality rather than a superficial economic rationality. If you want to ...really understand what is going on in modern consumerist capitalism-- to dive deeper into our paleo-rationality than Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman have dared to go, you must read this book."--Geoffrey Miller, University of New Mexico, and author of The Mating Mind and Spent
"Vigorously investigated... Sharp, piquant science/behavioral-economics writing."--Kirkus Reviews
"Do you want to understand all kinds of human judgment errors that seemed inexplicable before? And do you want to be able to profit handsomely from that new and deep form of understanding? Then don't miss the profound insights of this groundbreaking book."--Robert B. Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
"The Rational Animal is so persuasive that it could convince an ardent Wall Street economist to throw away his copy of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and replace it with Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species."--Noah J. Goldstein, UCLA Anderson School of Management, and coauthor of Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive
About the Author
Douglas T. Kenrick is a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and the author of Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.
Vladas Griskevicius is McKnight Professor of Marketing and Psychology at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He lives in Edina, Minnesota.
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Perspective.... but Who is It Responding To?
By Kevin Currie-Knight
There are two schools of thought about human rationality: the economics profession models humans as rational calculators, and the behavioral psychologists (in books like Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions) model humans as decidedly irrational. Both, say the authors of "The Rational Animal," are partly right and mostly wrong. To a large degree, humans do make decisions based on weighing costs and benefits, and humans do have many "blindspot" areas where their decisions are often less than rational.
But instead of asking whether we are or are not rational, these authors use evolutionary psychology to show that, given our evolved brains, many of the areas where humans look irrational exhibit a hidden rationality. So, several behavioral economic studies show that humans have a loss aversion: we value things higher when we are faced with losing what we possess than when gaining them for the first time. (In concrete terms, we will pay a lower cost to attain a thing than we would to give it up once we have it.)
The authors would respond to this above tendency as follows; we have several 'evolutionary selves' - mate attractor, survival expert, social networker, parent, etc - and each of these serves an evolutionary function and has slightly different preferences. So - and this is verified in studies the authors rehearse - when our 'mate attractor' self is primed (by having people look at pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex - we exhibit less risk aversion and are more aggressive in the amount of risk we often take. But when our 'parenting' selves are primed - by having people read stories about happy families - we become more 'conservative' in our riskiness behavior. (This, because in evolutionary terms, attracting mates often requires taking risks while raising successful offspring often requires more stability and less risk.)
So in this and other areas, some of our seemingly irrational tendencies have a deep rationality to them (those who raised successful offspring were less risky, and their loss aversion helped them survive. So, when we are loss averse, we are doing what made sense for our ancestors.)
Here is my big problem with this admittedly very interesting book. I am not sure the authors are saying anything that most economists (on the one side) and behavioral psychologists (on the other) would really object to. When economists model humans as wholly rational actors, it is WIDELY known among economists that this is a model valued for its simplicity, not its descriptive accuracy. (There are only a few more extreme economists who take this model as an accurate description.) And conversely, behavioral psychologists who say that many human behaviors are irrational, they mean irrational according to the standard of making the decision that makes the most rational sense given the context in which the decision is made. In fact, Dan Ariely's big selling book on why humans are often irrational is called "PREDICTABLY Irratioanl" and has a subtitle about what the 'hidden forces' (often, the evolutionary forces) that create those blind-spots in human rationality.
So, what this book does is gives us a good, plain-English survey of evolutionary psychology and how it helped shape current thought processes that often appear irrational (ironically, something similar to what Ariely does in the book these authors treat as a foil). What this book is not is an argument for anything new. The only reason it might seem novel is because the authors do not represent the present state of economics or behavioral psychology very accurately.
Still worth three stars for being really interesting, though.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
It's a numbers game! Entertaining and Thought Provoking Read!
By ppzahka
The Rational Animal really builds upon social psychology world that I was first exposed to when reading Robert Cialdini's "Influence." It really gets to the physiological reasons of why we do things, which after you get under the surface is incredibly simplistic. When it comes down to it, the core concepts of evolution drive many of our behaviors where we know it or not. The authors talk about these seven evolutionary motivations (Self-Protection, Disease Avoidance, Affiliation, Status, Mate Acquisition, Mate Retention, & Kin Care). After reading this book on a cross country flight, I came away both incredibly entertained, via the authors' colorful and edgy examples, and also a lot more knowledgeable about the world that we live in.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Some radical ideas and arguments
By NJ
Rational Animal provides strong thoughtful counterpoints to many behavioural finance (BF) theories. It cheats, in a way, by redefining "rationality" that behavioural economists love to mock. However, its biggest achievement is in highlighting the BF theorists' tendencies of simply exposing the human idiosyncrasies without providing explanations.
Right at the start, the authors make a useful distinction between the proximate and ultimate causes behind our activities. Their idea - that the actions that appear illogical from the viewpoint of rationality involving only the causes and effects surrounding the action alone may still be explainable through evolutionary tendencies - is radical and well made. Clearly, the authors are proposing a different idea of "rationality" which is far removed from the textbook mathematical variety involving a handful of direct variables and one that tries to encompass the unfathomed evolutionary goals.
The book also introduces a good "selfs within self" or seven multiple personalities' model to explain our behavioural inconsistencies. That humans are not computers and even the same individual does not respond identically to the same circumstances at different points is known to all real life beings but not understood or accepted as logical by the theoreticians. The authors' model is a good attempt at providing some explanation behind this irrational oddity. The section is littered with some good new studies and results - like the modified Prisoners Dilemma experiments involving family members to show the role played by trust and genes in rationality.
Separately, there are good explanations for why we overestimate our own skills (ie, how over 90% of us possibly think we are above average in over 90% of things!). The explanation that they have evolutionary functioned as a defence mechanisms when faced with dangerous situations may appear stretched at first. However, the studies of intuitive biological/physical responses of our behaviour (raising of white blood cells while watching photos of sick people or a male testosterone rise around an ovulating female) show why our views of rationality need a modification to accommodate the subconscious, almost intuitive bodily responses shaped by our evolution. The point of overconfidence inducing the risk-taking and hence has an evolutionary bias is truly staggering.
The section involving examples of how people solve many BF study problems rationally when the problems are presented in the frequency form but fail when described in the probability form too has some radical departures. The BF economists have repeatedly shown how the solutions we reach to any problem depends on how the issue is framed (the frame dependence) to point to our irrationality. There is nothing new in this argument, but these authors provide some evolutionary twists: in the example of frequencies versus probabilities, they claim that the later is a new mathematical invention and not yet evolutionary natural like the former.
The short book almost runs out of any new points to make somewhere around the two-third mark and turns banal. The "his versus her" section is out of place, where most explanations and examples are pretty generic. The book discussions turn completely purposeless without new perspectives when the topic moves to the behaviour of the parasites to explain our consumption or even corporate behaviour. It all becomes a bit silly and preachy by the end when the authors begin to discuss how we can avoid someone peddling their wares while trying to act in our interest. The advises become as simple as sleep before you make a decision!
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