The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (25 page)

It’s not that men were consciously aware of a link between their purchasing decisions and their mating motives; they did not, in fact, have any reason to believe that women would see their flashy purchases.
Instead, activating the mate-acquisition subself simply led men to want the expensive items.
And with mating on their minds, they were more willing to shell out extra money to acquire those conspicuous goodies.

Just as bowerbirds flaunt the blue in their bowers for potential mates, men appear to flaunt the green in their wallets to charm their dates.
Does it work?
It probably depends on the amount of green in the wallet and the choosiness of the date.
Charming a woman used to hanging around with the Kennedys, for example, would probably require some serious display—maybe even an ultraopulent yacht longer than a football field with solid gold bathroom fixtures and barstools covered in whale penis foreskins.
We don’t know what Jackie Kennedy thought about this eclectically extravagant décor, but we do know that she married Onassis—on his lavishly appointed private island.

PEACOCKS, PORSCHES, AND PAPAS

The fact that a desire to acquire a mate triggers men to flash the cash is consistent with findings that male animals are more likely to conspicuously display their feathers, antlers, or bowers when presented with mating opportunities.
Men, it seems, are not always that different from peacocks.
When a peahen comes strutting into the vicinity, peacocks instinctively fan out their magnificently grandiose tails.
It doesn’t even need to be a real peahen—a picture of one will trigger the same show-off response.
Men appear to do likewise.
Merely sitting in a room with other women—or just thinking about a date—prompts the desire to spend conspicuously.

But while it’s tempting to draw analogies between them, are all men really like peacocks?
As discussed in the last chapter, human beings play more than one strategy, with some of us being fast and some being slow.
Psychologists Jeffry Simpson and Steve Gangestad developed a personality test that can assess the extent to which a man is like a peacock—inclined to invest all his energies into colorful and flashy feathers while contributing little toward helping the female raise the young.
In the language of life history theory, peacocks follow a fast strategy.
And just as some humans follow a fast strategy, the researchers found that these men are indeed very much like peacocks.
Simpson and Gangestad call these fast players “unrestricted” strategists.
The unrestricted playboy types are interested in having a good time, with little or no desire to settle down or raise a family.
And like peacocks, such men are more promiscuous.
They are willing to have sex with women even when they’re not in love, and they think it’s a fine idea to have ongoing sexual relationships with more than one woman at a time.

But not all men are like this.
Simpson and Gangestad found that a substantial proportion of men find promiscuity unfulfilling and even downright unappealing.
Unlike peacocks, some men are more “restricted”; they want to find one long-term romantic partner, settle down, and raise a family.
These men follow a slow life history strategy.

Our colleague Jill Sundie suspected that conspicuous consumption would be found primarily among fast, peacock-like men.
Working
with Jill, Josh Tybur, Kathleen Vohs, and Dan Beal, we tested whether putting the mate-acquisition subself in charge would have a different effect on men who are like peacocks and those who aren’t.

The findings couldn’t have been clearer: priming a desire to attract a mate produced conspicuous consumption only in the fast, peacock-like men.
For the marrying kind of fellows following a slow strategy, on the other hand, the same mate-attraction motive did not trigger a desire to put themselves on display.
If anything, these men didn’t want to draw attention to themselves by going over the top with flashy purchases (if these guys are going to spend big money, they want it to be inconspicuous).
By contrast, the fast peacock types went straight for the most blaring products.
They didn’t even care if the goods were genuine or counterfeit.
As long as they looked expensive and attracted attention, these guys wanted to display them.
In fact, the effects were strongest after the playboy-style guys thought about a romantic tryst with someone they’d never see again—a one-night stand.
As soon as the women indicated they wanted a relationship, these guys started losing their inspiration to spend.

This study shows that if you see a man cruising around in a shiny Porsche, gold plated or otherwise, he’s probably of the fast peacock variety.
When a man drives a Porsche, Gad Saad and John Vongas find, he actually experiences a surge in testosterone—the hormone involved, across the animal kingdom, in male mating displays, as when a peacock spreads his tail or a bowerbird struts in front of his bower.
It’s probably a good bet that the guy driving the Porsche is looking for a good time, not for a good wife.

Does conspicuous consumption work?
In one study, Jill Sundie and her colleagues compared women’s interest in young professional men who drove either a flashy Porsche or a modest Honda.
The flashy car impressed women, who indicated that they would rather go out on a date with the guy driving the Porsche.
But women weren’t blindly seduced by the bling.
When asked which man they would rather marry, the luster of the conspicuous car quickly dulled.
For long-term commitment, women preferred the less flashy, and likely more reliable, fellow driving the Honda.

THE ULTIMATE DRIVER OF BEHAVIOR

After the “peacocks and Porsches” findings were published, both Jill and Vlad got yet another wave of e-mails, calls, and letters from outraged Porsche owners.
These men (and they were all men) argued that their conspicuous consumption had nothing at all to do with the ultimate reason of attracting a mate.
They pointed instead to various proximate reasons.
Some said they had purchased the cars for their distinctive styling; others bought them because they liked the feel of a Porsche; still others simply enjoyed the experience of cruising with the top down on weekends.
As one man put it, he’d owned his Porsche for over two decades and been happily married to his wife for most of that time.
Of course, this raises the question why he purchased a Porsche back when he was single and whether it had anything to do with sparking the interest of this attractive woman.

Vlad received one phone call from the president of a European Porsche enthusiasts’ club.
This guy was clearly concerned, but unlike the others, he wasn’t surprised or angered by the findings.
Rather, he was distraught about what the study would reveal to the wives of Porsche owners about their husbands.
The same fellow later sent Vlad a German Porsche television advertisement that he thought “might be related” to the study.
In the ad, a beautiful woman in a long raincoat walks by a shiny new Porsche in a mysterious dark alley.
She is struck by the awesome beauty of the car and begins to caress its smooth angles flirtatiously.
Finally, unable to resist, she opens her coat to expose her almost naked body to the Porsche.

Not very subtle.
But a superb depiction of the ultimate reason for buying a Porsche.

Once again, when we observe people doing seemingly foolish things like throwing away money to have their Porsches or their bathroom fixtures plated in gold, there is often more going on than meets the eye.
Although conspicuous consumption might appear to be vain and wasteful, such behavior can serve an important function at a deeper evolutionary level.

Our choices have multiple causes; some obvious, others obscure.
We are aware of some of the proximate causes of our behavior.
If
you’ve ever purchased a luxury car, you might have spent a lot of time thinking about its eye-popping leather interior or its chrome-plated engine that blasts from zero to sixty in a few milliseconds.
And if you bought a hybrid car, you may very well have been thinking about how the environmental benefits outweighed the hefty price tag.
But most of the time we are not consciously aware of the underlying ultimate reasons for our choices.

W
HEN IT COMES
to mating purchases, a person’s choices can be very different based on one particularly important biological factor—whether that person is male or female.
For example, men use conspicuous consumption to attract mates but women don’t.
In fact, sex differences go much deeper than conspicuous consumption.
If you want to predict where a person is likely to invest his or her limited resources, what he or she is likely to value, and which products he or she is likely to buy, perhaps the most important question to ask is this: Are we are talking about a man or a woman?
In the next chapter, we look more closely at how men’s and women’s decisions differ—and why.
We start by exploring a puzzling aspect of human culture: Why do men in some societies pay several years’ income for the company of a woman, whereas in other societies a woman’s family pays an immense dowry to buy her the company of a man?

8

Sexual Economics: His and Hers

I
N
M
ARCH
2008, Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign his position as governor of New York, steeped in scandal over his involvement with the Emperor’s Club VIP escort service.
Spitzer had racked up over $80,000 in bills for services that are, even in the free-wheeling Empire State, decidedly illegal—as he no doubt knew, having previously served as New York’s attorney general.
In the media frenzy that followed, reporters discovered that some of the world’s wealthiest men had, like Spitzer, paid handsomely for the services of Emperor’s Club escorts.

For many of us less tycoonish proletarians, an astonishing part of the scandal was how little escorting $80,000 would buy from this particular enterprise, whose website advertised a “social introduction service for those accustomed to excellence.”
The website specialized in introducing “gentlemen of exceptional standards” to women who included “fashion models, pageant winners and exquisite students.”
To make consumers’ decisions easier, the website included prices in American dollars, British pounds, and euros, with a wide choice of female companions ranked from three diamonds to seven diamonds, depending on “the model’s character and the grace with which she handles public relations/interactions.”
Alluring photos of the women in high-fashion, though typically low-coverage, outfits drew attention to their stunningly graceful curves, if not their social graces.
For the
company of a woman ranked with seven diamonds (presumably for having the most character and grace), a fellow would have to shell out $3,100 for just one hour’s worth of escorting.
If he wanted a twenty-four-hour period of escortship, the bill would be $31,000 (more than enough to buy a fully equipped new Prius).
Potential customers interested in something slightly less pricey could settle for a three-diamond model at a mere $1,000 an hour.

What some men pay for an hour’s worth of a woman’s company, other men pay for a lifetime’s.
The going rate for a wife in Afghanistan, as reported by the
Guardian
, is £2,000 (about $3,140).
Although this might sound like pocket change to one of the Emperor Club’s VIPs, it is two years’ income for a typical Afghan.
Down in sub-Saharan Africa and across many parts of Asia, the cost of a bride likewise runs to more than a man’s entire annual income.
Most men in those countries will have to save every penny even to be considered as a potential husband, and many still won’t have enough to qualify.

Why are men willing to pay so much for the company of a woman?
This question is as much about mammalian biology as economics.
It’s the question at the heart of a thorny issue about whether men’s and women’s psychologies are the same or different.
While the sexes are often more alike than dissimilar, here we examine an important reproductive difference between them.
We will see how this simple biological difference in reproduction provides insight into much more than prostitution and marriage.
It also shapes how men and women make decisions about which products to buy in a recession, how big a tip to leave at a restaurant, and even how high a credit bill they are willing to run up.
To explain how, we next introduce you to the “his” and “hers” versions of our subselves.

WHY DO MEN PAY SO MUCH FOR THE COMPANY OF A WOMAN?

Economist Siwan Anderson studies
bride price
—the payment made by a groom’s family to the family of his future bride.
Anderson contrasts the bride price with
dowry
, a payment made by a bride’s family to the groom’s at the time of marriage.
While people in Western societies may be more familiar with the concept of dowry, bride price is actually
much more prevalent around the world.
Murdock’s World Ethnographic Atlas
of 1,167 preindustrial societies shows that bride price is found in fully two-thirds of the world’s societies, whereas dowry is found in less than 4 percent.

Why is bride price so prevalent?
Anderson believes that bride price has generally served, at least in part, as payment for a woman’s fertility.
The price of a bride has historically been linked to virginity, with young, healthy virgins commanding the highest prices, and women who already have children often not bringing any bride price at all.

In the language of evolutionary biology, the economics of bride price are linked to the biological principle of
minimum parental investment
.
In any mammalian species, humans included, reproduction requires females, at a minimum, to carry an energetically hungry fetus for several months and then nurse it afterward.
Males, by contrast, are biologically exempt from paying the high cost of reproduction.
The minimum male requirement is a donation of sperm.

Human males don’t get a completely free ride, though.
Because human babies are born especially helpless, their chances of survival and success in life increase dramatically if the father hangs around to provide resources for the infant and the mother.
So before a woman agrees to the possibility of becoming pregnant and incurring the high biological costs of reproduction, she and her family often demand evidence that a potential suitor is willing and able to provide resources.
Forking over a substantial portion of his income, whether by paying a bride price or purchasing a diamond engagement ring, is, for the man, like making a down payment, indicating a commitment to stick around and provide resources over the long haul.