The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (29 page)

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Deep Rationality Parasites

T
HE
E
UROPEAN CUCKOO
, whose distinctive call is immortalized in the sound of the cuckoo clock, would not qualify for a good-parenting award.
Whereas most birds sit patiently on their eggs to keep them warm and protected, the cuckoo simply deposits its precious offspring-to-be in a total stranger’s nest.
To trick a bird of another species into caring for its young, the cuckoo first slyly removes an egg from the unsuspecting host’s nest, replacing it with one of its own, which often closely mimics the pilfered egg’s appearance.

But the scam doesn’t end there.
As soon as the young cuckoo hatches, its first act is to dispose of any other eggs in the nest, leaving itself as the sole occupant.
With the disappearance of their rightful young, the foster parents are now free to devote all their care and attention to their new only child.
The hoodwinked parents, commonly a pair of tiny reed warblers, don’t appear to notice they are rearing an impostor, which quickly grows to twice the size of its providers.
Meanwhile, loving mommy and daddy work like Sisyphus around the clock to keep up with the voracious appetite of the gigantic young cuckoo.

The cuckoo is an especially nefarious social parasite, deviously exploiting the adaptive tendencies of its fellow birds for its own gain.
But parasitism isn’t a rarity in the animal kingdom.
Virtually every successful organism attracts the company of leeches, moochers, stowaways, and manipulators seeking to take advantage of its evolutionary success.
Humans are likewise not exempt from parasites, and our free riders range from microscopic one-celled organisms to other human beings.

Fellow-person parasites often take the form of the various profiteers lurking in our midst, some of whom are adorned in religious robes, political sashes, or freshly pressed business suits.
But rather than hiding eggs in our nests, these miscreants seek to swipe our nest eggs.

Consider Bernard Madoff, the former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, who orchestrated the largest financial fraud in US history, bilking investors out of $18 billion (not to be confused with $18 million, which, though still a fortune, would be a thousand times less).
Just as cuckoos exploit the adaptive instincts of their fellow birds, Madoff exploited those of his fellow man.
In the same way a cuckoo tricks unsuspecting birds by producing eggs that resemble those laid by their victims, Madoff preyed on people with whom he shared common bonds of affinity and religion.
A well-respected member of a tightknit Jewish community, Madoff targeted fellow in-group members such as Steven Spielberg, Elie Wiesel, Mort Zuckerman, and Frank Lautenberg, as well as Yeshiva University and the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.
Operating as an insider, Madoff approached individuals of his faith with special offers.
Although people are naturally suspicious of anything that sounds too good to be true, a common heritage with Madoff provided a reason to trust that he was offering an inside deal.
This sense of tribal affinity also made it difficult to ask hard questions.
Interrogating a fellow member of the inner circle for hard information is like demanding receipts from your beloved Aunt Mildred—you just don’t question family.
But rather than helping members of the inner circle, who were told their investments were worth $65 billion, old Bernie tricked them into funding the escapades of the Madoff clan.

The reasons people give their savings to those they shouldn’t trust are surprisingly similar to the reasons they spend money on things they don’t need, can’t afford, or don’t even really want.
Just as in all species there is an arms race between successful organisms and parasites, the same is true for each of our subselves, which are locked in a race with outsiders who seek to take advantage of them.
Whether masquerading in the form of helpful individuals, caring politicians, or
friendly corporations, these manipulators seek to profit from our evolutionary needs by using our ancient wisdom against us.
But by discovering what they don’t want us to know, we can defend ourselves from nefarious malfeasance.

THE EXPLOITATION CONTINUUM

Exploitation doesn’t sound like something most people want to be a part of.
But it is not always a one-way street.
Sometimes the exploiter gives back.
Take the relationship between a clown fish and a sea anemone.
The clown fish takes advantage of the sea anemone by loitering near its poisonous tentacles for safety.
But the clown fish returns the favor by eating tiny parasites that can harm the sea anemone.
The clown fish gets safety and a meal, while the sea anemone gets a much-needed cleaning.
Everybody wins.
Biologists call this kind of two-way exploitation
symbiotic mutualism
, with each party benefitting the other.

In other cases the exploiter doesn’t provide much of a benefit to its host, as when a beetle looking for greener pastures hitches a ride on the back of a bison.
Biologists use the term
commensalism
to describe this one-sided relationship, in which one party benefits and the other is neither significantly helped nor harmed.
The sticky ties between the remora fish and the whale shark exemplify such relationships.
Remoras, which have an adhesive disk on the surface of their heads, attach themselves to whale sharks, which tend to be sloppy eaters.
When food floats away from the shark’s mouth, the small remora unhitches itself and collects the floating scraps of seafood.
In this hanger-on relationship, the remora wins, but the shark neither wins nor loses.

But sometimes the exploiter hurts its relationship partner, as when a mosquito or a tick takes a portion of its mammalian host’s blood supply.
Biologists call this relationship
parasitism
, meaning that one party benefits while the other is harmed.
Most parasites have some built-in limits to their greed, since their own welfare depends on the host’s survival.
If parasites get too greedy, the host might die, as when overzealous viruses kill the organism that provides their meal ticket.

But even nature’s checks and balances can’t always restrain the immense greed of some parasites, which can literally suck the life right out of their hosts.
The digger wasp, for example, paralyzes a caterpillar and then lays its eggs in the caterpillar’s still-living body, which provides a source of food when the wasp eggs hatch.
The wasp benefits—but the caterpillar is obliterated.

As with animals, other people can exploit us in mutually beneficial ways, as when a clothing advertisement uses our natural responsiveness to beauty to draw attention to a new line of threads that might actually make us more attractive.
At other times, human parasites might exploit us in ways that are only a little costly, as when a waiter pretends to give us inside information about the benefits of a more expensive bottle of wine, when its main advantage is that it will allow him to extract a slightly bigger tip.
But sometimes human parasites prey on our evolutionary tendencies to suck the life savings right out of us, as pyramid schemers like Bernie Madoff do to their investors.

Let’s consider how our ancestral needs open us up to exploitations, from the beneficial to the malignant, by exploring our love-hate relationships with Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and Hollywood Boulevard.
Along the way, we’ll probe the secret relationships between shoe companies, Hallmark cards, jewelry tycoons, and our occasionally bedazzled subselves.

WHY WE BUY

The word “marketer” doesn’t have a positive connotation for most people.
It may instead call to mind those advertising hucksters who broadcast “New and Improved!!!”
in fluorescent orange letters all over shiny new packaging for a product that was perfectly fine to begin with.
But not all Madison Avenue types are bad.
Marketers can sometimes be quite helpful—by identifying what people need and then helping them satisfy those needs.

If you are yearning for a car that lessens your carbon footprint, for example, good marketers are eager to identify that desire, make sure such cars are manufactured, and then inform you about the new car’s availability and special features.
Although marketers are technically
exploiting consumers, this exploitation is often mutually beneficial, like the symbiotic relationship between a clown fish and a sea anemone.
You want an environmentally friendly car, and marketers want to help you find the vehicle that best meets your needs.

If you have a product or service to market, an evolutionary perspective highlights something very useful: people everywhere have the same evolutionary needs, and those fundamental needs have a profound influence on their decisions.

From Alabama to Zanzibar, all humans need to affiliate with friends, get respect, keep themselves safe from the bad guys, avoid disease, attract a mate, maintain a loving relationship, and care for family.
Even if people claim that some of these needs have no effect on their personal choices, we know that all human brains are wired to pursue these ancestral goals.
Whether you are aware of it or not, even your desire for that environmentally friendly car may well have been stoked by deeper motives having nothing to do with saving the planet or even gas money (remember the study on “going green to be seen”).

Each year people collectively spend billions of dollars on products and services that help fulfill each of our evolutionary needs.
The need to affiliate contributes to a $160 billion mobile phone industry (that number is for the United States alone), serving the affiliative need of people so motivated to stay in touch that they text their friends while driving into oncoming traffic (r u kidding!?
2 gd 2 B true!
.
.
.
WTF!
.
.
.
crash :< ).
The need for status inspires people to accumulate such giant mounds of stuff that it has spawned an entire new industry whose sole purpose is to store our excess material goodies—the $22.6 billion self-storage industry.
The need to keep ourselves safe from the bad guys contributes to the $29 billion home-security industry that rigs our dwelling with alarms to keep away the villains (fence not included in the $29 billion figure—that goes to the $7 billion fencing industry).
And the need to avoid pathogens contributes to a $27 billion soap and detergent industry, designed to keep our homes, clothes, and bodies scrubbed clean of all those nasty little microbes.

And if you’re all cleaned up and looking for a mate, you might feel inspired to make a contribution to the billion-dollar Internet dating industry or one of the other multi-billion-dollar industries that provide
snazzy duds, cosmetics, cologne, cleansing creams, grooming, and gym memberships to make us look good for those dates.
Once you meet someone special, the need to hang on to that mate is facilitated by the $70 billion wedding industry (throw in a few billion extra for the honeymoon industry).
And if you’re not yet broke, the need to care for kin contributes to additional billions spent on relatives young and old, encompassing the $57 billion senior home-care industry and the $21 billion toy industry, which includes princess dolls and action figures based on Walt and Roy O.
Disney’s classic movies (but the costs of Disney amusements parks, Disney resort hotels, Disney movies, Disney music, the Disney channel, and Disney cruises are not included and go on a separate tab).

The need for friends, safety, status, lovers, and families leads us to fork money over to manufacturers that make products to satisfy these ancestral desires, and the manufacturers fork over a share to the marketers, who make sure we’re aware of the options and where to purchase them.
So far, so good—everybody wins.
But even symbiotic relationships can sometimes enter a grey area.
At what point does the relationship between manufacturers, marketers, and consumers cross the line from symbiosis to parasitism?
And how can you tell the difference?

GETTING PEOPLE TO PAY MORE AND BUY MORE

If you make a living selling something, the principles of economics suggest that you should seek to sell as many units as you can for the highest possible price.
This is much easier said than done, of course.
Of all the businesses started in the United States, 34 percent disappear within the first two years, and 56 percent are gone within four.
For any would-be capitalist tycoon, the critical questions are how to get people to buy your product in the first place and then how to get people to pay more for your product.
From an evolutionary perspective, both problems have a surprisingly simple solution.

Let’s say you open a shoe company called the Corner Cobbler, and you’re trying to figure out how much to charge for your shoes.
If you used the most common pricing strategy, called cost plus, you would take the cost of producing the shoes and add some extra on top for
profit.
But shoes can be expensive to produce, and you may quickly learn that most people are not willing to pay this much for your product, which has the unglamorous function of allowing them to step on things without hurting the soles of their feet—the utilitarian purpose of a shoe.
Yet those same people are willing to pay a lot more for the same pair of shoes if they believe this footwear will help them fulfill some additional social need, such as looking cool and attaining status in the eyes of others.
If shoe companies want to charge people more for the shoes they are hawking, they would do well to persuade consumers that their shoes are not just shoes.
This way, they might be able to charge $150 for a shoe that costs only $15 to produce, even if consumers are fully aware that the status-enhancing leather foot coverings are not really any better at protecting their toes than another pair selling for half the price.

Exploiters of our evolutionary needs can compel consumers to pay more for products that seem to fulfill those needs, regardless of the products’ actual utilitarian function.
This is precisely what makes Madison Avenue so effective.
The explosion of advertising in the twentieth century didn’t just inform people about products; it transformed those products into something much greater than the sum of their parts.
When was the last time you saw a car ad touting, “The Model S is really effective at getting you from point A to point B”?
You rarely see such ads because modern cars are intentionally hyped as being about so much more than mere transportation.
They are instead status symbols, family fun rooms, sexy-curved muscle sculptures, places to bond with friends, and protective steel armor systems that will keep us safe in any situation.