The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (30 page)

Cars are not unique in this regard.
Modern clothing is about more than keeping your corporeal person protected from the elements, housing is about more than having a roof over your head, and even food is rarely about the physiological need to eat.
If it were, advertising would proclaim, “Come to the Olive Garden—we’ve got your calories right here!”
or “If you’re looking to fill your stomach up efficiently, look no further than Red Lobster.”
To coax us into paying premiums for basic products, companies have persuaded us that we’re not paying for just a shrimp, just a car, or just a shirt.
These products
are instead so much more valuable because they help fulfill deeper ancestral needs.

Let’s return to your Corner Cobbler shoe business.
By making it seem like your shoes can fulfill the need for status, you can charge a higher price.
Perhaps you’ll want to change your name to The Pampered Paw.
But your goal to sell as many shoes as possible is going to come up against another inherent obstacle: the raw number of consumers.
Shoes last a while, and people only need so many pairs.
Or do they?

A hundred years ago, an average American had around two pairs of shoes—one for everyday wear and a nice Sunday pair.
Given the utilitarian function of shoes to protect the feet, having just a couple pairs was sufficient to meet this need.
But what if shoes could help fulfill multiple needs?
And more importantly, what if different pairs of shoes were required to fulfill each of those needs?

Some shoes, for example, can help you achieve status at work or on the playground (think Bruno Magli or Michael Jordan).
Others can help us achieve mating goals (think Manolo Blahnik stilettos).
Others can help you be healthier, like those North Face trail runners or Sketchers Shape Ups.
And then, of course, there are shoes for wearing when casually hanging out with friends, and yet other kinds of cozy footwear for wearing at home with the family, and still others for when you need serious protection from the elements.

Has the shoe industry’s diversification motivated the average Joe and Jane to buy more shoes?
Shoe betcha!
A typical American man today owns five pairs of shoes, while a woman owns eleven.
When it comes to more affluent individuals,
Time
magazine reports that higher-stepping men own an average of twelve pairs, and upscale women own an average of twenty-seven, with 19 percent owning more than fifty pairs of shoes, inching closer to former Philippine first lady and fanatical shoe aficionado Imelda Marcos.
This is good news for your shoe business.
Rather than being limited to a best-case scenario in which every person owns a pair of shoes, now you can sell every person seven pairs.
After all, each of your evolutionary needs is fundamentally important, and each of your subselves must have its shoe needs covered.

Across many industries, exploiters of our evolutionary needs have successfully persuaded consumers that we need different variants of essentially the same product.
As with shoes, these different variants are often targeted to our different subselves.
Consider greeting cards.
How often do you need to “greet” people?
It turns out that Americans feel compelled to greet people quite a bit, as reflected in the $7.5 billion greeting card industry.
Companies like Hallmark have helped institutionalize holidays and “special occasions” that require greeting, and many of these greetings are directed specifically at our different subselves.
Happy Mate Acquisition—It’s Valentine’s Day!
Happy Mate Retention—It’s Our Anniversary!
Happy Disease Avoidance—Get Well Soon!
Happy Status Striving—Congratulations!
Happy Affiliation—oops, did you forget to send those “Thank You!”
cards?
Better get the “I’m Sorry!”
ones.
Happy Kin Care—We’re Expecting!
Which card—It’s a Boy!
or It’s a Girl!—is appropriate for the baby shower?
And you’d better not forget to greet that woman who cared for you—Happy Mother’s Day!
And don’t forget to send another special Hallmark greeting to dad on Father’s Day!

If you want to greet people properly, though, you should really send a gift as well.
Perhaps some flowers or candies, or maybe something a little more practical, like a gift card for Amazon or iTunes.
Special occasions and holidays are also festive times, and it would be downright insensitive of us if we didn’t let our friends and neighbors know just how festive we feel by buying some decorations—at Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and, of course, the bedecked behemoth of them all, Christmas.
The monthlong holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a veritable orgy of spending—to the tune of $165 billion a year.
There is a reason why the Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday; this is when many retailers turn a profit and move their ledger books from the red into the black, thanks to the millions of shoppers who want to spend their money so badly that they wait in lines outside the store throughout the night.

Is this symbiotic mutualism or parasitism?
Do both companies and consumers benefit by inspiring shoppers to purchase more shoes, more greeting cards, and more presents for an ever-increasing number of holidays and special occasions?

Rather than genuinely fulfilling our evolutionary needs, many of these purchases might instead simply make us feel like those needs are being met.
This is because the companies and marketers that stand to profit from our spending often pander to our ancestral cravings by recasting whatever product they’re pushing to make it appeal to an otherwise disconnected evolutionary need.
You need to attract a mate?
How about some new shoes!
You need to gain some status?
How about some new shoes!

On nature’s exploitation continuum, the relationship between consumers and the companies who target them is often less symbiotic and perhaps more commensal—the middle ground between symbiotic mutualism and parasitism.
Many companies are like remora fish, attaching themselves to our wallets and snatching up the dollars that drop out during our sometimes sloppy spending.
It certainly beats being paralyzed so that someone can lay eggs in our flesh for their offspring to feed on, right?
Well, as we discuss next, that’s what “they” would like you to think.

SWIMMING (AND SPENDING) IN INFESTED WATERS

The yellow tang is a brightly colored fish that resides in the tropical reefs of the Indian Ocean.
When it needs a deep-sea cleaning, the yellow tang looks for its symbiotic buddy, the cleaner wrasse.
The tang recognizes its symbiotic partner by the bright lateral stripe running down the length of its body.
But before the yellow tang will grant access to its sensitive gills and mouth, the cleaner wrasse must first perform a secret dance to win the tang’s trust, like entering a PIN number into the fish’s neurological automatic bank teller machine.

This code system normally works out well, except that near the same reef lurks another small fish called the saber-toothed blenny, which is almost identical in size and appearance to the cleaner wrasse.
It even sports the same shiny stripe down its back.
If approached by a yellow tang, the blenny also knows the secret dance, which gives it complete access to the most private parts of the big fish.
But once allowed in, instead of providing a service, the blenny uses its saber-like teeth to rip a chunk of flesh from the unsuspecting client.
Rather than
helping the yellow tang rid itself of parasites, the saber-toothed blenny is a parasite—in disguise.

Like the saber-toothed blenny, human social parasites often try to make themselves look like the good guys, and they even know all the right moves to gain our trust.
But once you let them in, they’ll rip you off by taking a bite out of your wallet.
Let’s look at the ways in which our evolutionary tendencies can open us up to exploitation by those lurking social parasites.

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR A ROCK?

The first known diamond engagement ring was commissioned for Mary of Burgundy by the Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1477.
Later, the Victorians regularly exchanged “regards” rings set with birthstones.
But diamonds were almost unheard of by most people until the 1930s, when the De Beers group deployed a two-tentacled strategy unabashedly intended to exploit us.

De Beers was founded as a mining operation in 1888, after an 83.5-carat diamond was found in present-day Kimberley, South Africa.
Financed by the Rothschild family, the company began consolidating smaller outfits and quickly grew into a small empire.
In 1927, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German immigrant who had previously founded another mining company backed by financier J.
P.
Morgan, managed to wrest control of De Beers and truly maximize its exploitative prowess.

Oppenheimer, concerned that new diamond mines were being discovered throughout Africa, worried that the increased supply would swamp the market and force prices down.
Some experts today believe that if gem prices were determined by a free open market, a diamond might fetch between $2 and $30.
But chances are that either you or someone who loves you has been compelled to pay substantially more for this lump of compressed coal—and you can thank De Beers.

To keep prices high, Oppenheimer solidified De Beers into a diamond cartel.
After gaining control of 90 percent of the world’s diamond production and distribution, De Beers began to artificially limit
the supply—thus the “rarity”—of diamonds.
This is important because people are inherently attracted to objects and opportunities that are scarce.
Robert Cialdini, our mentor and author of
Influence
, spent several years going underground to study the scams used by insurance salesmen, used car dealers, and cult leaders.
He found that many of these hustlers exploit people’s desire for goodies they think are scarce.
By manipulating perceived scarcity, the De Beers parasite could now draw people in like flies to a neon light, extracting ever-more money from its human hosts.

The scarcity ploy was certainly exploitative, but it’s what came next that makes De Beers truly a deep rationality parasite.
In addition to controlling supply and distribution, De Beers oversaw another critical part of the diamond business: marketing.
“A gemstone is the ultimate luxury product.
It has no material use,” Oppenheimer confessed.
“Men and women desire to have diamonds not for what they can do but for what they desire.”
But De Beers needed to manufacture this desire—to fabricate the yearning specifically for diamonds.
To spin a yarn that would turn a rock into one of the most valuable commodities on earth, it turned to Madison Avenue.

In 1947, Frances Gerety was a young copywriter working for De Beers’s advertising agency, N.
W.
Ayer & Son.
Although Gerety herself never married, she had a big impact on millions of other marriages by coining the phrase “a diamond is forever.”
Advertising Age
magazine named it the single best advertising slogan of the twentieth century.
The eminently memorable phrase was the centerpiece of campaigns featuring ethereal women longing for eternal love, symbolized by a diamond engagement ring.
While perpetuating the mythology of love surrounding diamonds, the “diamond is forever” slogan was also cleverly designed to ensure that women hung on to their diamonds for the rest of their lives (“I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back,” Zsa Zsa Gabor once noted).

The notion of keeping diamonds forever was aimed to prevent a secondary market for used diamonds.
The trick was to persuade people that to really have special meaning, your diamond should be untouched by another woman (you try giving your bride-to-be a used
diamond ring originally intended for another female stranger).
By maintaining that true love could only be expressed through a brand-new diamond ring, De Beers managed to maintain control of the diamond trade at the wholesale level, enabling retailers to sell diamonds at a high price without competition from secondary markets.

De Beers had orchestrated the perfect parasitic coup.
After making its product artificially scarce, its marketing strategy perpetually activated the subself most vulnerable to scarcity: the mate-acquisition subself.
As described in an earlier chapter, this subself particularly fancies scarce and rare objects, being drawn to restaurants “off the beaten path” and “limited-edition” goodies.

Only thirty years after the launch of the “diamond is forever” campaign, a diamond ring was considered not simply a luxury but a necessity in the modern engagement ritual.
By the 1960s, 80 percent of American brides-to-be were demanding, and getting, a diamond; today that number remains similar, with the average engagement ring costing $3,200 (De Beers’s original marketing suggested that a man should spend the equivalent of one month’s income on an engagement ring, but it later readjusted the monetary value of a woman’s love, increasing the price to two months’ income).
De Beers did not limit its appetite for profit to America.
Countries like Japan, which never had a tradition of romantic marriage, made diamonds a tough sell for brides.
But De Beers persuaded even Japanese mate-acquisition subselves to part with their money for some shiny coal.
Whereas in 1967 only 5 percent of brides in Japan wore a diamond, this percentage had increased to 77 percent by 1990.

A RING FOR EVERY SUBSELF

De Beers stuffed its coffers by exploiting our mate-acquisition subself, through both marketing and manipulative business practices.
But the jewelry industry today would not be a $150 billion juggernaut if it had settled for only one of our subselves.
An engagement ring can be put on only one finger, and jewelry makers couldn’t help but notice that we have ten fingers, nine of which remained unprofitably naked.
Thankfully, there is now a different ring—or some piece of jewelry—for every available finger, wrist, ankle, toe, neck, belly button, ear, nose, eyebrow, cheek, chin, nipple, and lip (both above and below the waist).

Now that a woman’s fourth finger on the left hand was taken, De Beers moved to conquer the fourth finger on the right hand by exploiting women’s status subself.
“Your left hand says we.
Your right hand says me,” De Beers explains in its marketing.
After all, what better way for modern women to show their independence than by buying their own diamond rings?
(In addition to, not instead of, the engagement ring, of course.) The jewelry maker Kwiat offers a line of right-hand rings for around $5,000, but you can also scoop one up at Walmart, whose Keepsake Independence (“a shining symbol of your feminine spirit”) retails for $389.