The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (2 page)

A ROUGH MAP OF THE TERRITORY

In the pages ahead we journey into the depths of the ancestral mind.
Each chapter begins with a visit to a mysterious corner of human decision making.
Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt?
How did such a large group of otherwise shrewd and intelligent investors allow Bernard Madoff to swindle them out of millions and millions of dollars?
To solve each puzzle, we go beneath the surface and look at the newest scientific findings, letting you peek under the hood to examine the evidence for yourself.
Along the way, you’ll discover the intimate connections between ovulating strippers, Wall Street financiers, testosterone-crazed skateboarders, Elvis Presley, and you.

Here’s how our behind-the-scenes tour is organized.
In
Chapter 1
(“Rationality, Irrationality, and the Dead Kennedys”), we introduce the idea of deep rationality by comparing an eminently rational man, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, with his famously irrational descendants.
In
Chapter 2
(“The Seven Subselves”), we more properly introduce you to your subselves and consider whether you and Martin Luther King Jr.
are hypocrites or just victims of a common form of multiple personality disorder.
In
Chapter 3
(“Home Economics Versus Wall Street Economics”), we examine how each subself negotiates with other people, exploring some nasty problems that arose when the Walt Disney Company stopped being a family business.

In
Chapter 4
(“Smoke Detectors in the Mind”), we take a closer look at the biases and mistakes each of your subselves is prone to make, and try to understand why the people in one African nation chose to starve rather than accept help.
In
Chapter 5
(“Modern Cavemen”), we investigate how understanding our subselves can help us make better decisions, asking why uneducated members of tribes deep in the Amazon can solve logical problems that stump students at Harvard.

In
Chapter 6
(“Living Fast and Dying Young”), we examine how the subselves change across the lifespan and try to understand why many people who go from rags to riches later go bankrupt.
In
Chapter 7
(“Gold Porsches and Green Peacocks”), we ask whether people might buy a shiny gold Cadillac and a dull green Toyota Prius for some of the very same reasons, even if they’re not consciously aware of them.
In
Chapter 8
(“Sexual Economics: His and Hers”), we probe more deeply into the ways that men’s and women’s subselves differ
and try to figure out why in some societies men pay several years’ income for the company of a woman, while in others a woman’s family pays an immense dowry to buy her the company of a man.

In
Chapter 9
(“Deep Rationality Parasites”), we explore the dark side of the story—how our otherwise deeply rational tendencies can open us up to exploitation by clever parasites in the modern world, many of whom are hiding behind respectable business suits and sincere smiles.
Finally, we wave good-bye and send you off with a few colorful postcards, each inscribed with an important takeaway message from our journey to the decision-making centers of the mind.

YOUR TOUR GUIDES

Your tour guides will be Doug Kenrick and Vlad Griskevicius.
In some ways, it’s amazing that the two of us ended up on the same boat.
Doug grew up in a junkie-infested New York neighborhood and seemed destined to join his male relatives in the state prison at Sing Sing.
Vlad was born in Lithuania when it was still part of the Soviet Union, in a region more likely to produce potato farmers than college professors.
But Doug managed to avoid a life of crime and instead became an evolutionary psychologist who has conducted hundreds of scientific studies on topics ranging from sex and murder to love and altruism.
Vlad slipped out from behind the Iron Curtain and, after delighting in the joys of watermelon-flavored bubble gum, went on to study economics and social psychology among the capitalists.
He is now a professor of marketing, conducting research and teaching courses on consumer behavior, advertising, and decision making.
The two of us shared a brilliant mentor, Bob Cialdini, and we’ve collaborated with a group of highly creative colleagues, many of whom have contributed greatly to the scientific revolution we describe in this book.

Most of the findings we’ll describe have been reported in scientific journals, and a few of those discoveries have been reported more widely in the media.
But the big picture, connecting our own colleagues’ research findings with work by other psychologists, economists, decision scientists, biologists, and anthropologists, has yet to be
filled in.
In this book, we try to paint that wider canvas in a colorful way, showing why an intimate familiarity with our inner rational animal matters to business leaders and working stiffs, to armchair economists and their real-world counterparts, to politicians and their constituents, to teachers and those of us who still have a lot to learn.

1

Rationality, Irrationality, and the Dead Kennedys

J
OSEPH
P
ATRICK
K
ENNEDY
was a shining example of a rational economic man.
At age twenty-five, he became America’s youngest bank president, bragging to a newspaper reporter, “I want to be a millionaire by the age of thirty-five.”
That was quite an aspiration in 1915, when the average yearly income was barely $1,000, and a loaf of bread cost nine cents.
Kennedy made good on his lofty goal, though, becoming a Wall Street trader and turning a profit of $650,000 on a single transaction in 1922.
Kennedy’s good fortunes continued even when the stock market took its infamous nosedive (he had sold off his holdings just in time).
His impeccable sense of timing struck again in 1933, when he arranged a lucrative contract with Dewar’s to import liquor into the United States—just as Prohibition was about to end.
And as the Hollywood movie industry was hitting the big time, he co-founded RKO pictures, with assets of over $80 million.

Joe Kennedy also exhibited keen rational self-interest in his personal life.
After having an affair with the beautiful movie star Gloria Swanson, he jilted the actress when her movie went grossly over budget, and left her holding the tab.
Later in life, he turned his ambitions from money to political power, becoming the American ambassador to
England and plotting to have his eldest son become president of the United States.

But the luck of this particular Irishman did not pass on to his descendants.
His handsome and charming eldest son, Joseph Jr., the one he hoped would someday become president, was killed at age twenty-nine during a World War II bombing mission.
His beautiful daughter Kathleen seemed to be living a charmed life when she married William Cavendish, heir to the Duke of Devonshire.
But she was widowed only four months later when Cavendish was killed in action; then she herself died in a plane crash in 1948.
Joseph’s second son, John, was elected president, then famously assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
His third son, Robert, was shot down during his own campaign for the presidency in 1968.
And his youngest son, Teddy, narrowly escaped death in 1969 when he drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, drowning his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.

The next generation of Kennedys seemed to fare even worse.
In 1984, Joseph’s grandson David died of a drug overdose in a Miami hotel.
David’s brother Michael perished in a skiing accident in 1997.
And in 1999, John F.
Kennedy Jr., the strikingly handsome son of the former president, met a tragic end when the plane he was piloting crashed into the cold night waters off Long Island.
At this point in the story, you should be able to hear that spooky organ music playing in the background.
It was enough to lead one former
New York Times
editor to write a book called
The Curse of the Kennedys
.

How is it that Joe Kennedy could lead a life of charmed decisions, whereas his descendants seemed magnetically drawn to ill-fated choices?
The mystery of the Kennedy family vividly exemplifies a much broader question: Are people’s decisions rational or irrational?
Experts have been sharply divided on this question.
Some assert that our choices are eminently rational.
But others argue that our decisions are frequently irrational—and occasionally even tragically moronic.

In this book, we offer a third view, based on emerging scientific evidence that connects human behavior with that of the rest of the animal kingdom.
Although human decisions often appear foolish, they are, if you probe beneath the surface, often deeply rational.

To see under the veneer, though, we need to radically reframe how
we think about the human mind.
Rather than asking whether the mind is good at solving modern problems such as investing on Wall Street or acing the SATs, we should instead ask how it solves the central problems our ancestors faced over hundreds of thousands of years.
By looking at modern behavior through a wider-angled evolutionary lens, we can gain a fresh perspective on how people make decisions.
This new way of thinking transforms how we think about rationality and reveals the surprising, hidden wisdom behind seemingly senseless decisions—including ones made by the Kennedys, your coworkers, your family members, and your stockbroker.

As we’ll discover, a deeper understanding of the Kennedys’ fortunes and misfortunes reveals something fundamental about us, about our friends and neighbors, and about the nature of human nature.
Let’s take a closer look at the choices of Joe Kennedy and his descendants, as viewed through the eyes of three very different kinds of scientists.

RATIONAL MAN: PEOPLE AS ECONS

One explanation for the Kennedy clan’s fortunes and misfortunes is grounded in the classic view that dominated our understanding of decision making for over a century: rational economics.
You are familiar with this view if you’ve taken a class in business or economics or merely perused the financial pages of the newspaper.
This perspective is caricatured in the movie
Wall Street
, in which the coldly calculating Gordon Gecko proclaims, “Greed is good!”
and high roller Roger Barnes asks the classic question, “What’s in it for
moi?”

Rational economists view people as, well, rational.
To get a better feel for the rational economist, imagine someone in a finely cut business suit seated in front of a computer, with a stock market ticker flashing overhead.
Poring over mountains of data, our prototypical rational economist crunches numbers and scribbles mathematical equations on scraps of paper between triple-espresso coffee breaks.
Although rational economists in the real world are a diverse lot and don’t all wear suits to jobs on Wall Street, they share a commitment to analyzing decisions in terms of rational self-interest.
Any decision—be it to encourage one’s older versus younger child to run for president, to import
liquor or to go into showbiz, or to frolic with a Hollywood starlet or dump her—boils down to the question: What’s it worth to me?

According to this view, we make decisions like ultrarational “Econs.”
Like Joe Kennedy or Gordon Gecko, the average person is good at knowing which choices will best serve his or her self-interest.
Like Joseph Kennedy did in deciding to sell his stock holdings or end his relationship with Gloria Swanson, we base our choices on the best available information.
Of course, we can’t predict the future with certainty, and random, unexpected events do happen.
Those random events average out statistically, but as in the case of stock market and airplane crashes, an otherwise well-reasoned choice sometimes turns out to have been unfortunate.
From the classic rational economic perspective, the tragic succession of deaths among the second and third generation of Kennedys is not some mystical curse but more like a string of unlucky bets—nothing more magical than random bad luck.

IRRATIONAL MAN: PEOPLE AS MORONS

But there is a very different explanation for the Kennedy family’s calamities.
Maybe Joe Kennedy’s descendants were cursed not with bad luck but with bad judgment.
“The Curse of the Kennedys,” argued
New York Times
columnist Sandy Grady, stems from “their code of macho daring that crosses into recklessness.”
That certainly applied to the very first tragedy—the death of Joe Jr.
The eldest Kennedy son had already flown enough bombing missions to qualify for a discharge, when he daringly volunteered to fly a plane full of explosives directly at a heavily fortified German cannon site.
The same rash judgment style was shown by grandson Michael, who died playing football while recklessly zooming down a tree-filled mountain slope on a pair of skis.
And when Teddy’s car plunged off the Chappaquiddick bridge, random bad luck also had a little help from an evening of heavy partying and a dose of bad judgment.

This bad judgment theory of the Kennedy curse fits well with what is currently the most popular view of decision making—that our judgments and decisions are often flawed and irrational.

Consider the following situation:

Person A is waiting in line to see a movie. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that he is the millionth customer and wins $100.

Person B is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him gets to the ticket window and is told he’s the millionth customer and wins $1,000. Person B receives $150 for being the person right after the millionth customer.

Would you rather be Person A or Person B?

Unless you’re allergic to money (like the people who get a rash when they touch the nickel in coins), a rational economist would expect any sensible person to choose Person B, who makes off with $50 more than Person A.
But in fact, most people would rather be Person A, making the irrational choice to pass up an extra $50, just to avoid the bad feeling they might have from being so close to getting $1,000.