Prospects for an evolutionary economic psychology:Buying and consumption as a test case

Until a few generations ago, humans made their living by foraging, like other animals.We have therefore inherited genes that allowed our ancestors to thrive as hunters andgatherers. Thriving in a modern economy requires very different behaviours but wecope because the human brain evolved to be flexible with the ability to formcooperative networks with other humans and to maintain the shared body ofinformation, expertise and values which we call “culture”. We argue that humaneconomic behaviour is influenced by both the genes and the culture that we “inherit”and that both are a result of a Darwinian evolutionary process. An evolutionaryapproach is therefore likely to be of value in developing theories of economicbehaviour. We then use this approach to analyse in broad terms how people that areborn with the brains of foragers living in a small-scale society become consumers in amodern society and where this behaviour is likely to lead our species...