These findings come from the discipline of evolutionary

These findings come from the discipline of evolutionary psychology, which has also analyzed its subjects’ decision-making behaviour as write (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013), meaning their financial decisions and their choices about consumption, working on the principle that the human mind is the product of thousands of years of natural and sexual selection, and that explains how we behave (Buss, 2014). The study of consumer behaviour and the decision-making process is an ideal means of exploring underlying human motivations. Analysing how people allocate their limited financial resources under one set of environmental circumstances or another helps researchers understand which needs we prioritize as consumers and when. It can explain why some people squander the money they took such effort to earn on luxury goods that have no survival benefit or why others make apparently irrational consumer decisions. Or it can be used to consider why people go to great efforts to avoid certain losses and give these more importance than equivalent gains (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013). To understand many of these apparently irrational patterns of behaviour, we need a robust theoretical framework to study people\'s decision-making behaviour as consumers, whether this means what they choose to consume or what they are prepared to pay. The evolutionary approach can provide just such a framework (Kenrick, Sadalla, Groth, & Trost, 2010). Wilson and Daly (2004) demonstrate that looking at sexual stimuli can modify a consumer\'s financial decisions. Specifically, for male subjects, viewing pictures of potential mates (young and attractive women) is enough to generate impatience in financial decision making, particularly in estimating the discount rate (Van den Bergh & Dewitte, 2006; Van den Bergh, Dewitte, & Warlop, 2008). Wilson and Daly (2004) also demonstrate that sexual stimuli influence male and female decision making differently. While discounting increased in men who looked at pictures of attractive women but not in men who saw pictures of unattractive women, women who saw pictures of attractive men did not respond differently to women who viewed unattractive men. Originally performed in Canada, these experiments were replicated in Belgium with similar results (Van den Bergh & Dewitte, 2006; Van den Bergh et al., 2008).
Theoretical background The cognitive revolution paved the way for extensive research on consumer behaviour and decision making, which took the information process mechanisms that underlie human thought as the basis for human behaviour (Kassarjian & Goodstein, 2010). However, cognitive psychology fell short of explaining the seeming irrationality of certain types of human behaviour, which were more effectively addressed in other quarters. Two important contributions came with Loewenstein\'s work on visceral factors (Loewenstein, 1996) and cross-cultural studies on the evolutionary psychological mechanisms that underlie human behaviour (Saad, 2011). These studies challenged the cognitive paradigm by proposing that human beings were not selected because of their ability to process, store or learn information, or even because of their ability simply to think. Instead, they argued, these abilities should be understood as instruments that have evolved over time to satisfy two main human objectives: survival and reproduction (Buss, 2014). The fundamental principles of evolutionary psychology are rooted in Charles Darwin\'s two books, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), which describe the basic processes of evolution: natural selection, by which living beings adapt to their environment (e.g., the use by animals of natural camouflage to deter predators); and sexual selection, which allows animals to reproduce certain traits that facilitate courtship and mating (e.g., the antlers in deer or the tail feathers in peacocks). In the course of history, however, scientists know that evolutionary processes have played just as important a role in determining animal and human behaviour as they have in shaping our physiological traits. The sciences that study this are known as evolutionary behavioural sciences (Saad, 2013).