Sustainability Marketing:

Human Nature, Consumption, and Conservation

VLADAS GRISKEVICIUS

MARK VAN VUGT*

*Vladas Griskevicius is an Assistant Professor of Marketing, Carlson School of Management,

University of Minnesota, 321 19th Ave S. Suite 3-150, Minneapolis, MN 55455, (612) 626-

3793, fax (612) 624-8804, [email protected].

Mark van Vugt is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, VU University

Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 316-538-

53831, [email protected].

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Many scholars and policy makers agree that people must reduce their environmental impact and adopt more sustainable lifestyles. Yet many strategies to foster sustainable consumption have not been very successful. We propose that marketers can more effectively motivate sustainable behaviors through a deeper understanding of evolved human nature. By considering the ancestral roots of consumption and conservation, we present a framework for sustainability marketing. The framework suggests that many environmental problems are caused or exacerbated by five human tendencies: (1) propensity for self-interest, (2) motivation for relative status, (3) predisposition to copy others, (4) proclivity to be short- sighted, and (5) mismatches between modern and ancestral environments. By considering how and why evolutionary forces continue to shape modern consumer behaviors, we show how an improved understanding of human nature (I) can be harnessed to develop more optimal marketing messages to motivate sustainable behavior, (II) can prevent widespread and costly marketing mistakes, and (III) can spark future research to lessen resource depletion, restrain wasteful consumption, and spur sustainable behavior.

Keywords: Environmental conservation, social influence, sustainability, overconsumption, resource depletion, evolutionary psychology

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“The suggestion that our evolved human nature is a source of environmental exploitation and

degradation is not a claim that nothing can be done, but a warning that effective

conservation and remediation strategies will have to incorporate an understanding of

relevant evolved psychological processes in order to modify human action.”

—Wilson, Daly and Gordon (1998, p. 517)

Easter Island is one of the most remote places on earth. The island lies in the Pacific

Ocean over 2,000 miles from the west coast of South America. Yet despite its relative insignificance in the modern world, Easter Island offers a telling lesson about consumption, human nature, and environmental sustainability (Bahn and Flenley 1992; Diamond 1995).

When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen visited the island on Easter Sunday in

1722, he found a barren landscape inhabited by a society on the verge of collapse. Yet only a few hundred years earlier, the island was covered with lush forests and had a large, thriving economy. Roggeveen was shocked to learn what had taken place in only a few hundred years.

When the first settlers arrived on the island, the islanders divided up into clans. Each clan established its own center for cultural, economic, and religious activity. At each ceremonial site, clans began erecting massive stone statues to signal their status. To transport the colossal statues across the island, inhabitants had to drag them using large tree trunks as rollers. So many trees were required for this task that by the time of Roggeveen’s arrival, the island was almost completely deforested and statue construction had been brought to a halt.

Deforestation caused dramatic ecological, social, and economic problems. The shortage of trees forced inhabitants to stop building wooden houses and canoes needed for fishing. Tree removal also produced soil erosion, leading to constant food shortages. Diminishing natural resources intensified conflicts between clans, resulting in a state of near-permanent warfare.

Without trees for building transportation, the people were trapped on the island, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted, environmental collapse.

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The fate of Easter Island serves as a warning to the modern world. Like Easter Island, our planet has limited resources to support growing human populations and their increasing demands. Like the islanders, we have no practical means to escape our self-inflicted fate.

Natural resources such as land, fresh water, food, and oil are being depleted at unprecedented rates. A single, average American consumes over 200 pounds of meat and burns 900 gallons of gasoline each year, while producing over 1600 pounds of garbage. With current technologies, we will need at least four planet Earths if every person in the world were to reach Western levels of consumption (OECD 2001). The impact of these activities not only contributes to resource crises, biodiversity losses, and climate change, but it also creates new problems that could have devastating consequences for the health and well-being of future generations. Of course, this is nothing new. The Easter Island tragedy suggests that humans are very capable of—and sometimes very willing to—destroy their own environment.

Why have people been so slow to respond to environmental problems? Why are strategies aimed at changing environmental practices often not very effective? And how can we bring about enduring changes in consumer behavior to foster a sustainable life style?

Marketers and consumer researchers have a long history of investigating resource conservation and sustainable behavior (e.g., Allen 1982; Anderson and Claxton 1982;

Berkowitz and Haines 1984; Craig and McCann 1978; Houston 1983; Fritzsche 1981;

McNeill and Wilkie 1979). Almost thirty years ago, an entire special issue of the Journal of

Consumer Research was dedicated to energy conservation (McDougall et al. 1981). Since then, the majority of multi-national firms such as Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, Wells Fargo, and KPMG have incorporated green marketing initiatives as key components of their marketing strategies. This practice has reinvigorated consumer researchers to better understand green consumer behavior (e.g., Luchs, Naylor, Irwin and Raghunathan 2010;

Peattie and Peattie 2009; Thogersen 2010). While our field is producing important insights on

4 sustainable consumption, marketers, and behavioral scientists more generally, have been mute about the deeper ancestral roots of human environmental activities. We believe that this omission may be costing firms, marketers, and the environment dearly.

Our goal in this paper is to show how humans could better preserve nature through an improved understanding of evolved human nature. In the last few decades, evolutionary considerations of human behavior have produced an immense amount of theoretical and empirical insights in psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and even economics (Dunbar and Barrett 2007; Gandolfi, Gandolfi and Barash 2002; Neuberg, Kenrick and Schaller 2010).

Evolutionary approaches are increasingly influencing applications in medicine, law, and business (Colarelli 2003; Jones and Goldsmith 2005; Nesse and Stearns 2008; Saad forthcoming). Consumer researchers are similarly beginning to examine how our ancestral roots can inform modern consumer behavior (Durante et al. forthcoming; Griskevicius et al.

2009, 2010; Miller 2009; Saad and Vongas 2009; Van den Bergh, Dewitte and Warlop 2008).

Ancestral considerations suggest that many human-made modern environmental problems are caused or exacerbated by a small set of tendencies rooted in human nature. Our species has a long history of creating ecological problems, meaning that sustainability is not going to come easily. Lamentably, because most communication strategies designed to promote sustainable behaviors have ignored important aspects of human nature, such strategies are often sub-optimal. However, by considering how and why deep ancestral forces continue to shape modern behaviors that impact the environment, we propose that human nature can be harnessed to craft more optimal influence strategies to lessen resource depletion, restrain wasteful consumption, and spur sustainable behaviors.

The current paper is conceptual, not empirical. Marketing journals and consumer scholars have recently emphasized the importance of conceptual papers, urging for more such papers in our field (Deighton, MacInnis, McGill and Shiv 2010; Yadav 2010). The current

5 paper does not intend to present new data or to review exhaustively a specific area of work.

Instead, this paper is motivated by two practical marketing questions: (1) What advice do marketers have for effective persuasion strategies to lessen resource depletion, restrain wasteful consumption, and spur sustainable behaviors?; and (2) What advice do marketers have for avoiding costly mistakes when crafting such messages? We present a framework that helps answer these questions and contributes novel theoretical insights by focusing specifically on the ancestral nature of human nature. We offer numerous practical suggestions and cautionary examples, while also highlighting many fruitful directions for future consumer research investigating sustainability, overconsumption, and pro-environmental behavior.

This paper contains three sections. First, we provide a short introduction to evolutionary approaches to consumption and conservation. Second, we present the primary reasons why human nature contributes to causing many environmental problems. In this section we highlight widespread marketing mistakes that ignore human nature and can lead efforts to change environmental practices to be unsuccessful. Third, by considering theories designed to explain the roots of our ancestral tendencies, we demonstrate how a better understanding of human nature could be harnessed to develop more optimal communication strategies to spur pro-environmental behaviors such as curbing resource depletion, lessening excessive consumption, and promoting sustainability.

AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO CONSUMPTION AND CONSERVATION

“Humans are living fossils—collections of mechanisms produced by prior selection pressures

operating on a long and unbroken line of ancestors.”

—David Buss (1995, p. 10)

A modern evolutionary approach to behavior is based on the seminal work of Charles

Darwin (1859; 1871). This approach suggests that, just as the forces of natural selection can

6 shape morphological features, those forces shape psychological and behavioral tendencies.

An evolutionary approach maintains that human and non-human animals inherit brains and bodies equipped to behave in ways that are adaptive—that are fitted to the demands of the environments within which their ancestors evolved. Just as human morphological features— opposable thumbs, larynxes, and upright postures—have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, humans inherited brains specially designed to solve critical recurrent problems in the ancestral world (Buss 1995; Kenrick et al. 2010; Tooby and Cosmides 1992). For example, along with the larynx, humans also inherited a brain designed to easily learn to communicate using language. Although the specific words and sounds of a language may differ across cultures, all languages share an underlying universal structure as a result of evolved human mechanisms for language (Pinker 1994). Below we review two key distinguishing features of a modern evolutionary approach to consumer behavior.

I: Distinguishing Proximate and Ultimate Levels of Explanation

An evolutionary approach asks the following question about a behavior: What could be its adaptive or ultimate function(s)? That is, how might it have helped our ancestors survive, reproduce, or solve another critical recurrent problem? This approach focuses on a particular type of “why” question. When asking why children prefer donuts to spinach, one type of answer is that donuts taste better and produce more pleasure than spinach. An evolutionary approach, however, would also ask why sweetened, fatty foods taste good and produce more pleasure than spinach in the first place. In this case, the reason is because humans have inherited a tendency to prefer fatty and sweet foods. These kinds of foods, such as meat and ripe fruit, provided our ancestors with much-needed calories in a food-scarce environment, and did so more effectively than foods low in fat or sugar (e.g., roots, leaves, or unripe fruit). In the modern world of supermarkets and convenience stores, although we

7 know that we should resist Ben & Jerry’s latest combination of ice cream, brownies, and cookies, our evolved mechanisms continue to signal to us the adaptive benefits of fatty and sweet foods. This evolutionary explanation for food preferences is known as an ultimate explanation or cause.

An evolutionary perspective draws an important distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations for behavior (Tinbergen 1963). Behavioral researchers have typically been concerned with proximate explanations, which focus on relatively immediate triggers for behavior. When asking why individuals across cultures prioritize personal convenience over public welfare, proximate explanations include factors such as learning, utility, happiness, attitudes, values, emotions, framing, and personality. Although proximate explanations are critical, an evolutionary perspective urges that it can be equally pertinent to understand the ultimate, evolutionary reason(s) why humans come equipped with a psychology that leads them to prioritize personal convenience over public welfare.

Proximate and ultimate explanations are not competitors; they are complementary perspectives. It is misguided to ask whether a man bought an expensive luxury car because it makes him feel good (a proximate reason) or because this car enhances his reproductive opportunities by conveying his status (an ultimate reason). Both of these explanations can be correct simultaneously, whereby each one explains the same behavior at a different level of analysis. The important point is that neglecting ultimate reasons for behavior can lead to misguided and sub-optimal marketing communication strategies. For example, if marketers desired to curb purchases of pricy luxury cars, ignoring ultimate reasons might lead to a strategy that tries to persuade people that luxury cars shouldn’t make them feel good. This kind of a strategy is likely to be fighting an uphill battle, in the same way that it is difficult to curb overeating by trying to persuade people that donuts and ice cream shouldn’t taste good.

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An evolutionary approach does not presume that people will always be conscious of the ultimate reasons for their behavior. A large literature shows that such motives often guide behaviors in an automatic, non-conscious manner (Barrett and Kurzban 2006; Kenrick et al.

2010). Because people have both proximate and ultimate motives, this perspective highlights that people usually have multiple motives for a given behavior. For example, when buying a green product, this act can be driven by altruistic motives at the proximate level (e.g., “I want to be nice and help the environment”), but be driven by non-conscious selfish motives at the ultimate level (e.g., being nice helps my reproductive fitness by enhancing my reputation).

While our genes are selfish at the ultimate level, selfish genes can—and do—build organisms that are capable of behaving in ways that are kind, charitable, and sustainable (Dawkins 1976).

II: The Mind Evolved to Solve Adaptive Challenges

An evolutionary approach does not assume that humans or other organisms inherit the capacity to determine in advance which behaviors will enhance their reproductive fitness.

People do not proceed through life as fitness-maximizing machines, consciously considering how each decision increases their survival or reproductive chances. Instead, natural selection endows humans and other organisms with mental mechanisms designed to increase the probability of solving recurrent adaptive challenges confronted during the ancestral past.

Converging evidence suggests that our minds are adapted to life in small hunter- gatherer bands of around 100-150 individuals that roamed around the African Savannah for hundreds of thousands of years before moving out of Africa (Dunbar and Barrett 2007; Foley

1997). Our “Stone Age” ancestors needed to solve important recurring problems, such as acquiring food and water, protecting against predators, gaining status, attracting mates, caring for children, and maintaining group unity (Kenrick et al. 2010). Individuals who were disposed to behave in ways that were successful at solving such critical problems became our

9 ancestors, while the others died out. An evolutionary perspective thus posits that our brains have inherited a suite of mechanisms and tendencies that consistently helped produce behaviors to solve recurrent adaptive problems in ancestral environments.

As one example of an ancestral tendency, consider the well-documented mental mechanism for solving the ancestral challenge of protecting ourselves from predation

(Öhman and Mineka 2001). Although it is possible to teach people to fear almost anything with enough conditioning trials, the human mind comes “prepared” to swiftly and effortlessly learn to fear—often with a single trial—specific types of objects that posed harm in ancestral environments. It is much easier to condition human infants and adults to fear objects that resemble snakes or spiders—objects that posed a significant threat throughout our evolutionary past—than to electrical outlets or automobiles—objects that cause many more deaths in current-day environments, but which did not exist in our evolutionary past. Thus, our human nature predisposes us with a tendency to learn fears towards stimuli that posed threats to our ancestors (Domjan 2005).

An evolutionary perspective yields important implications for understanding human behavior. Foremost, it suggests that the human mind is not a blank slate (Pinker 2002); a blank slate perspective suggests that preferences, desires, and behaviors are determined solely by exposure to culture. This perspective implies that marketers are equally capable in persuading people to behave in one way as well as in the exact opposite way. According to this view, advertising campaigns are equally capable in teaching people to be selfish or selfless, value the future or the present, aspire to high or low status, imitate or not imitate others, or any other combination. Although blank slate approaches emphasizing a lack of human nature might seem outdated to some modern readers, it is important to realize that such approaches dominated social science research throughout the 20th century, and continue

to be prevalent across the behavioral sciences (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Pinker 2002).

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Conversely, an evolutionary perspective maintains that there is a human nature—that humans have a set of tendencies reflecting adaptive psychologies that helped solve recurring challenges in our ancestral past. Accordingly, instead of preferences and desires being infinitely malleable, there are human universals (Brown 1991). People are disposed to care more about some things than others and to learn some things easier than others. The existence of a human nature does not mean that our behavior is genetically fixed. Indeed, behavior is highly responsive to environmental contingencies. However, by considering how and why evolutionary forces continue to shape modern consumer behaviors, an evolutionary approach suggests that not all environmental contingencies are created equal. Whereas some types of contingencies used in hopes of motivating sustainability are doomed to fight an uphill battle against human nature, others can swiftly and effortlessly spur environmental action.

WHY HUMAN NATURE PRODUCES ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

“Sustainability is an admirable goal but our policies need to be sustainable themselves, and

therefore we need policies that are compatible with human nature.”

—Penn and Mysterud (2007, p. 2)

There is a popular belief that humans are naturally inclined to show restraint in using environmental resources, and that bad environmental practice is a product of modern, wasteful Western culture. Although this idea of an ecological “noble savage,” which dates back to the writings of 18th century French Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, continues to

persist, it turns out that traditional societies are not the conservationists they were once

thought to be (Smith and Wishnie 2000). While many traditional societies hold beliefs about

the sacredness of nature, there is no association between holding such beliefs and having a

low ecological impact (Low 1996). Most evidence suggests that the low ecological impact of

many traditional societies has more to do with low population densities and lack of

11 technology than with conservation ethics. Our ancestors were nomadic hunter-gatherers, continuously moving their camp to new locations when resources in current locales became exhausted. Our nomadic past suggests that human nature has been shaped to extract and consume resources from the environment, rather than to preserve and conserve them. Indeed, rather than once being noble savages, our species has a long history of causing ecological destruction (Diamond 2005; Penn 2003).

Why do humans cause environmental problems, and what aspects of our innate human nature may contribute to environmental destruction? We propose that a large proportion of human-inflicted ecological damage is caused or exacerbated by five ancestral tendencies (see

Table 1). These tendencies were adaptive in the ancestral environment, but they can have devastating ecological consequences in the modern world—in the same way that our adaptive tendency for craving sweet and fatty foods can lead to obesity in the modern world of caloric abundance. The tendencies we present are not mutually exclusive. The most ecologically damaging behaviors often involve a combination of several tendencies. But a better understanding of each tendency can help marketers avoid costly and widely prevalent communication mistakes. Although an evolutionary perspective is not necessary to identify and document most of these tendencies, the value of an evolutionary perspective comes in using appropriate theories to identify the ancestral roots of why these tendencies exist. As we discuss later, a deeper understanding of ultimate reasons provides a powerful lever for harnessing human nature to effectively promote sustainable behavior.

------Insert Table 1 about here ------

I: Valuing Self-Interest Over the Common Good

Many environmental problems result from a conflict between personal and collective interests, whereby narrow self-interests often prevail against the common good of the group.

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This tension is famously captured by the Tragedy of the Commons metaphor (Hardin 1968), in which a small pasture is shared by multiple herders. Although the herders all desire that everyone’s grazing be limited, each herder quickly realizes that if he adds just a little extra cattle to the pasture, he receives a net personal benefit while the costs are shared among all herdsmen. Corroborated by evidence from multiple fields, the result is an unintended tragedy:

Most individuals increase their grazing, thereby unintentionally causing the destruction of the commons (Dawes 1980; Dietz, Ostrom and Stern 2003).

The cause of this often-repeated tragedy is rooted in human nature. Humans are predisposed to prioritize personal over collective interests because natural selection favors individuals who can receive a personal benefit at others’ expense (Hawkes 1992). Natural selection does not care about the survival of the species. What matters is the replication of one’s genes, which often comes at the expense of the survival of others’ genes (Dawkins

1976). Accordingly, when faced with social dilemmas, most individuals make selfish choices, especially when interacting with strangers in large groups (Komorita and Parks 1994).

A key indicator that the human mind has been shaped to be wary of contributing to public goods comes from evidence that humans possess specific psychological mechanisms to detect cheaters (Cosmides 1989; Sugiyama et al. 2002). The presences of such specialized mechanisms suggests that our ancestors’ social environment was riddled with the threat of free-riders—individuals who attempt to profit from a common good without paying their fair share. Although there are individual differences in people’s tendency to exploit others (Van

Lange et al. 1997), evolutionary considerations highlight that it is human nature to be tempted by—and occasionally act on—opportunities to benefit oneself at the expense of others.

Marketing Mistakes. Because environmental proponents often do not recognize that humans are disposed to value their self-interest more than the public good (Penn 2003), this has resulted in the perpetuation of ineffective pro-environmental persuasion strategies

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(Gardner and Stern 2002). Communication tactics that try to urge people to value the group above oneself are fighting an uphill battle. Similarly, trying to persuade people to engage in self-restraint purely for environmental reasons is also unlikely to work. Even if such strategies might appear to work at the outset, voluntary restraint is likely to be only a temporary solution because of the free-rider problem, whereby the mere possibility of free- riders breeds paranoia and temptation (Van Vugt 2009). For instance, a campaign urging people to use restraint in water consumption actually increased water use because people feared that others would be unwilling to restrain themselves (Van Vugt 2001). An evolutionary perspective suggests that strategies aimed at eradicating people’s ancestral tendencies are doomed—or at best, sub-optimal. Instead, as we discuss later, such biases can and should be harnessed and redirected to promote sustainable behaviors.

II: Valuing Relative Status Over Absolute Status

Many environmental problems result from a conflict between having enough resources versus wanting to have more than others. Excessive consumption, especially of extravagant, showy goods that have no immediate survival value, contributes significantly to the depletion of natural resources, pollution, and waste (Frank 2007). This desire to “keep up with the Joneses” is often presented as an invention of modern, Western culture. Thorstein

Veblen’s classic treatise on Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) is widely regarded as a critique of frivolous consumer behavior in capitalistic society. Yet Veblen himself observed that conspicuous consumption had occurred throughout human history (Sundie et al. forthcoming). Egyptian pharaohs displayed their wealth with golden thrones, elaborate artworks, and giant pyramids, and Indian maharajahs built extravagant and ostentatious villas while keeping collections of rare and exotic animals on their expansive estates. Such showy displays of wealth have been documented in cultures as diverse as feudal Europe and Japan,

14 among Polynesian Islanders, Icelandic communities, Amazonian foraging tribes, and

Melanesian people of Australia (Bird and Smith 2005; Godoy et al. 2007).

An evolutionary analysis suggests that wasteful consumption is rooted in people’s innate desire for status that improves reproductive opportunities (Miller 2009; Saad 2007).

Because success in evolution is always relative (a gene must do better than alternative alleles to spread), an evolutionary perspective highlights that individuals will generally be more concerned with relative status rather than absolute status. Consider the following two options:

Would you rather have (A) a 4,000-square-foot home in a neighborhood of 6,000-square-foot homes, or (B) a 3,000-square-foot home in a neighborhood of 2,000-square-foot homes.

When presented with these types of options, the majority of people across cultures and demographic categories choose option B (Frank 1985). People are willing to have less overall, as long as they have more than their neighbors. Indeed, an increase in relative wealth makes people happier than their absolute wealth (Diener and Suh 2000). Although people differ in their status-sensitivity, an evolutionary perspective highlights that it is universal human nature to be tempted by and often act upon desires to improve one’s relative status.

Marketing Mistakes. Strategies for reducing consumption that fail to consider the importance of relative status are unlikely to be very effective. For instance, it is misguided to blame the media for creating a thirst for status. Rather than being the root of the problem, marketers are merely exploiting people’s innate desires. An evolutionary perspective suggests that it will be difficult to persuade people to be content with their current status or behave in ways that lowers their status. Imploring Westerners to consume less because they are wealthier than most people in the rest of the world is likely to do little to slow consumption.

Rather than trying to eradicate the drive for status, more optimal strategies can and should harness and redirect such tendencies to produce pro-environmental rather than wasteful behavior.

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III: Copying the Behavior of Others

An often underappreciated contributor to environmental problems results from a conflict between what people believe they ought to do versus what they actually see others doing (Cialdini, Reno and Kallgren 1990). A recent report by Environics Research Group showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans have the highest level of enthusiasm for being “green” and energy efficient. Yet when probed about actual behaviors, only 9% of people had purchased a green product, only 7% had been turning off unneeded lights or appliances, and just 6% had curbed water consumption. An important reason why people don’t behave pro-environmentally is because they observe others behaving in a non- environmental manner.

Psychologists have long recognized that humans exhibit a tendency to copy others

(Asch 1956). This tendency is believed to have evolutionary benefits (Simon 1990; Sundie et al. 2006). Imitating others and following the majority are adaptive strategies for learning in social species such as ours, in which the costs of individual trial-and-error learning are substantial (Gigerenzer and Todd 1999; Richerson and Boyd 2006). In ancestral environments, individuals who swiftly followed what others were doing had an adaptive advantage, especially in uncertain situations (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004; Kameda et al

2003). Mimicry research similarly suggests that imitating others is often an automatic process, triggered by mirror neurons in the brain (Chartrand and Van Baaren 2009).

The human tendency to imitate has important consequences for the environment. For example, although home residents say that the behavior of their neighbors has the least effect on their own conservation behaviors, the behavior of neighbors is by far the strongest predictor of actual energy conservation, including being a substantially stronger motivator than environmental attitudes or financial incentives (Nolan et al. 2008). And when people

16 learn that their neighbors are not conserving, they increase their own energy consumption, even when they had been conserving energy in the past (Schultz et al. 2007).

Marketing Mistakes. Communication strategies urging people that they “should” behave environmentally are likely to be sub-optimal, especially if people are not convinced that many others are behaving in this manner. Paradoxically, a common approach to spur environmental behaviors is to depict a problem as regrettably frequent. Messages such as

“83% of people are not recycling!” or “100 million plastic bottles discarded everyday!” are well-intended, but the communicators have missed something critically important: Within the statement “Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the powerful and undercutting message “Look at all the people who are doing it.” For example, a sign at the Petrified National Forest in Arizona attempts to prevent theft of petrified wood by informing visitors about the regrettably high number of thefts each year. Field experiments show that this sign increases theft by almost three hundred percent (Cialdini 2003). As we discuss later, rather than trying to get people to stop paying attention to what others are doing, there are more optimal ways to harness the human tendency to imitate the masses.

IV: Valuing the Present Over the Future

Many environmental problems result from a tradeoff between immediate versus delayed rewards, whereby today’s desires often prevail against tomorrow’s needs. This proclivity to discount the future is sometimes assumed to be a pathology of Western civilization (Penn 2003). Yet this tendency had enormous benefits in ancestral environments

(Wilson and Daly 2005). If our ancestors would have spent too much effort on future needs rather than on satisfying immediate needs, they would have been less likely to survive and pass on their genes (Kacelnik 1997). Indeed, neuroscientific evidence shows that the salience of immediate rewards activates evolutionary ancient brain systems (McClure et al. 2004).

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Natural selection is not forward-looking. It does not anticipate what might happen in future generations. Instead, natural selection has shaped our psychology to maximize the here and now. The evolutionarily-recent transition from being hunters-gatherers to farmers some

13,000 years ago had important consequences for temporal discounting. Whereas hunter- gatherers’ labor is often rewarded the same day, farmers need to wait several months until harvest. When our ancestors shifted from foraging to food production, their evolved preferences were not eradicated. Although there are individual differences in the ability to delay gratification, people in modern societies still overwhelmingly weigh immediate outcomes more heavily than distant ones (e.g., Frederick, Loewenstein and O'Donoghue

2002; Green and Myerson 2004), while underestimating the probability and severity of future outcomes, such as ecological threats (Hardin 1995; Slovic et al. 1987).

Marketing Mistakes. Because humans value the present over the future and ignore distant, low-probability events, strategies that fail to take these predispositions into account are not likely to succeed. Calls for people to value the needs of future generations as much as their own needs are unrealistic. Field studies show that appeals to consider the consequences of wasteful behavior on future generations are ineffective at motivating environmental behavior (Gardner and Stern 2002; Goldstein and Cialdini 2007). Nevertheless, although zero discounting is unrealistic, an evolutionary analysis suggests that specific types of tactics can lead people to place more weight on the future when making environmental decisions.

V: Mismatches Between Modern and Ancestral Environments

An evolutionary perspective suggests that we interact with our complex present-day world using brains that evolved to confront the problems of the Pleistocene (Ornstein and

Ehrlich 1989). Because our “Stone Age” brains are designed to produce adaptive behaviors in the ancestral environment, this does not imply that they will produce adaptive behaviors

18 today. For example, our evolved, adaptive desire for sex can produce outcomes in our modern world with little to no adaptive evolutionary benefits, such as pornography. The mismatch between what our brains were designed to do and understand versus what we confront and try to comprehend in the modern world can exacerbate environmental problems.

Social scientists have long been puzzled as to why people are so poor at rational decision making, comprehending environmental risks, and underestimating the severity of environmental issues (Hardin 1993; Slovic 1987). An evolutionary perspective suggests that such judgments may reflect a deeper ecological rationality, meaning that the human mind is optimized to solve problems the way they presented themselves in the ancestral environment

(Haselton and Nettle 2006; Pham 2007). Indeed, human decision-making improves dramatically when problems are presented in a natural ecological context (Gigerenzer 2000).

Consider that statistical information in the modern world is often presented in probabilistic terms, such as “there is a 0.2 probability that it will rain today.” Our ancestors, however, would have encountered information in frequentist terms—“it rained on 4 out of the last 20 days.” When a classic rational decision problem, such as Casscells’ (1978) medical diagnosis problem, is presented in probabilistic terms, it is solved only by about 12% of people, including trained physicians. Yet when the same exact problem is presented in frequentist terms, it is solved accurately by everyone between 76% and 92% of the time

(Cosmides and Tooby 1996). Rather than error-prone decision-makers, people are excellent intuitive statisticians as long as information is presented in an ecologically relevant way.

Marketing Mistakes. Humans will be slower to respond to threats that are evolutionary novel, such as global warming, air pollution, or toxic waste. Given that the mind has evolved to respond to information in the way it would have appeared in ancestral environments, people will also be less likely to respond to environmental risks stated in probabilistic than in frequentist terms. Similarly, because humans evolved in relatively small

19 and simple societies, we are not adept at comprehending large numbers. While a million, billion, and trillion represent vastly different quantities, such concepts did not exist in the ancestral environment. Finally, our ancestors’ ecological challenges were relatively local and had a visible link between activities and the state of the environment. This suggests that people are unlikely to be responsive to environmental threats that they cannot feel, hear, smell, touch, or see.

HARNESSING HUMAN NATURE TO SOLVE ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

“The only way to make a conservation ethic work is to ground it in ultimately selfish

reasoning… An essential component of this formula is the principle that people will conserve

fiercely if they foresee a material gain for themselves, their kin, and their tribe.”

—E. O. Wilson (1984, p. 131-132)

An evolutionary perspective highlights the reasons why and how human nature contributes to many environmental problems. But it does not imply that such problems are inevitable. By understanding the ancestral origins and workings of our innate tendencies, an evolutionary approach suggests that environmental problems could be lessened or even eradicated by employing evolutionarily-informed communication strategies. For persuasion strategies to be optimally effective, however, they must work with—rather than ignore—our ancestral tendencies.

In this final section we revisit the tendencies why human nature produces or exacerbates many environmental problems. Here we explicitly draw on the theories that point to the origins of these tendencies (see Table 1), which provide valuable insight into the levers and pulleys marketers can use to effectively influence behavior. We propose that each tendency can be harnessed and redirected to mitigate a variety of environmental problems from the depletion of natural resources to excessive consumption. As reviewed below,

20 insights from evolutionary considerations are not only already proving to be effective at changing environmental practices, but they offer many directions for future research on consumer sustainability and conservation.

I. Harnessing Self-Interest

Kin Selection and Psychological Kinship. An evolutionary perspective highlights that self-interest does not equate to the interest of an individual. The theory of kin selection (or inclusive fitness theory) asserts that people have been designed to ensure the survival and replication of their genes—genes that are shared with kin (Hamilton 1964). Kin selection has important implications for cooperation in environmental social dilemmas. Consider a group of siblings confronting a tragedy of the commons. Because siblings share roughly 50% of their genes with each other, they have a shared interest in preserving the commons (Kenrick,

Sundie and Kurzban 2008). Indeed, across cultures (and species) individuals are more likely to share resources with kin than non-kin, and with close kin more than distant kin (Burnstein,

Crandall and Kitayama, 1994; Dunbar and Barrett 2007).

Kin selection has implications for future research. Pro-environmental appeals may be more influential when they emphasize the interests of kin. A message urging people to conserve water may be more effective if it emphasizes that there might not be enough water left for one’s children, nephews, nieces, cousins—one’s “genetic future.” Another implication is that the use of fictitious kin labels may foster sustainable behavior. Messages emphasizing that groups are like families might elicit greater self-sacrifice by activating a psychological sense of kinship. Appeals such as “Mother Nature needs our help” or “Brother, can you spare a dime for the environment?” might be more powerful at eliciting environmental care.

Reciprocity and Social Networks. Because humans also cooperate with non-kin, evolutionary theorists have explained such cooperation in light of the theory of reciprocal

21 altruism (Trivers 1971). Because helpers can benefit by being helped in return, reciprocal altruism explains why people may cooperate with non-kin in commons dilemmas. Conditions in human ancestral groups were well-suited for the evolution of reciprocal altruism because hunter-gatherer groups formed small and stable social networks (Foley 1997). Research shows that modern small communities with dense social networks – much like those found in hunter-gatherer bands – are better at preserving communal resources (Ostrom 1990). For instance, fishery communities with stronger networks have more sustainable fishing practices

(Palmer 1991), and dense community networks speed up the adoption of green technologies via word-of-mouth (Gardner and Stern 2002). Reciprocal altruism suggests that pro- environmental behavior among non-kin could be fostered more easily through the creation of small and interdependent social networks. Although modern cities inhabited by millions of anonymous strangers are very different from the world of our ancestors, future research is poised to examine how online social network sites such as Facebook or Twitter can be used to turn large, anonymous masses into small, virtual communities.

Because humans are capable of cooperating with those who cannot directly return favors, the evolution of this kind of helping is explained in light of theories of indirect reciprocity (Nowak and Sigmund 2005). Indirect reciprocity posits that organisms can evolve the ability to cooperate with non-reciprocating strangers because doing so can establish a reputation as a good cooperator. People with cooperative and conservationist reputations are more often selected as allies and even group leaders (Hardy and Van Vugt 2006). People are not only less likely to deplete resources when their reputation is at stake (Milinski et al.

2006), but reputational concerns can be a powerful motivator in leading individuals to sacrifice personal benefits in order to adopt pro-environmental practices (Griskevicius,

Tybur, and Van den Bergh 2010). Reputation is also a powerful tool for inducing businesses to adopt sustainable practices. For example, a consumer-led “name and shame” campaign

22 forced McDonalds to abandon plastic packaging in favor of more sustainable materials

(Gardner and Stern 2002). Research shows that simply having a pair of eyes on a poster can activate reputation concerns and decrease free-riding (Bateson et al. 2006), suggesting that signs, stickers, or even computer monitor backgrounds with eyes might encourage pro- environmental behavior.

Fostering Group Identity. Evolutionary analyses point to an additional factor that should motivate people to self-sacrifice in large-scale environmental dilemmas. Because human evolutionary history is riddled with competitions and battles between tribes, people have an innate capacity to quickly form strong emotional ties with groups (Richerson and

Boyd 2006; Wilson et al. 2008). This “tribal instinct” is reflected in people’s social identity with various groups (Tajfel and Turner 1979). The strength of people’s community identification predicts their willingness to help solve tragedy of the commons problems (Van

Vugt 2001). High community identifiers are more willing to punish cheaters and compensate for undesirable behavior of other community members (Brewer and Kramer 1986). Recent neuroscience findings suggest that similar brain regions are activated when helping kin as when helping strangers with whom one strongly identifies (Harbaugh, Mayr and Burghart

2007), suggesting that we can perceive members of our community as kin. Future research needs to examine how the creation of community identities can be used to promote sustainable behavior. For example, a superordinate identity can be strengthened by emphasizing a common threat, such as the collapse of the local tourist economy when a shared resource such as a rain forest or fishing lake is being destroyed (Van Vugt 2009).

II: Harnessing Desire for Relative Status

Costly Signaling. Evolutionary theorists regard conspicuous consumption as a costly signal of status (Bird and Smith 2005; Miller 2009). Costly signaling theory posits that

23 natural selection encourages people to engage in activities that are increasingly costly – involving significant resources, energy, risk, or time – as a way of signaling their ability to incur costs, which is associated with status. People who buy second homes, for example, effectively convey to their peers that they can incur the cost of spending large sums of money on non-essential goods, thereby increasing their relative status (Van Vugt and Hardy 2010).

Because costly behaviors are intended to signal the ability to incur costs, competitions for relative status should not be limited to consumption. For example, someone like media mogul Ted Turner can signal his ability to incur costs by building a fifth mansion or by donating the same million dollars to pro-environmental causes. People who are wealthy and helpful are not only seen as more trustworthy, and as more desirable as friends and romantic partners (Barclay 2004; Cottrell, Neuberg and Li 2007; Griskevicius et al. 2007; Iredale, Van

Vugt and Dunbar 2008), but they are more likely to increase their status in the eyes of others

(Hardy and Van Vugt 2006). Indeed, individuals throughout history are known to compete for status via helping—a concept known as competitive altruism (Roberts 1998; Van Vugt et al. 2007). For example, in the Native American Kwakiutl practice of potlatching, tribal chiefs compete to give away their possessions, whereby the person who is able to give away the most resources gains status (Cole and Chaikin 1990). Anthropologists have observed such behaviors in numerous hunter-gatherer societies, including the Ache of Paraguay, the Meriam of Australia, and the Shuar of the Amazon (Price 2003; Smith and Bird 2000).

Competitive Environmentalism. People’s desire for relative status can be harnessed and redirected for status competition via pro-environmental behaviors. Because status desires can motivate people to invest in a good reputation, it can encourage them to purchase socially desirable green products rather than non-green counterparts (Griskevicius et al. 2010). As highlighted earlier, a key component of harnessing status to benefit the environment is that pro-environmental acts need to be visible to others (Hardy and Van Vugt 2006). Green

24 organizations are well-advised to give their benefactors visible signs, tags, or badges, so that benefactors can clearly display their self-sacrificing green acts. Another type of strategy could involve publicizing a “Green List” that ranks the top greenest companies, celebrities, or ordinary citizens. Media mogul Ted Turner, for example, once bemoaned the influence of the

Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, pointing out that this publicized list discourages the wealthy from donating to charity for fear of slipping down in the rankings. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that a list of top philanthropist—the Slate 60—was established the very same year that Ted Turner publicly pledged a billion dollars to humanitarian relief. Similar types of publicized lists of “least polluting companies” in India have been remarkably effective at motivating firms to voluntarily reduce pollution (Powers, Blackman, Lyon and Narain 2008), highlighting the universal human tendency to not want to be at the bottom of any totem pole.

A competitive environmentalism approach has important implications for the pricing of green products. This perspective suggests that increasing the price of a green product might lead that product to be more desirable because it signals that people are prepared to incur costs. For example, after U.S. tax credits for the Toyota Prius expired, sales went up by

68.9% (Toyota Reports 2008). When green products are relatively cheaper than their counterparts, this can decrease their desirability (Griskevicius et al. 2010). A counterintuitive implication of costly signalling is that making some green products cheaper, easier to buy, and more time-saving might undercut their utility as a signal of environmentalist dedication.

Electric cars might be seen as more prestigious and desirable if recharging stations are harder to find and batteries take longer to recharge. Future research is needed to examine whether it might be detrimental to have high-status celebrities market green products that are inexpensive because purchasing such cheap products can undermine the signaling of relative status. Future research is also needed to investigate conditions when it is optimal for green

25 products to have large premiums and be linked to high-status celebrities, compared to providing consumers with rebates and financial incentives to acquire green wares.

III: Harnessing Imitation and Obligation

There are two types of appeals commonly used in hopes of persuading people to go green. One involves informing people about the plight of the environment, and the other involves appealing to monetary benefits. For example, most hotels place cards in rooms urging guests to reuse their towels by appealing to the environment (e.g., “The environment needs our help!”) or to money (e.g., “Please reuse towels to help keep your costs low”).

Although such messages may intuitively seem persuasive, field experiments show that either type of message is no more effective than simply asking people to “Please reuse your towels”

(Goldstein et al. 2008). Much research demonstrates that merely informing people about the plight of the environment does little to motivate pro-environmental behavior (Gardner and

Stern 2002). And while financial incentives can motivate conservation, such incentives need to be substantial (e.g., a $5 hotel discount for reusing towels), making such programs prohibitively expensive. Moreover, financial incentives may crowd out any intrinsic motivation to do good for the environment (Tenbrunsel and Messick 1999).

Imitation and Social Norms. Drawing on the ultimate theory of cultural evolution

(Boyd and Richerson 2005) and proximate mechanism of social norms (Cialdini et al. 1990), the tendency to imitate others can be harnessed to spur pro-environmental behavior. For example, hotel cards imploring guests to reuse towels could indicate the prevalence of this behavior. Compared to standard messages, when guests are merely informed of the true fact that the majority of other guests reuse their towels at least once during a stay, towel reuse goes up by 34% (Goldstein et al. 2008). Our innate tendency to copy others has been used

26 with great success to increase recycling (Schultz 1999), reduce littering (Cialdini et al. 1990), and decrease home energy use (Nolan et al. 2008).

Future research needs to examine how the tendency to imitate can be used to promote pro-environmental behavior even when the majority of people are not engaging in such acts.

For example, what happens when only 5% of commuters carpool to work? Consideration of human nature suggests that re-framing such information from relative terms to absolute numbers (e.g., 25,000 city residents carpool each week!) may harness our tendency to copy others and motivate sustainable behavior. Equally problematic is people’s tendency to copy behavior regardless of whether it helps or hurts the environment. When residents learn that they are using less energy than their neighbors, for example, they increase energy consumption (Schultz et al. 2007). Fortunately, this detrimental effect can be reversed by providing residents who already conserve energy with positive social feedback (Schultz et al.,

2007). When residents are informed that they are using less energy than their neighbors and they receive a smiley face to indicate social approval for this behavior, such information motivates conservationists to continue their energy-efficient ways.

An American utility company named Opower provides a case study of how the tendency to imitate can be harnessed to foster large-scale behavioral change (Cuddy and

Doherty 2010). Directly applying the research reviewed above, Opower provides home residents with information on their monthly energy bill regarding how much energy they are using compared to their neighbors, including drawing a smiley face on the bills of those residents who are energy-efficient. Despite reaching only a small percentage of homes, in

2009 Opower saved more energy than the entire U.S. solar energy industry produced; and by end of 2010, the amount of energy use reduced by Opower will be equivalent to removing

150,000 homes from the electricity grid. This approach is not only inexpensive to implement, but it has been effective at reducing energy consumption across demographic categories. The

27 program also continues to be effective more than two years after initial implementation. This harnessing of human nature to promote sustainable behavior has been so effective that U.S.

President Barak Obama recently held a public press conference at Opower’s headquarters, heralding this marketing approach as the model for creating sustainable lifestyles.

Imitation and Reciprocal Altruism. An increasingly popular strategy to foster sustainability consists of offering donations to green causes in return for the purchase of products or services—a strategy falling under the rubric of cause-related marketing

(Varadarajan and Menon 1988). For instance, for every Samsung Reclaim phone purchased,

Samsung donated $2 to the Nature Conservancy. Cause-related marketing is believed to be so effective that it is the fastest-growing arena of corporate sponsorship (well over a billion dollars annually), outpacing sports sponsorships (Watson 2006).

Although these kinds of tit-for-tat approaches may seem intuitively persuasive, research shows that offering gifts such as mugs or tote bags as incentives for charitable giving significantly decreases donations compared to when no gift is offered (Newman and

Shen 2010). More pertinent to pro-environmental behavior, in a field experiment in hotels, messages that promised a donation to an environmental cause if guests reused their towels were no more effective at motivating towel reuse than standard messages (Goldstein,

Griskevicius and Cialdini 2010). Although cause-related marketing can no doubt be effective under some circumstances, a closer inspection of such tactics highlights that they fail to harness either the human tendency to imitate or to reciprocate. In cause-related marketing the company provides neither a behavior to imitate, nor a benefit that allows recipients to reciprocate. Consideration of human nature suggests that a small—but theoretically crucial— alteration to such practices should engage both imitation and reciprocal altruism: If the company were to donate first, it would provide a behavior for consumers to imitate and a sense of obligation to reciprocate. Indeed, a message in hotel rooms informing guests that the

28 hotel had already donated to an environmental cause increased towel reuse by 26 percent

(Goldstein, Griskevicius and Cialdini 2010). Future research is needed to investigate circumstances when cause-related marketing approaches are more versus less successful, as well as conditions that optimize the effectiveness of switching the order of the donation.

IV: Valuing the Present and the Future

While some discounting of the future is adaptive, an evolutionary perspective posits that people’s discounting rates are not fixed. Evolutionary theorists note that the extent to which people weigh the present versus the future is linked to life history theory (Kaplan and

Gangestad 2005). According to life history theory, all organisms, including humans, must make trade-offs between investing in current versus in future reproduction. Prioritizing current reproduction is associated with earlier sexual maturation (e.g., earlier onset of menarche), producing more offspring, and valuing the present (Ellis 2004). In contrast, prioritizing future reproduction is associated with delayed sexual maturation (e.g., later onset of menarche), producing fewer offspring, and valuing the future. Considerations of life history theory have important implications for both impatience and overpopulation—two key contributors to environmental problems.

Safe and Predictable Environments. According to life history theory, whether individuals prioritize the present versus the future varies in response to specific ecological factors. When environments are dangerous or unpredictable, people invest more in current reproduction and discount the future more steeply (Ellis et al. 2009). Mortality rates are indeed strongly related to the age of reproduction, both across countries and city neighborhoods (Low 1996; Wilson and Daly 1997). Even controlling for socio-economic status, higher violent crime rates predict an earlier age of reproduction (Griskevicius et al. forthcoming). This means that in environments that are unpredictable or dangerous, people

29 tend to have more offspring, adding to population numbers. Such environments are also associated with steeper discounting in decision-making. For example, mortality cues lead people to choose immediate rewards over larger, later rewards (Griskevicius et al. 2010).

Life history theory suggests that interventions to make environments be—or merely be perceived as—safer, more stable, and predictable should produce less discounting of the future. For example, research needs to examine whether marketing messages that highlight the safety, stability, and predictability of the environment are more effective at increasing the valuation of the future, possibly leading people to be more likely to act in ways to preserve the environment for the future. Life history theory also suggests that childhood environments are particularly important in setting psychological life-history parameters, meaning that individuals’ discounting preferences could be altered most powerfully through early-age interventions. For example, future research needs to examine whether child daycare centers that emphasize predictable routines and are staffed by a small and stable set of workers might lead those children to discount the future less steeply as adults.

Gender Differences. An evolutionary life history perspective predicts that men should discount the future more steeply than women. This prediction is derived from the theories of parental investment and sexual selection (Darwin 1871; Trivers 1972), which assert that the sex in a species with lower obligatory investment in offspring (e.g., gestation, birthing, lactation, parenting) will be more competitive. Consistent with the fact that in the vast majority of mammals, including in humans, males have lower obligatory parental investment, much research documents that men across cultures are more competitive, risk-taking, aggressive, and have a shorter life expectancy than women (Daly and Wilson 1988; Kenrick and Luce 2000). Accordingly, men, on average, have steeper discount rates than women

(Wilson, Daly and Gordon 2007). One of the implications of this gender difference is that men are more willing to deplete environmental resources and engage in wasteful

30 consumption for present gains. This is borne out by studies showing that men are less concerned about environmental degradation and are more willing to conspicuously waste environmental resources to attract mates (Low 1996; Sundie et al. forthcoming; Wilson et al.,

1998, 2007).

Consideration of the ancestral roots of gender differences suggests that men’s discount rates can be influenced by the mating ecology (Wilson and Daly 2004), such as the ratio of men to women in a population. Sex ratios deviate markedly from equality in many populous countries. In the most striking case, China will soon have several dozen million of surplus males (Zhu, Lu, and Hesketh 2009). Research shows that a scarcity of women leads men to discount the future at a steeper rate (Griskevicius et al. 2010), suggesting that male- biased sex ratios within countries or areas may exacerbate environmental problems.

A life history perspective presents some reasons for optimism about male environmental behavior. For example, men’s preferences shift toward less impulsivity and more restraint when they perceive that there is less competition for mates (Griskevicius et al.

2010). Further, the theory of sexual selection suggests that an important contributor to how men treat the environment is the mate preferences of women. Recent research shows that women find men who behave sustainably sexually more attractive (Gotts and Van Vugt

2010). This implies that a potentially powerful lever in shaping men’s environmental behavior is information that informs men regarding what modern women want.

V: Presenting Information to Match Ancestral Mechanisms

Our minds evolved in an ancestral world where there was a tangible link between behavior and the environment. If group members hunted all of the game and gathered all of the food in an area, they became hungry; if they defecated in their cave, it became uninhabitable; and if they ate something poisonous, they got sick and possibly died. A critical

31 difference between the modern world and our ancestral environment is that today we rarely see, feel, touch, hear, or smell how our behaviors impact the environment. When we buy food, we don’t see how it is grown; if we buy all of the food at the store, more will arrive tomorrow; when we purchase a manufactured product, we don’t see the factory by the river that might be poisoning the water downstream.

Tangible and Visceral Stimuli. Effective marketing communications must harness our evolved tendencies to respond to tangible and visceral stimuli. Consider an instructive example from the gas company. How do you know if your home is filling up with poisonous gas? You know because your house begins to smell funny. Of course, natural gas has no odor, so gas companies intentionally scent gas with a noxious smell to ensure that people feel that they are being poisoned, which motivates them to take immediate action. Now consider a related question: How do you know if your environment is being poisoned? Almost everyone cognitively “knows” that we’re depleting resources at unprecedented rates, our water is more polluted than ever, and entire ecosystems are being destroyed. Some of us have even visited places where we have seen the tangible and visceral evidence that these things are actually happening. But at the end of the day, my house smells just fine, my neighborhood has trees, my water tastes fine, and my food supply is plentiful. Our minds are not designed to respond to environmental problems when such problems are distant or presented in abstract terms.

For information about environmental problems to “stick” and motivate people to take immediate action, such information must be concrete, simple, and emotional (Heath and

Heath 2007). As in the poisonous gas example, industries could be required to discolor their invisible but harmful emissions, and city governments might consider altering the taste and smell of public drinking water according to the level of pollutants detected. Future research is needed to examine ways to make pro-environmental messages optimally tangible and visceral without leading people to tune out or habituate to the problem.

32

Biophilia. Although human nature has been shaped to extract and consume resources, our ancestors did live in natural settings for hundreds of thousands of years. A growing body of research suggests that our evolutionary history on the savannahs (rather than in cement boxes in concrete cities) may have endowed us with a sense of biophilia—an appreciation and desire for nature (Wilson 2006). Studies find that humans around the world are attracted to similar types of natural landscapes, and people in modern cities go out of their way to make their living spaces to be more like our ancestral environments (Kaplan and Kaplan

1989). Exposure to such natural environments is even known to increase recovery from stressful experiences such as surgery (Ulrich 1984). In line with the fact that consumers spend significant amounts of money to be surrounded by nature, American and European zoos attract more annual visitors than all professional sports events combined (Wilson 2006).

Although modern concrete cities are different from our natural ancestral dwellings, all people likely posses the sometimes-dormant ability to love and cherish nature. Recent research shows that when city residents are shown short video clips of natural scenery, they show more restraint in commons dilemmas and donate more money to environmental causes

(Steentjes and Van Vugt 2010). However, with an increasing percentage of the world population living in large cities, we must find creative ways to tap and unleash our dormant biophilia to promote a sustainable life style. Future research needs to examine, for example, whether for children growing up in urban environments, exposure to trees, animals, and enjoyable outdoor experiences may promote a life-long environmental commitment.

CONCLUSION

This paper was motivated by two practical marketing questions: (1) What advice do marketers have for crafting effective persuasion strategies to lessen resource depletion, restrain wasteful consumption, and spur sustainable behaviors?; and (2) What advice do

33 marketers have for avoiding costly mistakes when crafting such messages? Although our field no doubt has much to say in response to these questions, here we explicitly focused on answering these questions—and providing novel theoretical insights into consumption, conservation, and sustainability—by taking an evolutionary perspective that is ideally suited to shed light onto the ancestral roots of modern consumer behavior.

By considering our evolved human nature, we proposed a framework stating that many modern environmental problems are caused or exacerbated by a small set of ancestral tendencies. Our species has a long history of creating ecological problems, meaning that sustainability is not going to come easily. Indeed, our framework highlights that many communication strategies designed to promote sustainable consumption and environmental conservation are sub-optimal. These strategies constitute important and preventable marketing mistakes because they ignore important aspects of human nature, leading them to fight an uphill battle against ancestral tendencies. To remedy these types of mistakes, we considered multiple evolutionary-based theories that point to the origins of each ancestral tendency. By considering how and why deep ancestral forces continue to shape modern behaviors that impact the environment, we proposed that each of these tendencies can be harnessed and redirected to create more optimal persuasion strategies to lessen resource depletion, restrain wasteful consumption, and spur sustainable behaviors.

The framework presented here offers clear guidance to marketers for crafting persuasion strategies and avoiding costly mistakes by working with, rather than against, human nature (see Table 1). Perhaps more importantly, the framework presents many theoretically-guided directions for future consumer research investigating sustainability, overconsumption, and pro-environmental behavior. When considering the topic of sustainability and overconsumption, marketers have sometimes been viewed as part of the problem. But marketers are also ideally positioned and highly capable of being part of the

34 solution. Human nature has contributed to creating modern environmental problems and human nature is poised to help solve them.

35

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TABLE 1: EVOLUTIONARY FRAMEWORK FOR SUSTAINABILITY MARKETING

Ancestral Human Key Theories Sustainability Marketing Mistakes Evolutionarily Informed Future Research Questions Tendency Problem Strategies Self Interest Imploring people to value the Highlight genetic self-interest Can fictitious kinship labels foster Kin Selection Resource group above oneself Create small social networks self-sacrifice and green behavior? People prioritize Reciprocal Altruism depletion Urging self-restraint for sake of resembling ancestral groups Can online blogs and social media Indirect Reciprocity self-interest over other people Threaten reputations through sites create small communities group welfare Urging self-restraint for the sake “name and shame” campaigns resembling ancestral groups? of the environment Harness “tribal instinct” to Can eyes on signs or computer foster social group identity monitors spur green behavior? Relative Status Urging people to be content with Publicize “green lists” that rank Might using celebrities decrease the Costly Signaling Wasteful their current status most pro-environmental adoption of some green behaviors? People are Competitive Altruism consumption Asking people to behave in ways companies, celebrities, or Which types of green products should motivated by that lowers their status ordinary citizens have large premiums, and which ones relative rather than Emphasizing that we have more Make self-sacrificing green should have large rebates? absolute status than people in distant places behaviors more public Imitation Depicting environment problems Depict situations showing If green behavior is not prevalent, can Cultural Evolution Unsustainable as regrettably frequent prevalence of green behavior presenting absolute rather than People copy what Social Norms behaviors Informing people of what the Encourage those above average relative numbers be more effective? others are doing average person is doing to continue behavior If green behavior is not prevalent, can Offering donation to green cause Donate to green cause, then ask depicting that there is an increasing if people first purchase product consumers to purchase product trend be more effective? Future Discounting Emphasizing consequences of Emphasize consequences of Can messages highlighting stability & Life History Overpopulation wasteful behavior for future wasteful behavior for the predictability increase valuation of People value the Sexual Selection generations person doing it the future and sustainability? present more than Parental Investment Calling to value needs of future Depict that women prefer men Can more predictability & stability in the future generations as much as current who engage in sustainable acts childcare lead kids to discount future less steeply as adults? Environmental Presenting environmental Present environment problems Which visceral messages will be most Mismatch Mismatch All of the above problems in probabilistic terms in concrete, frequentist terms effective without leading people to Ecological Rationality Using large numbers Elicit visceral responses to tune out or habituate to the problem? People respond to Biophilia Depicting environmental local environmental problems Can exposure to nature, especially at novel information problems without engaging any Create visible link between an early age, encourage sustainable with ancestral minds of the five senses behavior and the environment behavior as adults?

50