Evolutionary psychology in marketing: Deep, debated, but fancier with fieldwork

Abstract

AbstractThis guest editorial starts with an introduction of evolutionary psychology (EP) in the marketing domain and delineates some of the building blocks of EP, both generally and when applied to consumer research. While EP is a debated discipline among marketing scholars, with some praising its presence and others perceiving it as patriarchal, politically incorrect, and problematic, a central tenet of this metaframework is a focus on deep‐rooted, ultimate explanations for human behavior. Marketing scholars have traditionally focused on proximate “how” and “what” questions, which are indeed important to address. However, unlike such proximate questions, EP strives to capture the ultimate “why” reasons behind our purchases and product preferences in terms of which adaptive functions they may have in giving us an evolutionary advantage. Having highlighted and exemplified this proximate‐ultimate distinction, I then present each state‐of‐the‐art paper included in this special issue. All special issue articles use a variety of EP arguments and theories to elucidate several consumption‐relevant phenomena with implications for marketing theory and practice. In closing, I provide a set of suggestions for future EP‐based consumer research, meant to make this field flourish further.