I read a very interesting article in the paper the other day about human behavior. Think you are rational when it comes to spending? A recent study by Vladas Griskevicius, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, researched why people make choices and decisions that are not always the smartest thing they could have done.
Oh, ya, we’d all like to think that we choose things because they are useful, make us happy or make us money. Not so much, this research says. It’s evolutionary biology that might be driving some of our choices. What? You are kidding, right? Read on
Griskevicius’ most recent work shows that when women are in the minority in a community, guys are more impulsive about spending, don’t save as much and run up more debt. Women who thought that women were a minority didn’t change their spending and saving habits, but they did expect more to be spent on them.
Did you know that women buy and wear sexier clothes when they are ovulating? Particularly when they notice there are other hotties around.
“In the animal world we call that mating effort,” Griskevicius says of these situations.
We might like to think that we are beyond evolution-the laws of natural selection just don’t apply anymore. We’re way too smart for that, right? This research might make you stop and think. “It doesn’t make sense that natural selection would apply to every other species except humans,” according to Griskevicius.
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