Prior research demonstrates a reliable association between low-quality father involvement or absence and negative outcomes for daughters, particularly in contemporary Western cultures. For example, low-quality father involvement and absence are associated with accelerated sexual development, promiscuity, and risk-taking. The current research tests the prediction that having a daughter shifts fathers' mating psychology to promote long-term pair-bonding, signaling to daughters that male investment is reliable. Using cross-sectional, longitudinal, and transition-to-parenthood data from parents with either a daughter or a son (N = 1694), we found an association between daughters and fathers' long-term pair-bond motivation toward the biological mother. Longitudinal evidence suggested that this effect diminished with daughters' age, consistent with the father absence literature. Transition-to-parenthood data provided additional support that this pattern. Changes in male mating psychology occurred alongside daughters' births and was not related to individual differences between fathers of daughters and sons prior to parenthood. This effect could reflect an adaptation to signal reliability of male investment and prevent abandonment during girls' development.

This paper examines hormonal fluctuations associated with fertility as one of the reasons behind women’s desire for luxury. We suggest that women engage in conspicuous luxury consumption during ovulation, when they have a physiologically activated mating goal, because doing so helps women be noticed by men. Being noticed by as many men as possible increases the likelihood of attracting a desired partner for a romantic relationship. The finding that ovulation—the time of peak fertility—increases women’s desire to purchase conspicuous luxury goods challenges previous research suggesting that women use luxury to signal high standards and limit their pool of potential partners. We reconcile this apparent contradiction by proposing a two-phase mating process: women first seek to attract a broad pool of potential partners (attraction phase), then select from among them for a romantic relationship (selection phase). These findings have benefits for researchers’ understanding of how ovulation changes women’s behavior towards men, and how mating motives can be a driver of the desire for luxury and conspicuous consumption in general.

The modern marketplace has made consumers' lives better in many ways, offering a multitude of affordable conveniences and luxuries. Why, then, is the prevalence of physical and mental health deficits higher than any other time in history? Here, we articulate an evolutionary mismatch perspective-the idea that the environment we live in has changed dramatically in a short period of time, but the human body and mind have not changed. Consumers' evolved body and mind are interacting with the modern world as if it was an ancestral environment that existed thousands of years ago, leading to many negative outcomes. We discuss three evolutionary mismatches that contribute to or compound consumer vulnerability to disease and dissatisfaction with life. We review emerging research and propose future directions that inform effective strategies to mitigate illness and enhance wellbeing.

In Western dual-educated, male-female marriages, women who divorce face greater burdens because of decreased income and primary or sole responsibility for caring for children than men who divorce. Why, then, do these women initiate divorce more and fare better psychologically after a divorce than men? Here, we articulate an evolutionary mismatch perspective, informed by key findings in relationship science. We argue that mismatches between women's evolved preferences and configurations of modern marriage often clash, producing dissatisfaction. Women's unprecedented career ascendance also affords women ever more freedom to leave. We discuss pressures from social expectations for men and women that contribute to or compound these vulnerabilities. We conclude with key questions for future research, which can contribute to strategies for mitigating relationship dissatisfaction and the profound loss and pain that results from divorce.

Despite evidence that consumers appreciate freedom of choice, they also enjoy recommendation systems, subscription services, and marketplace encounters that seemingly occur by chance. This article proposes that enjoyment can, in some contexts, be higher than that in contexts involving choice. This occurs as a result of feelings of serendipity that arise when a marketplace encounter is positive, unexpected, and attributed to some degree of chance. A series of studies shows that feelings of serendipity positively influence an array of consumer outcomes, including satisfaction and enjoyment, perceptions of meaningfulness of an experience, likelihood of recommending a company, and likelihood of purchasing additional products from the company. The findings show that strategies based on serendipity are even more effective when consumers perceive that randomness played a role in how an encounter occurred, and not effective when the encounter is negative, the encounter occurs deterministically (i.e., planned by marketers to target consumers), and consumers perceive that they have enough knowledge to make their own choices. Altogether, this research suggests that marketers can influence customer satisfaction by structuring marketplace encounters to appear more serendipitous, as opposed to expected or entirely chosen by the consumer.

An evolutionary approach studies the evolutionary history and adaptive utility of behavior. This chapter discusses what it means to take an evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior and the significance of using an evolutionary lens to generate testable predictions about identity. The authors begin with an overview of the primary insights of evolutionary theory. They discuss how an evolutionary approach can inform identity research by considering: (1) the evolutionary age of different identities; and (2) how variation in the environment and social worlds of our ancestors forged adaptations that influence identity categorization and signaling. They suggest new research predictions generated from an evolutionary-informed view of identity and identity-driven consumer behavior.

Do personality traits relate to how likely women are to conceive? In two studies (N = 250), we explored the relationship between the probability of conception and the Big Five (Study 1) and the Dark Triad (Study 2) traits. Study 1 suggested that women who were freely cycling and likely to conceive were less agreeable and lower on openness, which may assist in assertiveness and higher discernibility for new partners. Study 2 suggested that coupled, as opposed to single women, who were more likely to conceive, were more narcissistic, which may be related to an increased sense of desirability and enable them to compete with their current partners over sexual access. While this was an exploratory study, it provided implications for the possibility that self-reported personality traits are sensitive to hormonal fluctuations that may be geared towards changes in women's sexual motivation..

Loss aversion is the tendency to be more sensitive to losses than comparable gains. Recent work has shown that men's loss aversion can change when they have a currently activated mating motivation. The current research examined whether women's sensitivity to loss might be influenced by the hormones that regulate fertility, which are known to activate intra-sexual competition and mating motivation. Three studies found that women became less sensitive to loss at peak fertility—near ovulation—in some contexts. Ovulating women reported being less upset at the prospect of losing hypothetical amounts of money and products (e.g., laptop, tennis shoes), as well as accepted lower selling prices for a picture frame, an indication of decreased loss aversion. We also uncovered a theoretically-derived boundary condition for this effect: ovulation led women to become more loss averse when the product was directly relevant for enhancing attractiveness (e.g., lipstick).

The current research examines the impact of women’s early-life socioeconomic status (SES; used as a proxy measure of life history strategy), relationship status, and ovulatory cycle phase on their desire for short-term mating. Results revealed that during the periovulatory phase (i.e., the high-fertility phase of the monthly ovulatory cycle), single women from low SES environments expressed an increased desire for short-term mating, whereas the opposite was found for single women from high SES environments. No such pattern was found for partnered women. These results suggest that one’s early-life environment and relationship status may play a key role in how women respond to internal fertility cues, providing important new insights into factors that may moderate ovulatory shifts in mating behavior. Results provide some of the first evidence that one’s developmental history may alter the expression of ovulatory cycle adaptations.

Do parents favor some children over others? The overwhelming majority of parents state that they treat their children equally, but parents rarely track their spending on each child. We investigate in four studies whether mothers and fathers favor specific children depending on the biological sex of the child. Evidence from the field, laboratory, and community (online panel) showed that parents exhibit systematic biases when forced to choose between spending on sons and daughters. Mothers consistently favored daughters, whereas fathers consistently favored sons. For example, parents were more likely to choose a real prize and give a real U.S. Treasury bond to the child of the same sex as themselves. These parenting biases were found in two different cultures and appear to be driven by parents identifying more strongly with children of the same sex as the parent.

AbstractAn evolutionary theoretical approach considers the adaptive function of behavior. Here we discuss what it means to use an evolutionary approach to generate predictions about consumer behavior and the value of applying an evolutionary lens to the study of consumer psychology. We begin with a discussion of the core insights of evolutionary theory and the common misperceptions associated with an evolutionary approach to the study of behavior. We then detail how specific evolutionarily informed theories can be applied to four core areas of consumer research: risk preference, competition and luxury consumption, self‐control and temporal preferences, and the consumer behavior of women and families. We also discuss the strengths and limitations of an evolutionarily informed research program.

The field of consumer behavior addresses a rich array of basic and applied issues of interest to a wide range of scholars. The present collection of 30 articles reviews state of the art research in four broad domains of consumer behavior including: firstly, perception (e.g. aesthetics, attitudes, brands, judgement and decision-making, metacognition, numbers, sensory marketing); secondly, goals and motivation (e.g. evolutionary motives, identity, intertemporal tradeoffs, goals, materialism, self-control); thirdly, interpersonal processes (e.g. collaborative consumption, consumer-brand relationships, power, prosocial consumer behavior, service failures); and finally, societal level issues (e.g. corporate social responsibility, culture and diversity, environmentalism, health behavior, social media marketing and the digital self). As a set, these reviews highlight the exciting, dynamic, and far reaching nature of consumer behavior.

In examining how stress influences consumer saving and spending, the authors propose that consumers who experience a stressful situation allocate their resources strategically to gain control of their environment. A series of studies shows that this strategic allocation of resources occurs in two ways. Consumers experiencing stress may show increased saving behavior, which assures them that monetary resources will be available when needed. Alternatively, consumers experiencing stress may show increased spending behavior, directed specifically toward products that the consumer perceives to be necessities and that allow for control in an otherwise uncontrollable environment. This conceptualization and the related findings can inform assessments of when stress will lead to beneficial or impulsive consumer behaviors.

Relationship researchers and evolutionary psychologists have been studying human mating for decades, but research inspired by these two perspectives often yields fundamentally different images of how people mate. Research in the relationship science tradition frequently emphasizes ways in which committed relationship partners are motivated to maintain their relationships (e.g., by cognitively derogating attractive alternatives), whereas research in the evolutionary tradition frequently emphasizes ways in which individuals are motivated to seek out their own reproductive interests at the expense of their partners' (e.g., by surreptitiously having sex with attractive alternatives). Rather than being incompatible, the frameworks that guide each perspective have different assumptions that can generate contrasting predictions and can lead researchers to study the same behavior in different ways. This paper, which represents the first major attempt to bring the two perspectives together in a cross-fertilization of ideas, provides a framework to understand contrasting effects and guide future research. This framework-the conflict-confluence model-characterizes evolutionary and relationship science perspectives as being arranged along a continuum reflecting the extent to which mating partners' interests are misaligned versus aligned. We illustrate the utility of this model by working to integrate relationship science and evolutionary perspectives on the role of ovulatory shifts in women's mating psychology, highlighting the tension between the desire to maintain or strengthen a bond with a current partner versus seek out extra-pair mates. To underscore the generality and generativity of the model, we also illustrate its application to two additional topics: functional perspectives on the role of subjective relationship quality, and "errors" in judgments of mate value. As scholars work to integrate relationship science and evolutionary approaches on additional topics, the promise of a unitary, functional perspective on human mating comes closer to reality.