The Evolutionary Bases for Sustainable Behavior: Implications for Marketing, Policy, and Social Entrepreneurship

How can evolved human nature be leveraged to help eliminate or alleviate environmental problems? The authors examine the evolutionary bases of destructive and ecologically damaging human behavior. They propose that many modern environmental and social problems are caused or exacerbated by five adaptive tendencies rooted in evolutionary history: (1) propensity for self-interest, (2) motivation for relative rather than absolute status, (3) proclivity to unconsciously copy others, (4) predisposition to be shortsighted, and (5) proneness to disregard impalpable concerns. By considering the evolutionary processes that produced these tendencies, the authors present ways that marketers, policy makers, and social entrepreneurs can harness evolved human tendencies to lessen or even eradicate environmental and social problems. From an evolutionary perspective, optimally effective influence strategies must work with humans' evolved tendencies, rather than ignoring them or working against them. Natural selection has shaped all living organisms to exploit resources effectively. Our human problem is that, through our cleverness, we have created a novel evolutionary circum-stance—we now have such technology that the very behav-ioural tendencies which we evolved to do well are those most likely to ruin us. O ur ancestors were highly adept at extracting resources from the environment and using them to survive, thrive, and reproduce, but whereas we have inherited tendencies that were adaptive in the world of our forebears, we live in a world that is considerably different from the one inhabited by our predecessors. Our ancestors were nomadic hunter-gatherers living in bands of 50–150 people; they lived on a planet with fewer than one million people; and they continuously moved their camps to new locations when resources became exhausted, conditions changed, or waste accumulated. In contrast, today many of us permanently live in dense cities of millions on a planet populated by billions. The same behavioral tendencies that enabled our nomadic ancestors to thrive can wreak ecological and social havoc in a technologically advanced world with more than seven billion people. Although most people want to preserve the natural environment , changing old habits can be a formidable challenge , especially when those habits have been adaptive for many millennia. A recent survey shows that while an overwhelming majority of people have great enthusiasm for being green and lowering their carbon footprint, only 9% use any environmentally friendly products, only 7% turn off unneeded lights or appliances, and just 6% curb water consumption (The Home Depot 2009). When surveyed one year …