ABSTRACT
Of all multidisciplinary fields, perhaps none is more so than the consumer behavior discipline. The consumption context provides one of the most fertile forums within which the rich tapestry of human behaviors is fully displayed. Cognate disciplines within the social sciences that bear a direct influence on consumer behavior include economics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. These can further be broken down into several subdisciplines of relevance to consumer behavior. For example, within psychology, relevant subdisciplines include behaviorism, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. Notably absent from any such list are Darwinian-based frameworks and fields, including human ethology, human behavioral ecology, human sociobiology, Darwinian anthropology, and evolutionary psychology. Recently, Wilkie and Moore (2003) provided a historical overview of marketing thought over the past 100 years as broken down into four distinct eras. The eras might have varied on how much
focus was placed on the commodity, institutional, and functional approaches. Similarly, different eras might have paid greater or lesser attention to the economics, motivational, or information-processing (i.e., cognitive) approaches. However, what is common across all four eras is the absence of biology and evolutionary theory as relevant forces in understanding marketing and consumption phenomena. Given the increasing acceptance of evolutionary theory in both the natural and social sciences, this is perhaps surprising. As such, my goal in the current chapter is to propose ways by which evolutionary psychology might be useful to the consumer behavior discipline by exploring specific subdisciplines that have historically interested consumer scholars.
