By Steve Quartz

“Understanding how products impact us in light of our brain’s evolutionary history compels us to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about why we consume. The complex emotional life our medial prefrontal cortex creates gives rise to our most basic social impulses: to form intimate partnerships, friendships and alliances — to create the groups through which we gain our sense of belonging. During evolution, one’s life success was critically tied to the quality of partners and alliances one made. This is true today. An extraordinary amount of our social behavior revolves around seeking out and maintaining romantic partnerships and friendships, an evolutionary pressure known as social selection.

Social selection has created deep-seated needs in us to display our value as social partners through acts of generosity, kindness and understanding of social norms. Evolutionary biologists describe these as costly signals of our trustworthiness and worth as a partner and friend. Virtually every social behavior contains some signaling element that conveys something about us to others, from how we walk to how we talk to how we eat. The latest Emily Post etiquette book comes in at a back-breaking 865 pages — a testimony to the extraordinarily complex symbolic layers of our social life.”

“In fact, much of the economic value of products today lies in their impact on our brain’s mostly implicit estimate of how they impact our social identity. In collaboration with Read Montague’s lab at Baylor College of Medicine, we found that boosts in our social status also strongly activate the nucleus accumbens, a critical part of the brain’s reward system that’s implicated in almost all forms of addiction. Other studies with college students found that they value self-esteem boosts even more than sex!”