Must-Have: The Hidden Instincts Behind Everything We Buy, By Geoffrey Miller

Reviewed,Inbali Iserles
Sunday 22 August 2010 00:00 BST
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Prof Geoffrey Miller is on a mission to redefine how we think about marketing. Through the discipline of evolutionary psychology, he examines and dispatches the current marketing paradigms. These he identifies as either conservative (human nature plus free markets necessarily equals consumerist capitalism) or radical (consumerist capitalism occurs as a result of oppressive institutions and ideologies impressing themselves on nascent minds). While such alternatives may be unfairly cast as straw men, Must-Have is a thought-provoking analysis of how marketing really works and its relationship to our ancient psychological traits.

Marketing is a consequence of surplus that is characteristic of modern capitalism, while our psychology was significantly shaped by the hunter-gatherer society of early humans. Yet the same traits that have developed in subsistence societies are, says Miller, the engine of modern marketing. Our choices as consumers result in two Darwinian "fitness cues": we spend money on products that display social and sexual fitness, or which, based on prehistoric indicators, enhance our social, survival, sexual and parenting prospects.

(Just watch out for references to Spent throughout – this was the title of the book in hardback and for reasons unknown, Vintage has failed to update it in the text.)

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in