I had the great pleasure of seeing Dan Ariely last week at the Chautauqua Institution.
2 Responses to “Ask Ariely: On Reading Labels, Regulating Risks, and Reproducing Compliments”
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Isn’t the “cave man theory” Ariely mentions in one of his replies just another “just so” story? After all, who really knows how the cave men lived their daily lives?
I think the assertion “no matter how technologically advanced we may become, many of us still believe that our bodies were designed to function best in a long-ago era” seems reasonable. For example, it seems reasonable to assume that our craving for dietary fat and sugar is an adaptation to our ancestral environment.
Of course, we can not have absolute certainty with any specific evolutionary hypothesis, but we can ask which explanation is most consistent with the available evidence. Sources of this evidence includes human physiology, psychology, and the ethnographic record.