One of the most important

One of the most important of these sciences, the branch of biology and experimental psychology known as ethology, studies animal behaviour in both controlled and natural environments and examines how animals adapt to environmental change to improve their chances of survival. Human ethology studies adaptive behaviour in humans and accepts that many types of behaviour are not learned after birth but evolve as instinctive manifestations. These include the newborn infant\'s ability to find its mother\'s breast during breastfeeding or our universal ability to recognize other people\'s emotions by their facial expressions (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Evolutionary psychology has used the findings of ethology to create a body of theory with which to analyze human behaviour. One of its basic tenets is that the human order fexofenadine hydrochloride works as an operating system which has learnt to resolve recurrent challenges by evolving, just as our lungs, pancreas or liver have. In fact, evolutionary psychologists argue that all living organisms have evolved to behave in a way that gives them an evolutionary advantage (Confer et al., 2010). Some of the recurring challenges that propel the human brain towards evolution are the need to forage, select a mate, invest in childcare and education, avoid predators and form protective groups. From an evolutionary perspective, therefore, the human brain is understood not so much as a general processor that applies the same algorithm to any task – and so in our discipline, to an exercise in cost-benefit analysis, for example – but as an organ that has evolved to provide specific algorithmic instructions for a multitude of tasks. Evolutionary psychology also rejects the standard premise of social sciences that the brain begins as a blank slate and is then filled during the socialization process (Pinker, 2006). Instead, it affirms, human beings are endowed with a universal human nature grounded in biology, modified by evolution and inherited by sexual selection (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). Like ethologists, evolutionary psychologists make an important epistemological distinction between the proximate and ultimate reasons for how we behave (Tinbergen, 1963). Studies on proximate reasons address our immediate emotions and the mechanistic relationship between the facts that explain a phenomenon, while the research on ultimate reasons examines the triggers of certain kinds of non-immediate behaviour based on an evolutionary function. Such studies use Darwinian logic to ascertain the cause of certain kinds of behaviour and determine how humans have evolved to act in particular ways (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013; Saad, 2013). In short, proximate reasons explain the how and why of a phenomenon, while ultimate reasons focus solely on the why. Sometimes the two types of reasons are not easy to distinguish and one of the main finding in many consumer behaviour studies is the difficulty people have recognizing ultimate reasons for their actions (Kenrick et al., 2010). Note, however, that proximate and ultimate reasons are also complementary and may co-exist, so that researchers can examine examples of both types in any given study on consumer behaviour. Finally, the distinction between proximate and ultimate also provides a fundamental epistemological tool in research on evolutionary behaviour (Saad, 2013). By way of example, most cross-cultural research on consumer behaviour considers proximate reasons, exploring behavioural differences between groups but rarely addressing the ultimate causes of such differences. Hofstede\'s cultural criteria (individualism vs collectivism) have been used in numerous studies as explanatory variables in cultural differences in consumer behaviour. An important but much neglected question is whether biological or evolutionary reasons can explain the differences in cultural criteria scores between different countries. Are they responsible for why China qualifies as a collectivistic society while the United States is rated as individualistic? Fincher, Thornhill, Murray, and Schaller (2008) propose an alternative explanation where they show that the overall distribution of individualism and collectivism scores worldwide correlate with the prevalence of pathogens in different countries. According to these authors, the degree of collectivism is greater in those countries where there are more factors causing disease and where collectivism encourages greater cohesion between group members but greater distance between groups. Therefore, in studies on ultimate reasons, the behavioural differences between individualistic and collectivistic societies are considered as the result of an environmental challenge; the cultural and biological reasons for these differences are not directly addressed, even though they can offer additional information about the way people behave. In short, in their behaviour as consumers, people combine their biological past (ultimate reasons) with their cultural heritage (proximate reasons).