Evolutionary psychological consumer research:Bold, bright, but better with behavior

Abstract This special issue includes state-of-the-art papers that leverage various theories from evolutionary psychology (EP) to shed light on important consumption-related phenomena. Our guest editorial provides an overview of this EP-based consumer research, highlighting the key content, common denominators, and significant strengths of the articles. The papers cover a wide variety of topics, characteristic of evolutionary-informed research, that we structure around the following three themes: (1) Mating, marketing, and meaningful motivating forces, (2) Conspicuous consumption and salient signs of “showing off,” and (3) Human hormones and biologically-based business research. We close our…