Free The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think by Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius Page A

partner worth keeping, the mate-retention subself is unwrapped from its cocoon.And of course, the kin-care subself doesn’t fully mature until we’ve not only found and kept a mate but produced a child.
    For Abraham Maslow, the top of the pyramid was the need for self-actualization —the desire to pursue one’s own artistic and creative impulses without regard to other people’s reactions.You might be surprised to find that we’ve knocked self-actualization off the top of our pyramid and replaced it with those mundane mammalian parenting motives.We do not deny that human beings are motivated to be creative and artistic.But a desire to self-actualize is not detached from our social goals; instead, it is directly linked to the deeper evolutionary goals of gaining status and acquiring a mate (think about how Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera each turned his creativity into a ticket into the arms of many beautiful women).
    Later in the book we take a closer look at the scientific evidence for the architectural refurbishment of Maslow’s pyramid, and we also examine how different people proceed through this developmental sequence in the pyramid at different speeds (see Chapter 6 , “Living Fast and Dying Young”).But for now, let’s take a look at how our different subselves approach financial decisions.
    THE SUBSELVES MEET MONEY
    One of the authors of this book (Vlad, the former Communist bubble gum aficionado) once worked as an intern at Morgan Stanley, a giant international investment firm.His manager, who ran a multi-million-dollar fund, was a wily Vietnam War veteran who had acquired a taste for the finer things in life and liked fast cars and the sound of roaring engines.He thrived in the action-packed financial environment, blasting into work at 5 a.m.each day and taking pleasure in pulling thetrigger on high-stakes decisions that could wipe him out or enshrine his hero status.It takes a certain bravado and confidence to take such large risks on a daily basis, and he was the kind of man who liked the adrenaline rush that came along with taking those calculated plunges.
    But this fund manager was different from other financial traders in one important regard.Although Wall Street types are known to work around the clock (money never sleeps, after all), this particular financier adhered strictly to the opposite policy: he refused to make investment decisions at home.This practice had less to do with his desire for rest and relaxation than with his keen strategic wisdom.After years in the industry, he realized an important split in his own personality.At the office he was a maverick who approached decisions with guns blazing, but at home he was a family man with a loving wife, small children, and a cuddly puppy.The financial choices he made in the confines of his family world were much more cautious than the ones he made at the office.The same risky investment opportunity that seemed sound and calculated at work looked too precarious at home.To stay successful at his job, he had to take immense risk, but the parent in him simply couldn’t take such chances.
    This fund manager understood something critical about the divided nature of human nature: different subselves are activated in different social situations.This has important implications not just for investing but also for understanding the seemingly irrational biases that plague our minds.
    REVERSING LOSS AVERSION
    Let’s take another look at the phenomenon of loss aversion—the tendency for people to weigh losses more heavily than gains.This seemingly irrational bias was discovered by behavioral economists, those fun-loving laboratory researchers who love to expose our foibles (they’re the guys wearing those Rolling Stones T-shirts with the red tongue hanging out underneath their white lab coats).Loss aversion is one of those things that led to a lot of head scratching among rational economists, the sharply dressed number crunchers.From the classic rational