The Real Reason You’re Voting for Clinton or Trump

The Lebanese-Canadian professor of marketing Gad Saad (both sound like “sad”) can readily defend evolutionary psychology against the charge that it’s a convenient, “just-so story.” (Before diving in, he said, “Forgive me, it’s going to be a bit long-winded, because your question is an important one.”) He founded and developed the field of “evolutionary consumption” after realizing that the principles of evolutionary psychology could be used to study consumer behavior, and now he holds the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption at Concordia University, in Montreal. “Humans are consummatory animals with rapacious appetites,” he’s written in his “Homo Consumericus” blog on Psychology Today. “Much of what we do short of breathing and sleeping involves some consumption act.”

Of late, because of the United States presidential election, among other things, he’s been—you might say “consumed”—by politics. He discusses it on his YouTube channel, “The Saad Truth,” where his followers know him as “The Gadfather.” But politics is not a new interest. on the topic, called “,” in which he argued that evolutionary psychology is the best way to explain the factors at work when voters choose their candidates.