Do you like shopping? The answer may partly depend on one factor:
whether you are male or female. Of course, it’s a generalization to say
that, "Women like shopping, men don’t"—I’m sure we all know people this
doesn’t apply to (my wife, for example, doesn’t particularly like
shopping). However, there is evidence that this isn’t a complete myth. A
survey of 2,000 British people conducted in 2013 found that men become
bored after only 26 minutes of shopping, while it took women a full two
hours. The survey found that 80 percent of men didn't like shopping with
their partners, and that 45 percent avoiding doing so at all costs.
Almost half of all spousal shopping trips ended in arguments, with men
becoming frustrated because they bought what they needed straight away,
while their partners were still looking and taking too long to make
decisions.
If there is some validity to these generalizations - and if they are
more than just the result of social conditioning - where could these
different attitudes to shopping stem from? I have had a "pet theory"
about this ever since writing a book called The Fall (link is external) several years ago, which involved research into early human history and anthropology.
The Hunter-Gatherers
For hundreds of thousands of years, until around 8000 BCE, all human
beings lived as hunter-gatherers—that is, they survived by hunting wild
animals (the man’s job) and foraging for wild plants, nuts, fruit, and
vegetables (the woman’s job). I learned a lot of surprising things about
the "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle in my research. For example, it wasn’t a
particularly hard life. When anthropologists began to look
systematically at how modern-day hunter-gatherers use their time, they
discovered that, far from exhausting themselves in their search for
food, they actually spent only 12 to 20 hours per week at it. (This led
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins to call hunter-gatherers “the original
affluent society.”)
Interestingly, women were the main "breadwinners" in hunter-gatherer
groups. Anthropologists estimate that women’s gathering provided around
80-90 percent of groups' food —a fact which has led some anthropologists
to suggest that these peoples should be renamed gatherer-hunters. This
is also meant that their diet
was largely vegetarian (only around 10-20 percent meat), and also quite
healthy, with a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, roots and nuts, all
eaten raw.
Ancient Instincts
Beginning in the Middle East, human communities began to switch to
farming around 8000 BC, and slowly, over the following millennia, the
practice spread widely throughout Asia and Europe. But after so many
hundreds of thousands of years of living that way, it’s no surprise that
hunting and gathering are still instinctive to us. And this brings us
back to shopping—because these instincts may show themselves in our
shopping habits. When most women shop, they are in more of a 'gathering'
mode - browsing from tree to tree (or shop to shop) looking for ripe
and nutritious fruit. They spend a lot of time examining the food,
checking its freshness and edibility, and they discard quite a lot of
it. At the end of the trip, they return home laden with a wide variety
of food stuffs (or shopping bags).
In the same way, men's shopping habits may be related to their
hunting heritage. This might explain why men appear to be more
mono-focused, rather than browsers. In prehistoric terms, they have one
thing in mind: kill an animal and go home. They don’t want to waste time
browsing, and it’s not so necessary for them to examine their food
acquisitions. They just look for animals, kill them, pick them up, and
go straight home. Perhaps this rush to get home was based on the
knowledge that if a hunter left an animal lying
for too long, other animals or insects would start to eat it. Some dead
animals would also have been heavy, and so difficult to carry around
for long. Also, in hot and humid conditions, it wouldn't be long before
meat would start to go bad.
Let me repeat that these are generalizations - there are undoubtedly
million of men and women to whom these characteristics don't apply. And
I'm obviously being facetitious in making these connections between
modern shopping habits and hunger-gathering. But if there is a tendency for men and women to shop in these different ways, then they could be explained in terms of our hunter-gatherer past.
Of course, as with most "pet theories," I eventually realised that
I’m not the only person who has thought of it. In 2009, anthropologists
Kruger and Byker found very clear similarities between modern men and
women's shopping habits and our hunter-gatherer past. They found that
women "scored higher on skills and behaviors associated with gathering,
even though the environment
and the objects being gathered have changed with respect to our
ancestral environment....Men scored higher on skills and behaviors
associated with hunting." They found that women were more inclined to
spend extended time browsing around shopping malls, while men more
inclined to buy what they needed and then leave straight away.* Their
findings supply empirical evidence for the connection I'm making in this
article.
One good thing about this: It provides justification for our shopping
habits. You can always use the excuse that you can’t help liking (or
not liking) shopping because you inherited those instincts from our
prehistoric past. More seriously, this might also help us to overcome
the impulse to buy unnecessary material goods—items that we may not be
able to afford, which often don’t bring us any happiness,
and which are often produced by low-paid, exploited workers in poorer
parts of the world—and which, on the massive collective scale that we
consume them, contribute to environmental degradation.
Once you become aware of the reasons for a behavior, it becomes
easier to control and overcome it. I’m not saying that we should stop
shopping, but perhaps we should shop more sensibly, and bring our buying
more in line with our needs than our desires.
But then again, I am a man, after all.
By : Steve Taylor, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.
Source : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-darkness/201402/why-men-dont-shopping-and-most-women-do
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