Friday, March 27

Register & Submit Abstracts: EVOLUTION THEMED, April Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption meeting

Now accepting registrations and student submissions for ISC15:

Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption 2015: The Evolution Edition!
April 17-18, 2015
Ann Arbor, MI
University of Michigan
Organizers: Stephanie Preston, Joshua Ackerman

By April 5th: Register to attend and/or submit student data blitz abstracts by emailing ISC15Meeting@umich.edu. Attendance costs $30 if you do not register in advance.

PUBLIC EVENING LECTURE, APRIL 17(free to the public)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University, author of Flow) - "Curiosity and enjoyment as moderating factors in socio-cultural evolution"

CONFERENCE SPEAKERS, APRIL 18(requires registration)
Jeffry Simpson (Univ. of Minnesota) - "The effect of early life experiences on risk-taking and impulse control in adulthood"
Kristina Durante (UT San Antonio) - "Evolutionary influences on consumer behavior and finance"
Lucia Jacobs (UC Berkeley) - "How olfaction and cognition shaped the evolution of the vertebrate brain"
Martin Daly (Univ. of Missouri) - "Economic inequality and lethal violence"
Daniel Kruger (Univ. of Michigan) - "Consumption is sexy: Consumer behavior understood through evolutionary life history theory"
Josh Ackerman (Univ. of Michigan) - "How the threat of infectious disease influences consumption"
Special Meeting Theme: Evolutionary Perspectives on Consumption. Sponsored by the University of Michigan's Evolution and Human Adaptation Program (EHAP).

For more information email ISC15meeting@umich.edu.

See you there!

Best,
Josh Ackerman & Stephanie Preston


Society Overview: Our drive to consume--our desire for food, clothing, smart phones, and megahomes--evolved from our ancestors' drive to survive. But the psychological and neural processes that originally evolved to guide mammals toward resources that are necessary but scarce may mislead us in modern conditions of material abundance. Phenomena such as obesity, financial bubbles, hoarding, and shopping sprees suggest a mismatch between our instinct to consume and our current environment. The overlapping biological and psychological bases for these consumption-related phenomena suggest the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach. Therefore, ISC meetings include presentations from leading researchers across fields with ample discussion time to promote communication and collaboration.

Edited Volume: The Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption. Speakers and research from prior meetings have been published in a volume by MIT Press (edited by Preston, Kringelbach, and Knutson). Contributors consider such topics as how animal food-storing informs human consumption; the downside of evolved "fast and frugal" rules for eating; how future discounting and the draw toward immediate rewards influence food consumption, addiction, and our ability to save; overconsumption as social display; and the policy implications of consumption science. Taken together, the chapters make the case for an emerging interdisciplinary science of consumption that reflects commonalities across species, domains, and fields of inquiry.