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

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 guest editorial by highlighting the crucial challenges of capturing real behavior, favoring field work, and promoting wisely conducted replication studies, which we deem to be fundamental in order to move this research area further forward.