Gad Saad - Biography

Gad Saad (born October 13, 1964) is an evolutionary behavioral scientist and Professor of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada). He holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption (2008-2013). He was recently appointed an advisory fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Professor Saad has a blog at Psychology Today titled Homo-Consumericus.

For much of the past 15 years, Saad's research program has operated at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior. He is the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (Erlbaum, 2007), The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature (Prometheus Books, 2011), and editor of Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences (Springer, 2011). He has also guest edited a special issue of the journal Futures (Elsevier, 2011) on possible futures of evolutionary psychology across a wide range of disciplines.

In February 2011, Saad gave a TED talk titled The Consuming Instinct in which he discussed his books and several of his evolutionary-based empirical studies. Watch here.

Career

Saad joined Concordia University in 1994 as an Assistant Professor. In 1999, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. In 2010 he was promoted to Full Professor. He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California Irvine.

He has published 60+ scientific papers and has made over 110 academic presentations at leading conferences and universities. His work has garnered 600+ total citations (as listed on Google Scholar). He was the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Faculty of Commerce and Administration in 2000 and was listed as one of the "hot professors" of Concordia University in the 2001 and 2002 Maclean's reports on Canadian universities. Professor Saad obtained a B.Sc. (Mathematics and Computer Science) and M.B.A. from McGill University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. His doctoral adviser was the mathematical/cognitive psychologist and behavioral decision theorist Dr. Jay Edward Russo.

He has published several studies of gift giving, including a 2003 paper that found that men more often than women report giving gifts to romantic partners for tactical reasons (for example, to flaunt wealth or to seduce).

External links

• Gad Saad's Website