As soon as you set foot in the mall, the friction begins.

She wants to amble around to the Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Roots, but can't quite remember where any of those stores are.

He knows exactly where he's going and wants to practically run there, get the thing you're looking for and flee as if the food court were on fire.

Now we know why. University of Michigan psychologist Daniel Kruger has found that how we shop has an awful lot to do with how we once found our food. Men hunt. Women gather. Conjugal chaos ensues.

Kruger had his lightbulb moment while on vacation with his future wife and another couple in central Europe. After days of driving through sleepy villages, the foursome arrived in Prague. Kruger and his buddy got ready to hit the sights. The women started looking around for the nearest shopping centre.

"This caused, well, a little scuffling," Kruger said. "And then the girls just dumped us."

As a scientist, he refused to do the sensible thing – shrug his shoulders. He wanted to know the reason. He combed over studies of aboriginal tribes and did a battery of tests on student volunteers. The results will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology.

Kruger found that our habits haven't changed. Our environment and our goals have.


    In prehistory, women gathered or foraged for food. This kept them close to home, performing a daily, intensive and social activity. A good memory, a keen eye and a lot of patience when choosing help make a good gatherer.

    Men hunted for meat. This was an intermittent, asocial activity that earned them prestige only through the biggest catches. Short bursts of energy were followed by long periods of sitting around waiting for women to bring in the harvest.

    With different duties came different abilities. Women perceive colour more vividly. They are less likely to be colour blind. This allows them to distinguish between edible and poisonous berries, for instance. Foraging also encourages pickiness, rewarding women who spent hours poring over their alternatives.

    Women see directions in straight lines, which allows them to head right to a favourite gathering spot.

    Men have better spatial awareness, which allows them to navigate in unfamiliar territory. They think directionally in terms of landmarks, like breadcrumbs leading back home from the hunt.


      Cave men operated with two goals in mind – kill as big a thing as possible and make sure everyone in the village knows about it. The proceeds of a hunt were shared throughout the group and increased a man's prestige. What a woman found was generally used only to feed her own family, encouraging her to keep the most fertile locations to herself.

      The wide-ranging conclusions drawn by Kruger help explain why women are more mindful of sales (i.e., choosing to return when a desired food is more ripe) and why the fashion calendar is seasonal (i.e., keeping a sharp eye on what food is most desirable at what time of year).

      It also helps explain why a husband sent out to get a carton of milk returns with a widescreen TV. Studies among the Ache tribe of Paraguay show that hunters often kill something too large to reasonably drag home, knowing that a big catch means greater popularity. Men in Kruger's study said that, by and large, they only enjoyed shopping when it was for a major purchase like a car.

      Then there is talking.

      Gathering, by its nature, is social. Prehistoric women travelled the same route each day to the same favoured patch, often with children in tow.

      A long-winded discussion on cave painting might tend to frighten off the buffalo, so hunters prefer to stalk in silence. Since the hunt can be dangerous, men did it without their children in the vicinity.

      This leads to a simple conclusion – men and women should never do together what we've spent thousands of years doing apart.

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      "Maybe men and women split up (while hunting) because they got on each other's nerves, using different strategies," Kruger said, rather carefully.

      Now that he's armed with knowledge, has Kruger embraced the manly art of mall-hopping?

      "Honestly, I haven't been to a mall for years to shop for clothes. I buy things online," Kruger said. "I'm my own best proof of this theory."