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What Science Actually Says About Men and Women — Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss
01:22:35
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- [00:00]
Host
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Professor David Buss
Humans are unique in their mating system in at least three respects. One is the evolution of concealed ovulation. I did have one male graduate student who claimed he could detect when women were ovulating. But he turned out to make many false claims and we had to kick him out of graduate school. Then you have the evolution of long term pair bonds. And then the third is male parental investment.
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Host
Why do people cheat?
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Professor David Buss
On average, for men, it's desire for sexual variety. The women who cheat tend to be very unhappy with their primary relationship. The first thing men want to know is did you him? First thing women want to know of their husbands is are you in love with her?
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Host
Professor David Buss. Welcome to trigonometry.
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Professor David Buss
Thank you. Delighted to be talking to you.
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Host
Oh, it's great to have you on. We've had one of your students on in the past, Anna Fleischman, who we were talking about, about before we started. You are, of course, one of the, you know, widely regarded as one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. First of all, before we, we're going to have a great conversation about men, women and all the rest of it. What is evolutionary psychology?
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Professor David Buss
Well, there are many ways to answer that question. It's a great question. One level Is that it's simply psychology looked at through the lens of evolutionary theory. A slightly deeper explanation would be that just as our body evolved and we have many components of our body, a liver, lungs, heart, larynx, etc. And we analyze the body by what their functions are, that's a key critical point. You know, you couldn't understand what the liver is all about if you didn't understand its functions, you know, which includes detoxifying toxins. And similarly, evolutionary psychologists argue that the mind housed in our brain, which is a physical structure, evolved through the same process of evolution by selection, sexual and natural selection, and that we have to analyze the brain and the component parts of the brain as a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms, and we have to understand what their purposes are, what their functions are, what were they designed to do? Just as, as analogously, we were trying to understand what the liver, the hearts or the lungs are designed to do. So, and then we have to do the hard work of saying, well, what are these psychological mechanisms? How were they designed? And what is their function? And how does input from the environment influence their activation or deactivation? How do they interact with other psychological mechanisms and eventually produce output which on average is directed towards solving adaptive challenges of survival or mating?
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Host
And I know that scientists don't really deal in truth claims, they deal in theories of how things are. But from a layman perspective, a kind of obvious question might be, how do we know that what evolutionary psychologists say or claim or believe is true or accurate?
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Professor David Buss
Well, so that all rests with the specificity of the hypotheses. So you develop a hypothesis. So let's say I've developed hypotheses around sexual jealousy. You know, that sexual jealousy is an evolved emotion, contrary to what most psychologists have argued over, over the history of psychology, that it's a pathology, it's a sign of immaturity, it's a neurosis, it's a psychosis, it's a delusion. But that jealousy, sexual jealousy evolved for a mate guarding function, you know, and that it gets activated under specific circumstances. And so we can develop specific empirical predictions from the hypothesis. And then you test those and see whether they are confirmed or disconfirmed. And then your, the hypothesis is either supported or disconfirmed by the empirical evidence. And so, and so there's this, you know, ultimately it all boils down to probability statements that it is improbable that it's not designed. Because We've identified these 13 design features of sexual jealousy. It's activated, for example, when there's a threat to the valued relationship, an interloper. We call them mate poachers in the jargon, or when they're accused to infidelity given by your regular committed partner, or even when there are things that, where there's no infidelity and no mate poachers. But there's a, what we call a mate value discrepancy. So let's say, you know, normally people hook up, they mate, they mate assortatively. So with the eights, with the eights, sixes with the sixes and so forth. But let's say someone, a man or a woman, gets an enormous pay jump or they become a star, an actress or an actor, and their status rises dramatically. It can create a mate value discrepancy where none previously existed. And that can trigger sexual jealousy as well. Because we know, and this is another empirical prediction that's been supported, that when there's a mate value discrepancy, there's a higher probability that the higher mate value person will cheat or dump their partner and trade up to a higher mate value person. And so, and so what we the game is simply normal science. Does this suite of predictions pan out empirically when we do the studies to the degree that they do, and then we increase our support for the probability of the hypothesis being correct. And the onus on evolutionary psychologists is often somewhat greater than that on non evolutionary psychologists in the sense that we assume or hypothesize universality of design. So just as like if you were to go to an entirely different culture, you wouldn't expect the body to be differently designed. You know, some people have a heart, other people don't have a heart. You know, some people have a liver, other people don't. So we assume that there's just as there's universality of our body design, we hypothesize that there should be universality of our psychological design as well.
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Co-host
And David, I can't believe I'm asking you this question, but I think it needs to be asked. If we look at the two genders through the lens of evolutionary psychology, what are the fundamental differences between the two genders?
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Professor David Buss
Well, so, so I distinguish between sex and gender.
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Co-host
Okay, the two sexes to start with.
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Professor David Buss
Yeah, so I'm very well. So, so, so, yeah, so biologists define sex simply by the size of the gametes. So males are the ones with the small ones, small gametes, females with the large ones. So sperm are basically small packets of DNA with an outboard motor and basically nothing else. Eggs are large, many times the Size of sperm and nutrient rich. And so that's the definition of sex According to biologists, 99.9% of all biologists. And so your question is, what is the difference between them?
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Co-host
Yeah. What is the key difference?
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Professor David Buss
So, well, so, so from this small beginning of an asymmetry in gamete size flows a tremendous avalanche of other biological differences, differences in our reproductive anatomy and our reproductive physiology. So fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men. And that nine month period of gestation is obligatory. It's an obligatory parental investment. And so one act of sex can result in that nine month period of investment by women and at a minimum, and zero investment by the man at a minimum. Now, fortunately, men often do more than the minimum, and so sometimes they make up for that gap. But so from the get go, there's this asymmetry in obligatory investment and that cascades to a bunch of other things. So another component of human reproductive physiology is lactation. So men don't lactate, women do lactate. Over 99% of human evolutionary history, an infant would die without that breast milk. And, and so that's. So, so now of course we have formulas and you know, you can buy, you can even buy breast milk that was produced by other women. There are breast milk banks you can go to, but ancestrally there weren't. And so that's another, at least historically, over human evolutionary history, an obligatory investment that women put in. So what you have is a suite of adaptive problems that follow from these sex differences in our reproductive biology. So one of them, for example, is I just kind of alluded to with sexual jealousy, where because fertilization occurs internally within women, women are 100% certain they are the mothers of their children. So no woman ever gave birth. And as the child is emerging from a body, wondered, gee, is this kid really my own? They know it's their own 100% certainty, maternal certainty. Men can never be sure because the woman could have had sex with another man and it could be another man's child. And so this creates a fundamental problem. So humans are. If I could back up one step here. Humans are unique in their mating system in at least three respects, three pivotal, pivotal respects. One is the evolution of concealed ovulation. So if you compare humans with her chimpanzee primate relatives, and chimpanzees are, with whom we are genetically related, more than 98% they have. The female has a very visible estrus. She gets the large red genital swellings, she emits olfactory cues, and the males basically go wild. When into a kind of a sexual frenzy of attraction to her during that estrus phase. And women, humans, women don't have anything remotely like that. I mean, I did have one male graduate student who claimed he could detect when women were ovulating, but he turned out to make many false claims and we had to kick him out of graduate school. So. But you can't, you can't, you can't walk down the street or walk into a party and say, oh, this woman's ovulating, she's not, she's ovulating, she's not. We don't, we don't have anything. Whereas male chimps easily detected and human skin detect it as well. So you have concealed ovulation. Then you have the evolution of long term pair bonds, which is also somewhat unique. So there's no other primate species that's like humans informing long term committed relationships where they're with one mate for long committed periods of time. Pair bonding, we have the attachment system that comes into play there. And then you have the emotion of love, which when I was an undergraduate, I was taught it was a western invention by some European poets a few hundred years ago. But love, I think, is an evolved emotion that in the context of romantic relationships, evolved specifically for long term committed romantic relationships. So you have that. And then the third element in the three big pillars of how we are at least somewhat unique is male parental investment. So even though women have the obligatory investment, men do a tremendous amount, not all men, a lot of men don't do anything and abandonment is a real thing. But some men invest tremendously in protecting, provisioning, caring for their offspring. So these three things really change the ground rules of human mating and make us somewhat unique. But getting back to your question, sorry for rambling here, but that because the fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men, men can never be sure. So paternity certainty is always less than 100%, at least prior to now. I mean, now we can do DNA fingerprinting and you can verify with certainty whether this kid is actually yours. But historically you couldn't. So men had to. In order for heavy male parental investment to have evolved, men had to evolve adaptations to increase the probability that that kid is their own. Because if they didn't, then they're spending a decade, two decades of their investment and a rival's offspring. And just from a purely reproductive standpoint, that's a road to reproductive disaster. You know, you're helping the reproductive success of your rivals or the rival who inseminated your partner at your expense. So and so and so I think sexual jealousy is one of those, one of those adaptations, psychological adaptations. So you have pre mate selection where one of the things that's valued by men is, is cues to sexual fidelity. Is this, is this potential partner going to be sexually faithful to me? And these are all probabilistic cues because you, you can't know. I mean you can have, I don't know, a woman who's a virgin and seems totally honest and then three years into the marriage she has an affair. And we know that infidelities do occur, but so you have a premarital selection and that gets down to mate choice, preferential mate choice. And people, men do look for cues to promiscuity, for example, because it's a law of psychology. Best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So if she's had a huge, I guess they call them nowadays body count. What is your body count? I study murders. When I think of body count, I think of serial killers, not number of sex partners. But the younger generation refers to body count as how many people you've had sex with. Um, and, and so if a woman has had sex with a large number of partners prior to marriage or prior to commitment, then there's a higher probability that she's going to be having sex with someone else after you've committed.
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Co-host
Is that why they say that men always exaggerate their body count and women always downplay their body count?
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Host
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Professor David Buss
Well, that's an interesting question, and that is true. So if you. If you. All the surveys show men report a higher number of sex partners than women, which can't be correct mathematically because the average is. The means have to be identical, assuming an equal sex ratio in the population. So what's going on here? So what's going on, I think, is at least three things. So one is, yes, men tend to exaggerate. So. Oh, yeah, I touched her arm. That's one. You know, but on the flip side, women tend to downplay, you know, so we're underestimate their number of sexual. Well, that really didn't count. We were just fooling around and, you know, it wasn't serious. And so. And so you get sort of a reporting bias on both sides. But there's another. There's a third factor that's involved, and that is that almost all the studies that have been done on these body count numbers don't include prostitutes. So if you include prostitutes, so let's say a prostitute can have sex with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of guys, you know, then there's one study that included prostitutes and did the statistical calculations and found that the numbers of men and women reporting sex partners were almost identical. And that is because prostitution is 99% plus a male consumer. I don't know what you call.
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Host
Activity.
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Professor David Buss
Activity. Yes. Thank you. I was looking for. Looking for a word. Thank you. Activity. And so if men are including, yeah, I had sex with this prostitute and that prostitute and that prostitute, that's three or four right there, then their body count is going to be higher. So. But I think. I think all three variables are at work. Males exaggerating, women underreporting, and then inclusion of prostitutes is another issue.
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Host
David, I was wondering, as you were speaking about paternal uncertainty, is that the reason that almost every society. Or I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Correct me on this if I am, but societies have evolved mechanisms for restricting and controlling female sexuality to sort of prevent women from sleeping around a lot. Is that why.
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Professor David Buss
Yes, but the way I'd phrase it is it's typically the families of the women that are. That have developed means of trying to restrict and cloister the females. They do mention. This is actually a study that Diana Fleischman and I did with another graduate student. We call it the daughter guarding hypothesis, where and we showed it. Even in America, parents devote more effort to monitoring and restricting their daughter's sexual activity than their sons. So, and that's the more modest dress setting, curfews, or when the child has to be back home and in bed, et cetera. And so, but it's typically the families of the daughters that do this sort of thing. And it ranges all the way to genital mutilation, to clitoridectomy and fibrillation, where, where it's, it's the women within the family that inflict these genital wounds on their daughters, on, on the young females because it increases their mate value on the mating market. And so, and so families are very concerned about their daughter's sexual reputation because mating and marriage historically have not been just one man, one woman. It's been that the family's gotten involved and influences it. And it's often a political alliance or economic alliance between two families. And so they want to ensure, or they strive to ensure the highest mate value value, which is sexual reputation of the girls in their family, the daughters and women in their family.
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Host
And you mentioned mate value and you talked about, you know, one person's pay going up or whatever. I imagine what, what makes up male mate value is very different than what makes female mate value on, on a number of things.
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Professor David Buss
Yeah. So we have to distinguish between male and female mate value. We also have to distinguish between the long term mate mate value and short term sexual value, if you will. And where this. So I assume we're talking about long term mate value. And yes, there, there's, if you look at the components that make up for mate value, many of them are actually shared by the sexes. So intelligence, dependability, kindness, good health, et cetera. There are many shared components, but there are basically two clusters of sex differentiated contributors to mate value. So on the male side, it is his economic or financial provisioning as well as his willingness to channel those resources to a specific woman and her offspring. So, and that's an important distinction because it's not just the number of digits in his bank account or stock portfolio. I mean, he can be Elon Musk, but if he's unwilling to channel those resources to a particular woman, then his mate value is correspondingly lower. And so those are more important components to a man's mate value than to a woman's as well as a slightly older age. So women universally prefer partners who are a few years older than they are, not ancient, but typically a few years older. You do get, in some cases, very large age discrepancies but those are rare. So like a modern example would be Bill Belichick, the football coach who is his girlfriend is apparently, I guess in her mid-20s or so and he's in his, I think, 70s. But, but typically it's more women prefer guys who are a few years older but not ancient. On the female side you get youth and beauty. So physical attractiveness looms much larger in a woman's mate value than a man's. And people don't like this finding.
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Host
By people you mean women?
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Professor David Buss
Well, well, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean
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Host
to put you on the spot.
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Professor David Buss
It's, you know, it goes against, you know, because again, what I was taught when I was undergraduate and I'm sure you've all heard these phrases like beauty is only skin deep. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. You can't judge a book by its cover. But in fact, physical appearance provides a wealth of information about a woman's health status and her fertility, most important, her fertility. And so, and so we know, for example, that while it used to be believed that beauty standards were infinitely cross culturally variable, we know now that they're not. There are some, at least some components that contribute to physical attractiveness that are universal. So clear skin, clear eyes, smooth smooth skin, lustrous hair, full lips, a waist dip ratio of roughly 0.7, low waist dip ratio basically cues to youth and cues to health cues to youth because youth is very highly correlated with fertility. So we know that, we know what the fertility curves are for women and for men. And for women they tend to peak in their say early to mid-20s where women are most fertile. And then it declines with time so much more steeply for women than for men. Now fertility also declines for men, but much more gradually. So you do have men who are in their 60s, 70s and occasionally older that actually do reproduce. So I think of two recent examples would be
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Co-host
Mick Jagger.
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Professor David Buss
Well, Mick Jagger would be, would be one. But I was thinking of Al Pacino and I think it's Robert De Niro also in their, in their, their pretty old at this point, but they've had children of course, obviously with much younger women who are still fertile. So, so this, this is a fundamental sex difference, one that people don't like and it's, but you know, I don't make these things up. You know, you have to, you have to go with the data. And so these are fundamental differences in our reproductive biology. It's, it wasn't, it wasn't sexist male sc. Who invented the fact that Fertility declines more rapidly in women than in men. It's just a biological fact. So. So getting back to your question, so you have. Those are the two big clusters of sex differentiated components of mate value, resources and the ability to contribute those resources. And then youth and physical attractiveness. And people don't like either of those, actually. So, because people say, well, so you're saying women are gold diggers. Well, no, I'm not saying women are gold diggers. You have this fundamental asymmetry in parental investment where you think of our ancestral mothers and their mothers and their mothers and their mothers. What would have aided a woman and her children's survival and their reproductive success? Well, an investing male who offered protection and provision and resources and who could ensure or increase probability the survival of the woman and the children. And so it's perfectly reasonable why women universally have evolved this standard of their mate preferences and what contributes to male mate value. And from a man's point of view, every one of us, we are all the descendants of fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers, all of whom have preferred to mate with fertile women. So if they preferred to mate with infertile women, we wouldn't be here. It would have broken this inviolate chain of reproduction. So we are all. I mean, this is. We could pat ourselves on the back. We're all evolutionary success stories in that sense. We've all come from this long, unbroken chain of successful males and females, all of whom have made wise mate choices and gotten through these tremendous slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to give rise to who we are here today.
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Co-host
And when you were saying we're all evolutionary success stories, I was thinking back to my teaching career. I've taught a few kids who weren't evolutionary success stories, David.
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Ad Voiceover 2
But let's.
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Co-host
Let's not focus on that.
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Ad Voiceover 2
Now.
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Co-host
That is very interesting, what you were talking about, because as you were well aware, over the last few years there has been a revolution in mating, which has been the Internet and apps and everything else. So how has that kind of changed predilections, what we look for? And how has that changed the relationships between the sexes more broadly?
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Professor David Buss
Yeah, that's a great question and a complex question, and there isn't one simple answer. So what I can offer is some thoughts on the question, and without attaching an undue amount of certainty to those thoughts. So one thing is, so ancestrally, we would have encountered perhaps a few dozen potential mates in our entire lifespan because we didn't have cars, airplanes, Internet or anything else. So you're geographically Limited. And now we live in large urban settings. And then the Internet with, with dating sites, they provide us access to thousands or potentially millions of potential mates who live thousands of miles away. They can be in another country and sometimes are. So. So this is one huge, what we call an evolutionary mismatch. And sometimes this produces, and I think this is a speculation, but a reasonable one, decision paralysis. So they've shown this in studies of. You go to a high end supermarket and they have these six jams you can taste and then you taste several and then say, oh, I like the peach or whatever and you buy one. But they've shown if you give people 24, they taste some and they just can't decide. There's too many, too many to decide. Decision paralysis. And I think some of that goes on in the mating world. So you get, well, there's so many potential mates to choose from. And I got matched with this person now that person, and maybe there's someone just a little bit better, you know, on the next match. And so I think there's this reluctance to commit to one choice, you know, whereas in ancestral environments you have just a few to choose from and you choose one and make the commitment. So that's one. Another thing that I think that really skews things is that what you get on the Internet dating profiles is you get photographs and then written descriptions. So I like fishing or I'm into rugby or whatever, you know, I like, you know, heavy metal, rock.
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Host
Whatever the case, it's an interesting woman you're describing. She likes fishing, rugby and heavy metal.
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Co-host
She doesn't sound strange. Straight is. I think what we're saying,
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Professor David Buss
hey, there, there's assortative matings, mates for all sorts of interests. So. But, but I think that what you have is what happens is the photograph is a visual image that tends to overwhelm all other sources of information. And so people make their decisions heavily based on the photographs. And so physical appearance takes on a much larger share of people's attention than it would be. It's contrasted with meeting people in real life. There's the thing called in real life. You've probably heard of it.
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Host
Irl.
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Professor David Buss
Yeah, it used to happen. So. But when, so when you meet someone in real life, there's a whole host of other information. I mean, you get olfactory cues, which are women are very sensitive to. And most people don't know this, but women have a greater olfactory acuity than men do. And so they can smell things that men can't smell, which is why you Know, men have like, woman walks into a guy's apartment, he thinks it stinks or whatever and he doesn't notice anything. So, but, but one of the things that we. It's another sex difference, that visual information is much more important to men than to women. It's important to women, but women tend to use all sorts of other senses. So olfaction, how does the guy sound? Vocal qualities, you know, intonation and so forth. So none of those can you get from the appalled written description and then an overwhelming photograph. And of course then we know the photographs are somewhat deceptive. People post photographs that are not truly representative of what they actually look like. They might be old or they might be filtered or photoshopped or you know, they're even like websites where you can go to take the best selfie possible to post and then you meet the person in real life that's not what they look like. So, so I think that this, but all this other information that you can glean from meeting in real life, and not just one time meeting, because that even provides a very restricted informational window meeting someone over time. So when people are thinking about getting serious, I'm not in the advice business, but I give them this piece of advice. I say go on a vacation together to a place that neither of you have been and you're unfamiliar with. And so you have to grapple with novel challenges, different culture, different ways of getting around, different food and so forth. And so, and so you can see how people react to the novel information, to stresses and strains. You know, do they get thrown out of whack by a minor, a pebble of a strain? Or, you know, can they, do they, are they resilient? Do they cope well and adapt well to these different circumstances? You go for a week or two with someone, then you find out a lot of information about someone. So in short, it's a long winded answer to your question, which is a really good one, is that I think there are a number of mismatches between the way we selected mates ancestrally and the way we do through Internet dating. I think it's something like 40% of all people now meet through Internet, through Internet in one form or another. And so, and the other piece of advice I give is stop messaging. Just meet the person. Start out with having coffee together or lunch together and then go from there. And if there's some connection, that's the other thing, is a connection or romantic spark or a sexual spark, is there a chemistry that you have with each other? And that's Hugely important.
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Co-host
Well, that is the most important thing. And it's really interesting when you, when you see these apps because they over index for pictures and particularly looks. Whilst, you know, some people may not be photogenic, some people may be incredibly charismatic, some people may be witty, funny, whatever it may be. So I guess my question is this. Is it true about the apps that it's 20% or 15% of the guys who look great in their pictures who take all the goals and everybody else is left with nothing? Is that kind of a misrepresentation of what's actually happening?
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Professor David Buss
Yeah, I think it's a misrepresentation. I mean there is a skew. I mean some guys get more hits than others get more attention. But, but one of the nice things about the modern environment is that there are so many different niches or niches or ways to improve your make value for some people, but not for others. So as I mentioned, I don't know heavy metal, but you know, some people are into certain types of music. So I know, I'll give an example. So I know a woman, a friend of mine, who, she's trilingual and really values guys who can, who know Russian literature so that she can have in depth conversations about Tolstoy. Now this is that if you have those qualities that will be, you will be very high in mate value in her eyes, but irrelevant in most other people's eyes. But we have many, many of those kind of, you know, what you can call idiosyncratic value systems that can elevate someone's mate value. And so the, and, and then the other aspect of it is that a good mating strategy is not to go where the heaviest competition is. So if everybody is fighting over the same mate, then you're much better off going for someone who is not at the center of that attention. So, you know, so, so, so now do people struggle on the mating market? Absolutely. You know, there's this phenomenon that the, the modern word for them is incels guys that have difficulty attracting women.
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Co-host
But that's always been the case, hasn't it?
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Professor David Buss
It's always been the case. Yeah, it has always been the case. And however, in the past. Yeah. So we just didn't have a name for them.
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Host
Well, it's that. But also I don't think it was an identity. That's, I think a big difference within sales is it's not guys who struggle. As I understand it, but do correct me, it's not guys who struggle with women. It's guys who struggle with women so much they give up on trying to find a way.
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Professor David Buss
Yeah, yeah. And. And some of them.
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Host
And make an identity of discussing it with other people who they found, who share that.
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Professor David Buss
Yeah, right. Which can result in, you know, a miss Misogynistic echo chamber of, you know, that, you know, Jim Morrison had the. Of the Doors, had the quote of women seem wicked when you're unwanted. You know, and there's some truth to that, you know, that, you know. But. But you're absolutely right that there have always been incels without that identity or name. But the other thing is. So I have a graduate student now, William Costello.
- [44:48]
Host
We've had him on the show. Yeah.
- [44:50]
Professor David Buss
Oh, yeah.
- [44:50]
Host
A couple of times, actually.
- [44:51]
Professor David Buss
Yeah. Well, he's studied incels. And so he's probably the world's expert on incels right now. Professionally, not personally. And. But one of the things that he's found is that they tend to be a bit spectrumy, so they have difficulty with social mind reading. And so that impairs their ability to have interesting conversations with women and also some anxiety about it. So they get, you know, a. Dating anxiety or mating anxiety when they. When they talk to women. So. But these are. These are actually conditions that are curable because you have. And one of the things that. I mean, many psychological abnormalities are not curable, so schizophrenia we can't do anything about. But anxiety. Specific anxiety disorders are very, very curable. It's one of the few things that we know if. If you have snake phobias, flying anxiety, fear of flying, or. Or. And we're actually looking into mating anxiety and ways to reduce that, because you have these guys who are perfectly reasonable in their mate value, but have this anxiety which inhibits their ability to approach women and have conversations with them. So it's not. They shouldn't give up. These are fixable problems.
- [46:38]
Co-host
And it's very interesting now that we're talking about incels because they have the myth of the Chad, which is the. And that's the terminology for the guy who's really buff, really handsome, and, you know, every woman wants him. And you go, all right, okay. So there are guys who are more popular with women. I mean, that's just obvious. But there is a type of guy online who is high mate value, who on hinge or Tinder or whatever it may be, he can literally go out and have a date every night of the week if he wants. And then they would say that those women would gravitate to those types of men. So it's those types of men who are getting most of the matches.
- [47:19]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, well, well, yeah. But for short term sexual hookups, you know, I would say so. You know, this is where sites like Tinder, you know, I wouldn't advise any woman to go on a site like Tinder because they're, first of all, there are 30% of the men on Tinder are in relationships or married, you know, and so they're looking for short term hookups, sexual hookups. So if you're looking for a long term mate, you don't want to go on Tinder. You want to go on a dating site that is more geared towards long term relationships and compatibility. So, so maybe for those incels who are resentful about the chads who are getting these short term hookups. Well, you know, that's another mismatch again, evolutionary mismatch. Ancestrally, there was no such thing as this large pool of sin little people. They didn't exist so ancestrally. And in almost all hunter gatherer societies, traditional societies, women get married, all fertile women get married and they reproduce. And so that there's not this pool of singles like you have now.
- [48:45]
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- [50:03]
Host
And we've obviously returned. I was going to say straight, but we returned to the topic of infidelity. Would I be right in saying that cheating is an evolutionary adaptation? Well, did we evolve to be monogamous? I guess is what I'm asking.
- [50:20]
Professor David Buss
I would say I would rephrase the question. So the way I would phrase it is have we evolved a long term mating strategy? And I would say yes, we have as one strategy within our repertoire of mating strategies. So do we have adaptations for long term pair bonded attachment, committed mating? Yes. Do we also have adaptations for short term mating? I would say yes. Do we have adaptations for EPC mating, extra pair copulation, mating? I would say yes to that as well. So which particular mating strategy an individual pursues depends on a variety of factors. Mate value, problems in the relationship, and this is actually something we're working on right now, is different forms of infidelity, different forms of cheating. So you have sexual infidelity, which is obvious, but you also have emotional infidelity, and then you also have financial infidelity or resource infidelity. So turns out I was surprised at these stats. I didn't do these studies. But something like a third of married people have secret bank accounts or credit cards that they have the, the, the bills mailed to their office rather than their home and conceal debt or other,
- [51:53]
Co-host
or
- [51:55]
Professor David Buss
stocks or resources that they have that they don't want their partner to share in. So, so there's financial infidelity, emotional infidelity and sexual infidelity. And humans do all three.
- [52:08]
Host
And why, why do people cheat?
- [52:12]
Professor David Buss
Well, there are, there are sex differences there. Which won't surprise you.
- [52:16]
Host
No.
- [52:18]
Professor David Buss
So for men, there's going to be generalizations for which many, many exceptions occur. But on average for men, it's desire for sexual variety. You know, it's, it's something like 70%, 75% of men. It's, it's a, an opportunity presented itself when I was at this conference and you know, I hooked up with this, with this woman while I was there. It was sexual, sexual variety for women.
- [52:55]
Co-host
Sorry, just to pause there, David. Is that why when you watch like a movie and see the woman goes to the man, why did you do it? And he goes, it meant nothing.
- [53:03]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, yeah. And often it does mean nothing. So, so often that is an accurate statement. But, but this is interesting. So, so, so let me just finish on women.
- [53:17]
Co-host
Yeah.
- [53:17]
Professor David Buss
And then, and then I want to return to this point that you raised here. So for women, women who have affairs, something like One study showed 79% of them become emotionally involved with or fall in love with their affair partner. And this is very described for men, it's more like 20, 25, 30%, it's much, much lower. This is a huge, huge sex difference. And that reveals something fundamentally different about why women cheat versus why men cheat. And that is for women, it's what I call the mate switching function. That is women who cheat. And this is going to sound really obvious, but it's, but it's not. Women who cheat tend to be very unhappy with their primary relationship. And you say, okay, this is state. Tell me something more obvious than that. Well, if you look at men who cheat and men who don't cheat, there's no difference in how happy they are with their relationship. And so there's a big sex difference in predictors of who cheats now. So now men who are perfectly happy in their relationships can cheat if the costs are low, the opportunity presents itself, the risks are low, risks of discovery and so forth. For women, it's much more meaningful. And so it's what I call, I think the, if you ask the question, why do women cheat? I think the majority do it for mate switching function. Now it might be there are varieties of mate switching. So it could be she's just, she's really unhappy with her primary relationship and she's looking to see what is my mate value. If, if I were to leave this, how desirable are the people who are attracted to me. Or it might be she meets someone at work, falls in love with them and, and switches to him. Or after years of a, an unsatisfying relationship, the affair gives her confidence that she can do well on the mating market and causes her to exit the relationship. And it's actually, I'm not recommending this, but it's quote effective as a way of exiting in the sense that it's. One of the two leading causes of divorce worldwide is sexual infidelity. So have sexual infidelity and it gets revealed, which often it does over time. If it lasts for any amount of time, then men like that getting back to that paternity uncertainty issue. And so it's a pretty cool study done by a former student of mine, Barry Cooley is his name, where he analyzed the episodes of this it's known exists but a reality show called Cheaters. And what they did is they had. If you suspected your partner of cheating, you could call them up and they would put a detective on your partner. And so then if the detective spotted your partner going into the no tell motel, then the detective will call, say hi, we've discovered your partner just walked in with another person into the no tell motel. Do you want to come down and confront them? And so that what he analyzed is the verbal interrogations of people who confronted their partners as they're walking out of the no tell motel. And what they found is that, what he found is that the first thing men want to know is did you fuck him? You know, did you have sex with him? First thing women want to know of their husbands is are you in love with her? So there's this huge sex difference because women are more forgiving. They don't like it at all, but they're more forgiving if it is a. Doesn't really mean anything. And, but if the guy's in love with another woman, that's going to signal that he's going to defect over the long term and devote his resources and commitment to another woman.
- [57:49]
Co-host
But that demand must make women quite paranoid really, because in a way, if someone really cheats on you because of love, you go right, well, maybe I didn't care enough, maybe I wasn't sympathetic enough, maybe I didn't do enough. Maybe, you know, I just wasn't a good partner. But you can be the most amazing partner in the world and he's still gonna go off and shag someone else. That must put you in a state of paranoia, doesn't it?
- [58:20]
Professor David Buss
Well, the comedian Chris Rock said men are only as faithful as their opportunity. So no, I think that's an exaggeration. You know, there are men who could cheat but remain faithful for moral reasons, for religious reasons, because they don't want to jeopardize their relationship. So, but, but you can see that sometimes with. Well, an older example would be the actor Hugh Grant, who was, had a long term relationship with Elizabeth Hurley, who was at the time a, one of the top models in the world, regarded as gorgeous, beautiful, sexy, etc. And, and he was found having sex with a hooker in Los Angeles in a car. And people are just like totally baffled by it. It's like, why you, you have Elizabeth Hurley drop dead gorgeous and why would you have sex with a prostitute in Los Angeles? And you know, of course he didn't have an explanation for that, but, but we do. You know, it's just simply someone who's different. That desire for sexual variety, which is, I view it as evolution, has played a nasty trick on men. So this is not a good thing for men because what it means is that we have these desires that can never, never be successfully implemented unless maybe you're a Mick Jagger or a king or an emperor or somebody like that.
- [60:02]
Host
But there must be variation within men. So if with a, with female Infidelity. As I understand it, the single biggest predictor is happiness in the relationship. Right. If a woman's unhappy, the risk goes up significantly. What about for a man? There must be, you know, is it he's a cheater, as in like he's just born to seek sexual variety more than other men? Or is the how, if you're a woman, how do you sort of go, he might be into this?
- [60:29]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, well that's a good question. And there are, I think, several factors that contribute to. One is there are individual differences among men. So some men are more novelty seeking, some men are higher on what we call sociosexual orientation. They're more short term oriented and will cheat if the opportunity arises. And there are other men who would not dream of cheating even if the opportunity is. So just to give an example. Oh, here, here is an example again from older time. But there used to be this, for the younger generation, this actor called Paul Newman. And in his heyday he was like viewed as the, I don't know who would be the modern analog, Brad Pitt, or maybe he was too old now, but he was dropped, acquired.
- [61:30]
Host
Jason Momoa. Sorry, Jason Momoa would probably be there.
- [61:34]
Professor David Buss
Okay. Yes, yeah, he would be in, he would be the perfect example of, in the modern day era. So, but he was asked once. So Paul Newman met and married Jillian Woodward, another an actress, and they were married for 50 years. And he never, as far as we know, never, never cheated on her even. He had a million opportunities to do so. And he was asked by a journalist, why do you remain faithful given you have all these opportunities? And he said, he said, why eat hamburger out when you have steak at home? And that was his answer. So I have this.
- [62:20]
Co-host
I'll pause it there. Sometimes you've had a few drinks, you just fancy a hamburger.
- [62:25]
Host
Well, you're outing yourself, mate.
- [62:28]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, so. But anyway, that was. And that made him even more attractive to women that he was so loyal and faithful to her. So same with another example is Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States. He who said in an interview that he had lust in his heart and that he had committed adultery many times in his heart, but never in actuality and probably could have. It's a very high status guy. And as you know, many presidents have committed adultery in the past, going back to jfk. But there's this discrepancy and this reveals the difference between our desires and implementing those desires in our behavior. And Jimmy Carter, I think was a very religious person and he also is very dedicated to his wife and so it would violate his religious beliefs, his sense of morality. And so I think there are, to get back to your question, large individual differences in men, large in their willingness to act on their desire for sexual variety. I think the desires still exist in most men, but some men inhibit their desires. And then as Chris Rock said, some men don't have the opportunity.
- [63:59]
Co-host
And David, let's talk about the dark side, particularly of male sexual desire. Why is it that men stalk. Why is it that men are abusive by the verbally or physically?
- [64:14]
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- [66:12]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, I think there's an evolutionary answer to that and that's it. Basically both of those things. Stalking and abuse are unfortunately mate guarding functions. So so let's take these one at a time. So abuse, whether it's physical or psychological abuse, and both are important, they're designed or have the effect of lowering the woman's self perceptions of her desirability. And sometimes it literally lowers their desirability if she has bruises, scars, black eyes, and so forth. And so men tend to do it when there's a mate value discrepancy. And it has the effect of lowering the woman's self perceptions of her desirability so that she feels sometimes even lucky that this guy's still with her. And some women even interpret the abuse as a sign of his love for her, is that he's so in love with her that he, he will do everything possible to keep her. So that's a dark side that the abuse has dysfunction. And stalking similarly occurs when there's a mate value discrepancy. And the typical scenario is that the woman dumps the guy and he doesn't want to get dumped because he realizes consciously or unconsciously that there is no way that he's going to be able to attract a woman of equivalent make value as the woman who has just dumped him. And our study, we did a study of 4,000 victims of stalking. And that's one of the things we found is the stalker has much lower mate value than the victim of the stalking. And so the mate value discrepancies predict that. And so these guys think, well, she was with me once, maybe I can get her back.
- [68:19]
Co-host
And yes, because when you look at that behavior, you will also. I was reading one of your studies and you were saying that stalking is a very good predictor of violence and then murder, isn't it?
- [68:31]
Professor David Buss
Well, well, yeah, I wouldn't say a very good predictor. It statistically increases probability of. So. So yeah, so I think criminal stalking, I mean, it should be taken very seriously, you know, and women should do. And, and one thing that women should realize is that the first three to six months after the breakup are the most dangerous times for women of, of being murdered by the ex. And, and it's typically when the guy realizes that it's permanent, it's a permanent break, and that there's no way she's coming back when that sinks in, that's the danger sign for women.
- [69:19]
Co-host
And let's talk about the flip side of it, because one of the things that we don't really talk about, we talk about male violence and towards women. Of course we should. And you know, it's horrifying that women have to go through this but we talk about it less about female violence to men. So what do we know about that?
- [69:37]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, well, what we know is that there is female violence to men, to their mates, it's typically less extreme. And so I think there right now is. There didn't used to be any. There's one in the country, one shelter for battered men in the country that's up in Dallas, whereas there are thousands for battered women. And. And so that. That tells you something about it. So women do sometimes abuse their partners physically, but. But it typically does less damage.
- [70:22]
Host
And I imagine the number of victims will be incomparably small.
- [70:25]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, right.
- [70:26]
Host
Is that fair?
- [70:26]
Professor David Buss
Yeah. The number of victims is smaller. And now some ARG. Depends on if you get. Sometimes there's mutual abuse, where you get. They'll get into a physical confrontation where one will slap the other, the other will slap back or hit and hit back, and so you get some of that. And so if you simply count up the number of acts of violence, the sexes are actually not that wildly discrepant. But in terms of the damage done, the damage done is much greater to men, and it's also predictable. The other predictor of it is if the guy suspects an infidelity or discovers an infidelity. That's a big predictor of abuse. And even more disturbing perhaps, is if the woman gets pregnant by another man. If she gets pregnant and there's a suspicion that it's not his. And in those cases, something like 50% of the physical blows to the woman are directed toward her abdomen, toward her pregnant belly. And so it seems like. And not consciously, but an effort to terminate a rival's offspring.
- [71:57]
Host
Wow, that's horrifying.
- [72:00]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, it is. It is truly horrifying. But, you know, but again, you know, if. If we're ever going to have any success at solving these problems, we have to understand the circumstances in which they occur.
- [72:14]
Co-host
Because when we talk about an issue such as rape, we interviewed a gentleman called Luke Gittos, who's a lawyer, who said that rape is an act of violence as opposed to a sexual act.
- [72:27]
Ad Voiceover 2
But if you look at it through
- [72:28]
Co-host
the lens of evolutionary psychology, and maybe I'm wrong, push back on it. I mean, it can serve an evolutionary purpose of, you know, I want to impregnate this woman. She won't let me, therefore I have to do what I have to do.
- [72:39]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, well, so. So here you have to look at it, whether it's. It's really a. People are confused about the. Is it sex or is it violence? So From a woman's perspective, it is violence. From a man's perspective, it's often about sex. You know, so why did you do this? You know, you enter the interviews with convicted rapists, they say, well, I, I, I wanted her sexually. And, you know, I knew there was no way she was going to have sex with me voluntarily, and so I forced myself on her. And so from a male perspective, it is often about sex. From a female perspective, it's about violence because it is an act of violence. And so, and so there's been a muddle of that. Is it sex or is it violence? Well, according to who? And it matters greatly whether you're asking a man or a woman. There is debate in the evolutionary, among evolutionary scientists about whether rape is an adaptation, whether we have adaptations to rape or whether it's, we don't. Whether it's a byproduct of other things like desire for sexual variety, the fact that men have a higher sex drive than women, and other things like that. And it hasn't been resolved. And I myself, I don't have a strong opinion about whether there are adaptations to rape or whether it's a byproduct or not. And it's kind of unfortunate. It's such a loaded topic that you can't do, you can't really do research on it, and you certainly can't get any funding to do good quality research on the topic because it's so politically loaded.
- [74:38]
Co-host
But that's quite, Look, I understand why that may be, that attitude, but you look at the number of women who have been raped or suffered sexual violence, this is an important topic. And if we can get to the bottom of why it happens and pull it apart, we might be able to protect women.
- [74:56]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, exactly. That is my position. Exactly. But it's such a loaded political issue for many that they inhibit the act of research into the topic. So even though it, it absolutely could benefit women if we knew more about it.
- [75:16]
Host
David, it's been great having you on the show. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But before we do, in the main interview, our final question is always the same, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be.
- [75:30]
Professor David Buss
Wow, that's a hard one. What's the one thing we're not talking about? Well, we've talked about some of the things that most people are not talking about, and rape would certainly be one of them. But I think, I guess what I would say is, and this is partly, you know, maybe touting my own work, but I've always been intrigued by understanding the darker sides of human nature. And they include the things we've been talking about, abuse, rape, murder, and why people do stalking, why people do these things. And so. But I think most people avoid these more, the darker sides of human nature. And I think that one of the things that evolutionary psychology does is it says, yes, we have this large collection of psychological adaptations for good stuff and for bad stuff. So for cooperation, for altruism, for helping and the good side of human nature. But we also have adaptations to do some nasty stuff, ranging from gossip to malicious behavior toward people we don't like, ranging all the way up to killing. And warfare is another one. So I think evolutionary psychology gives us a handle on the complexity of our nature. And, you know, and this has been a perennial debate going back to the philosophers like John Locke and others. You know, are humans fundamentally good but corrupted by bad society or, you know, capitalism or culture or humans fundamentally bad? And I think we're both, you know, we have good elements and bad elements to our psychological nature, and both need to be understood.
- [77:46]
Host
I suppose it raises the question of what is it that activates those predilections? Right. And that's perhaps where culture and morality come in, and religion, too, is that right?
- [77:58]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, yeah, I think that's well put and certainly one way to phrase it, because all adaptations, almost all adaptations just reside within our brains in a dormant status. They're quiescent until they are activated by external circumstances of one sort or another, like a mate value discrepancy or a mate poacher hitting up on your partner or cues to a partner's infidelity. It's always these external circumstances that activate a subset of our psychological mechanisms and then keeps others quiescent. So. So, yeah, I think that's.
- [78:43]
Host
Well, what you're talking about a circumstance, but what I'm talking about is what the. So there's three men in the.
- [78:50]
Professor David Buss
In.
- [78:50]
Host
In the room, around the table. What determines how we act if we discover that our wife is cheating is we've been exposed to the same circumstances, but we might act differently based on the values been taught by parents, the cultural values of society we live in, the religion we follow.
- [79:09]
Professor David Buss
Yes. The
- [79:12]
Host
other things. I'm trying to think off the top of my head, and that's kind of an interesting area because it's a way of regulating these things that are latent in our brains, as you're saying.
- [79:21]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's Right. And you know, that's another interesting suite of topics of religion and morality and group norms and the degree to which they play, they have an influence on activating or deactivating some subset of our psychological adaptations.
- [79:41]
Host
Yeah, because. Sorry, that I'm delving into as far as I am. But I think it's interesting because what it really makes, I think that's the way you've explained it, which is we have these adaptations in our brains and they're sitting there waiting to be triggered, we might say, or activated. That really puts a lot of emphasis, at least as I think about it, on creating values and social structures that regulate our behavior in those environments. Yeah, that's sounds like that's really important.
- [80:11]
Professor David Buss
Yes.
- [80:11]
Host
And if we don't do a good job of that, we're going to end up with people, otherwise decent people, running around doing terrible things because they haven't been prepared to avoid those pitfalls once those things are in place.
- [80:26]
Professor David Buss
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Although I would say that there are, I think, elements of our morality that are part of our evolved psychology themselves. So fairness, for example. So like if you, you know, they have these economic games where let's say I give you a hundred dollars and you can give, you know, it's up to you how to distribute the hundred dollars. You can keep 99 for yourself and give one to your partner, you can split it 50, 50. And people show in these one shot economic games that people who say get $1 on that, they decline the offer. And so if the person declines the offer, nobody gets anything, but they will decline it. Even though from a purely economic perspective they should take the $1 because it's $1 or nothing. But they don't. And the reason is because we have an evolved sense of fairness and we don't want to develop a reputation, a social reputation, as exploitable. And so if we are willing to accept unfair offers, we will develop an exploitable reputation. And so that's, you know, that's bad. But so I think that fairness is just one example, but I think that we have evolved standards of morality that are part of our evolved psychology and not just externally imposed by religion or parental instruction.
- [81:59]
Host
All right, head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where David answers your questions.
- [82:05]
Co-host
What traits humans consider attractive are most clearly linked to evolutionary psychology? And why is that trait seen as evolutionarily better by human beings?
- [82:24]
Professor David Buss
Sam.