Dr. David Buss: How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term

Andrew Huberman:

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. David Buss. Dr. Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, and he is one of the founding members and luminaries in the field of evolutionary psychology. Dr. Buss's laboratory is responsible for understanding the strategies that humans use to select mates in the short and long term, and he is an expert in sex differences in mating strategy. His laboratory has explored, for instance, why women cheat on their spouses or their long-term partners, as well as why men tend to cheat on their spouses and long-term partners. He's also explored a number of things related to the courtship dance that we call dating and securing a mate, including the use of deception related to proclamations of love or promises of finances or sexual activity.

Andrew Huberman:

Dr. Buss's laboratory has also evaluated how status is assessed, meaning how we evaluate our own worth and our potential as a mate, and who is, let's just say, within range of a potential mate, both in the short and long term. For instance, today we talk about how people don't just make direct assessments of their own and other people's value as a potential mate, but also using the assessments of others to indirectly determine whether or not they stand a chance or not in securing somebody as a short or long-term mate. His laboratory has also focused on some of the complicated and varied emotions related to mating love in relationships, such as lust and jealousy. And he's extensively explored something called mate poaching, or the various strategies that men and women use to make sure that the person that they want to be with, or the person they are with, is not with anyone else or seeking anyone else, and indeed that other people don't seek their mate.

Andrew Huberman:

Dr. Buss's work also relates to how biological influences, such as ovulation or time within the menstrual cycle, influences mate selection or tendency to have sex or not with a potential short or long-term mate. And more recent work from Dr. Buss's laboratory focuses on the darker aspects of mating and sexual behavior in humans, including stalking and sexual violence. Today we discuss all those topics. We also discuss some of the strategies that humans can use to make healthy mate selection choices, and for those that are already in committed relationships, to ensure healthy progression of those committed relationships. In addition to publishing dozens of landmark scientific studies, Dr. Buss has authored many important books. A few of those include "The Evolution of Desire" and "Why Women Have Sex," and his most recent book is the one that I'm reading now, which is called "When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault."

Andrew Huberman:

And it's an absolutely fascinating read. It has endorsements from Dr. Robert Sapolsky, professor at Stanford, who's been on this podcast as a guest before, as well as Steven Pinker, and Jonathan Haidt, who wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind." It's a really important book, I believe, and one that doesn't just get into the darker aspects of human mating behavior and violence, but also strategies that people can take to ensure healthy mating behavior and relationships. There's so much rumor, speculation, and outright fabrication of ideas about why humans select particular mates in the short and long term, what men and women do differently, and so on. What I love about Dr. Buss's work is that it's grounded in laboratory studies that are highly quantitative using rigorous statistics. And so throughout today's discussion, you'll notice that I'm rapt with attention, trying to extract as much information as I can from Dr. Buss about the real science of human mate selection and mating strategy.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm certain that everyone will take away extremely valuable knowledge that they can use in existing or future relationships from this discussion with Dr. Buss. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss.

Andrew Huberman:

Well, David, delighted to be here. I've followed your work for a number of years, and I'm excited to ask you a number of questions about these super interesting topics about how people select mates, how they lie, cheat and ... but also behave well in this dance that we call mate choice.

David Buss:

Yes. Yeah, fortunately there are well-behaving humans in the mix here.

Andrew Huberman:

Good to know. Just to start off, perhaps you could just orient us a little bit about mate choice. Some of the primary criteria that studies show men and women use in order to select mates, both ... should we call them transient mates, as well as lifetime mates,

David Buss:

Right. Well, that's a critical distinction, because what people look for in a long-term committed mateship like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship, is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex or one-night stand, or even a brief affair, so that's actually critical. I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework for understanding mate choice?

Andrew Huberman:

Sure.

David Buss:

So it basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection, and most people when they think about evolution, they think about cliches like survival of the fittest or nature, red in tooth and claw. And Darwin noticed that there were phenomena that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival selection. Things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks, sex differences, like in ... stags, for example, have these massive antlers, and the females of the species do not.

David Buss:

And so he came up with the theory of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage. And he identified two causal processes by which mating advantage could occur. One is intrasexual competition, with the stereotype being two stags locking horns in combat, with the victor gaining sexual access to the female, loser ambling off with a broken antler and dejected, in low self-esteem and needing psychotherapy, perhaps, or mate-value-improvement therapy. And the logic was, whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers. And so you see evolution, which is change over time and increase in frequency of the characteristics associated with winning these, what Darwin called "contest competition." Now we know that the logic of that is more general now and involves things like, in our species, competing for position and status hierarchies.

David Buss:

So anyway, so intrasexual competition is one, but the second, most relevant to your question about mate choice, is preferential mate choice. That was the second causal pathway. And the logic there is that if members of one sex agree with one another, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired, then those of the opposite sex who possess the desired qualities or embody those desired qualities, they have a mating advantage. They get chosen, they get preferred. Those lacking desired qualities get banished, shunned, ignored, or, in the modern environment, become incels. And so the logic there is very simple, but also very powerful. And that is that whatever qualities are desired, consensually desired, if there's some heritable basis to those, then those increase in frequency over time. And in the human case, these two causal processes of sexual selection are related to each other, in that the preferences of, the mate preferences of one sex basically set the ground rules for competition in the opposite sex.

David Buss:

So if, for example, hypothetically, women preferred to mate with men who were able and willing to devote resources to them, then that would create competition among men to claw their way and beat out other men in resource acquisition, and then displaying that ... their willingness to commit that to a particular woman. And same with women though, and this is one of the interesting things about humans, is that we have mutual mate choice, which is not true in all species. And that is, that it's not just a matter of you selecting someone to be your mate, they have to reciprocally select you. And so with mutual mate choice, we have both preferences, mate preferences that women have and mate preferences that men have, and consequently, competition among men for access to the most desirable women and competition among women for access to the most desirable men.

David Buss:

So that's sort of a little bit of the theoretical backdrop. So you asked, "Well, what are the qualities that men and women desire?" And maybe we'll start with long-term mating and then shift to short-term mating. And long-term mating is interesting, in and of itself, in that it's very rare in the mammalian world. So there are more than 5,000 species of primates, of which ... I'm sorry, more than 5,000 species of mammals, of which we are one. But the percentage of mammals that have anything resembling like a pair-bonded long-term mating strategy, it's about 3 to 5%. It's extremely rare. And even our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, they don't have a long-term mating strategy. They don't have anything resembling pair-bond in mating. And then in the chimps, the females come into estrus. Almost all the sexual activity occurs during the estrus phase. After that, the males and females basically ignore each other, for the most part, with some exceptions.

David Buss:

But with humans, you have the evolution of long-term pair-bonding attachment, heavy male investment in offspring, relatively concealed ovulation, and so these are kind of unique aspects of the human mating system. So to get to your question, well, what are the qualities? The most large-scale study that's been done on this is a study that I did, a while back, of 37 different cultures, and it's now been replicated by other researchers. But basically what we found is three clusters of things. We found qualities that both men and women wanted in a long-term mate, we found some qualities that were sex-differentiated, where women preferred them more than men, or men preferred them more than women, and then we found some attributes that were highly variable across cultures, in whether people found these as desirable or indispensable or irrelevant in a mate. And so I could give examples of each of these if that-

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, that would be great. I'd love to know what some of the common themes were across these cultures, in terms of what's being mate and sexually selected for.

David Buss:

Yeah. So some of the things that were ... so if you talk about universal desires, so things that men and women share, there are things like intelligence, kindness, mutual attraction and love, which is really kind of heartwarming because some people think that love is a recent Western invention by some European poets, but it turns out it's not true. You go to the Kung San in the Botswana, and they describe pretty much the same experience as a falling in love as we do. And even describe the distinction between this kind of infatuation stage of love and the attachment phase, where you can't maintain this frenzy of infatuation and obsession for very long. Six weeks, maybe six months at most. Otherwise, you can get nothing else done in your life. And-

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah. Those are those dopamine circuits firing at high frequency.

David Buss:

Yes. Yeah. So mutual attraction, love, good health, dependability, emotional stability, although there's a bit of a sex difference there with women preferring it a bit more than men. And so basically, and these may seem obvious, so no one wants a stupid, mean, ugly, disease-ridden mate. And so perhaps obvious, but no one knew this in advance of the 37-culture study. So these were some universal preferences. So you go to the Zulu tribe in South Africa, or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, or Portugal, or Oslo, or anywhere in the world, and these are qualities that people universally desire in long-term mates.

David Buss:

Sex differences. Sex differences basically fell into two clusters. Women more than men, prioritized good earning capacity, slightly older age, and the qualities associated with resource acquisition. So these are things like a man's social status, does he have drive, is he ambitious? Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory is one way that I like to phrase it, because women often ... they don't look at necessarily the resources that a guy possesses at this moment, but what is his trajectory? And so-

Andrew Huberman:

Just ... sorry to interrupt, but may I ask, is there anything known about the commonalities of how that is assessed? Is it, he's rolling out of bed early and running eight miles, he's showing proficiency in school, he handles himself well socially at parties, isn't drinking too much but knows when ... I mean, obviously they're integrating multiple cues. The brain is a complex place, but is there any information about what those variables are, across cultures?

David Buss:

Yeah. Well I think that there's been less attention to that, so that's a great question. One of the things that we do know across culture, is that women attend to the attention structure. So the attention structure is a key determine of status. So those people who are high in status are those to whom the most people pay the most attention.

Andrew Huberman:

So the attention of others to them, not how well a given potential mate can focus and pay attention necessarily?

David Buss:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

Uh-huh.

David Buss:

Yeah. Exactly. But women, look, I mean, is the guy, even in the modern environment, is the guy spending eight hours a day playing video games, eating Cheetos and drinking beer, or is he devoting effort to his professional development? So hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals, or is he in an existential crisis, not knowing what he's going to do with his life? Those are some of the qualities that people look for, and also, women use what's called in literature "mate choice copying." This is related in part to the attention structure. That is, guys who have passed the filters of multiple women, those are like preapproved.

David Buss:

So we've done studies where you just take a guy, photograph him alone versus take the same guy, put an attractive woman next to him, or put two women next to him, and women judge exactly the same guy to be much more attractive if he's paired with women than if he's not. And some guys exploit this in the modern world by hiring wing women to go with them on dates, and so forth. "Oh, this is my sister, my former girlfriend," or whatever.

David Buss:

But you're correct in that women use multiple cues to assess these things, and they change over time. In the modern environment, even in things like the attention structure, does this guy have a million Twitter followers or three Twitter followers? So that is an index of the attention structure and hence the status of the guy within the broader community. And from an evolutionary perspective, it's reasonable that women would prioritize these qualities, because of the tremendous asymmetry in our reproductive biology. Namely that fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men.

David Buss:

Women bear the burdens of the nine-month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive, as well as creating opportunity costs in terms of mobility and solving other tasks that people need to solve in the course of their lives. One way to phrase that is that the costs of making a bad mate choice are much heavier for women, when it comes to sexual behavior certainly, because ... and the benefits correspondingly of making a wise mate choice are higher for women in the sexual context. But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species. And so what do men value more than women? Physical attractiveness.

Andrew Huberman:

They rank that as a more important criteria than do women about men?

David Buss:

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman:

Consistently across cultures?

David Buss:

Consistently. And it's not that women are indifferent to it. So women do pay attention to a guy's physical appearance, his fitness, and so forth. And guys are actually off base in the thinking that women prefer more muscular men than they actually do. So in muscle magazines, these men with bulging biceps, and so forth, women don't find that especially ... but they do prioritize fit men, a good shoulder-to-hip ratio and other qualities of physical appearance, as well as things like cues to health.

David Buss:

So, physical appearance provides a wealth of information about the person's health status, but also provides for men a wealth of information about a woman's fertility, her reproductive value. Now, not that men think about that consciously. I mean, men don't walk down the street and see a woman and say, "Oh, I find her attractive because I think she must be very fertile." Maybe a few weird people do that, but most men just ... It's like they just find those cues attractive.

David Buss:

And the cues are cues associated with youth and health, because we know that youth is a very powerful cue to fertility and reproductive value. So men prioritize physical appearance. And in the field of psychology, it used to ... well I was taught, when I was an undergraduate, that you can't judge a book by its cover, that physical attractiveness was infinitely arbitrary, infinitely culturally variable, and it's simply not true. We know now, based on the last 20 years of scientific studies, that the cues that men find attractive in women are not at all arbitrary.

David Buss:

There is some variation across cultures, like in relative plumpness versus thinness, but things like clear skin, clear eyes, symmetrical features, a low waist-to-hip ratio, full lips, lustrous hair, all these are qualities that are associated with youth and health, and hence have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness. And so it's not just that men are these superficial creatures who evaluate women on the basis of appearances, there's an underlying logic to why they do so. And as I said, relative youth, this age thing, is one of the largest sex differences that you find in long-term mate selection, with women preferring somewhat older men and men preferring somewhat younger women.

Andrew Huberman:

Is there a consistent age gap to relate to that statement?

David Buss:

Yes, there is. The age gap, though, depends on the age of the man. We can document this. In my studies, what we found is that men preferred women who were about three to four years younger than they were, on average. And I'll qualify this in a second. Women preferred guys who were about three and a half to four and a half years older than they were. So there was a sex difference going in the opposite direction, but as men get older, they prefer women who are increasingly younger than they are.

David Buss:

One way to gauge this: there are actual marriage statistics, and then there are expressed preferences, and both sexes kind of converged. So if you look at first marriage, second marriage, third marriages, if people get divorced and remarried, average age gap is, in America anyway, is three years at first marriage, with the guys being older, five years at second marriage, and eight years at third marriage.

David Buss:

So that as men are getting older and getting divorced and remarrying, they are marrying women who are increasingly younger than they are. In terms of preferences, it's also expressed in preferences. So it doesn't go down. So like a, say a 25-year-old man would, say, prefer a woman who's 20, or in her early 20's; 35-year-old man might prefer a woman who's in her late 20's or early 30's. A 50-year-old man might prefer a woman who's, say, 35 to 38. So the preferences do go up, but the gap gets increasingly larger. And the reason that you don't see things like, why aren't men preferring women ... so peak fertility in humans is around age 24, 25. And so you say, well, why aren't the 60-year-old men prioritizing 25-year-old women? Well, as I mentioned, we have a ... it's a reciprocal mutual mate choice phenomenon. So-

Andrew Huberman:

She constrains the equation too?

David Buss:

Well she constrains it, but also, marriage and long-term mating are things other than reproductive unions in the modern environment. That is they're ... you're supposed to do things as a couple, and if you get too large an age gap, then essentially, you're in different cultures. You grow up with different songs, and if the cultural gap gets too large, you don't understand each other. So there are constraints on that.

David Buss:

But if you look at contexts where there are no constraints of that sort ... so historically, kings, emperors, despots, et cetera — and I'll give one more modern example — they basically prefer young, fertile, attractive females. And if they have harems, they stock the harems with those, and then circulate them out when they're 30, and so forth. And so if you look at marriage systems that are unconstrained, then the preferences are more likely to be revealed. Or within cultures, that is if you look at men who are in a position to get what they want. So as Mick Jagger noted, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need."

Andrew Huberman:

I hear that it ... that most of the time, he got what he needed.

David Buss:

Right. He got what he wanted.

Andrew Huberman:

Right.

David Buss:

Yeah. And maybe what he needed, but he was in a position ... I don't know if he still is. He's in his 70's now, but he was in a position, as was, let's say, Rod Stewart, to take another example. Or Leonardo DiCaprio. If you are a male who's in the position where there are thousands of women potentially available to you, and you can have your pick, then you see that clear expression for younger females. There was a chart that was floating around the Internet of the girlfriends of Leonardo DiCaprio as he got older. So he's getting older and older, and the graph of the ages of his girlfriends, it basically stayed the same. It was in the early 20's or so.

Andrew Huberman:

He values consistency.

David Buss:

He values consistency. The data converge on that; so these are universal sex differences in long-term mate selection. So now when we shift to ... and I should mention cultural variability, because that's a critical thing, because there is ... in my 37-culture study, what I found was the preference for virginity, that is no prior sexual experience, that was the most variable desire across cultures. So you had cultures like, at the time of the study, China. It was basically indispensable that a partner be a virgin. And then at the other end, you have Sweden, where Swedes typically place close to zero value on it, and some even find it undesirable. You're weird if you're a virgin, and so they have this whole spectrum-

Andrew Huberman:

This is virginity in the female, or is this also ... in China, was it preference that the male and the female be a virgin?

David Buss:

Okay. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

So mutual mate selection by-

David Buss:

Yeah. It was a preference for both sexes.

Andrew Huberman:

Interesting.

David Buss:

But it's a good question, because where there was a sex difference, it was always in the direction of males preferring virginity more than females. And we've gone back to China. So I still do research in China, among other places, and we've gone back and retested modern urban populations. And the importance of virginity has gone down in China, especially in the urban areas. And the sex difference that didn't exist before has now emerged, where males value it more than females. And I think part of it was in previous times, you hit ceiling effects, where both sexes say, "Yeah, it's absolutely important to be a virgin."

David Buss:

So there's cultural variation and cultural change over time in some of these qualities, but the sex differences that I described have remained invariant over the years. So since my 37-culture study, this has been replicated in at least a couple other dozen different cultures, and we've gone back to some of the cultures. I mentioned we've gone back to China, Brazil and India, to look at cultural changes over time. And there have been, in some cases, dramatic cultural changes over time, but the sex differences that I described are invariant. They haven't changed a bit.

Andrew Huberman:

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about truth telling and deception, because some of the measures that you're describing, age, for instance, one can potentially lie about, right? I'm guessing that there are people who do that on online profiles.

David Buss:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

And whatnot. From what I understand, people also lie about height and other features on online profiles, but some of them are much harder to hide. Right? Eventually the truth comes out about some, if not all, of these things. So if you would, could you tell us about how men and women leverage deception versus truth telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?

David Buss:

Yeah. Basically the ... both men and women do deceive. So we have the modern cultural invention of online dating, which was little used 10 years ago, and virtually absent 20 years ago. And people do lie, but they lie in predictable ways. They lie in ways that attempt to embody the mate preferences of the person they're trying to attract. And so men do lie, they deceive about their income, their status; so they exaggerate their income by about 20%. They add ... they tack on about two inches to their height. So if they're 5'10," they round up to six feet. So they don't ... like if they're 5'10," they don't say that they're gigantic, but they kind of round it up in the more desirable direction. Women tend to deceive about weight, so they tend to shave about 15 pounds off of their reported weight. And both sexes post photos that are not truly representative of what they actually look like. So they might post photos of themselves when they were younger, or there are even advice tips on how to create the best selfie, of the best angle that will maximally enhance what you look like.

Andrew Huberman:

Or just doctoring of photos, I'm guessing also.

David Buss:

Yeah, photoshopping.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

David Buss:

Absolutely. And one of the things about it, now you say like, well, do people find out. Of course people do find out. I mean I'll just give you one story about a colleague of mine who was doing ... is a male who's doing Internet dating, and he picked only women who self-described as sevens on the one-to-seven on attractiveness, so the most attractive as self-reported. And so he went out with this one woman, and she was missing her front teeth. He said, "Well call me picky, but missing her front teeth and she thinks she's on the top of the attractive list?" He was a little disappointed about that.

David Buss:

And women, of course, are disappointed; they meet a guy who they think is this physically fit, athletic guy, and he comes up, he's 300 pounds and overweight. So people do find out. And there are ... some Internet dating sites have kind of a vetting of the accuracy of some things. So some things you can look up through public records: does this guy have a criminal record, for example. Is he on a sexual offenders website? So there's some things you can verify, but what I tell people is you really have to meet the person and interact, because the ... in part because of the deception, but also because what happens with Internet dating is that the photograph ...

David Buss:

What happens with Internet dating is that the photograph tends to overwhelm all the other cues, and all the other cues are written statements. And we weren't really evolved to process written statements, but we were evolved to respond to physical cues, and men tend to attend to the visual cues much more than women. So women in their mate selection, they have olfactory cues.

David Buss:

So what does the guy sound like? His vocal qualities? That's auditory cues, but olfactory cues, what does he smell like? And so women have a more acute sense of smell than men do. And so if the guy doesn't smell right, even if he embodies all these other qualities women want, that's a deal breaker. And so I encourage people, just stop with the 100 texts back and forth, or messaging, and meet a person for a cup of coffee and interact, and then you'll get a more accurate bead on the person.

David Buss:

And then, of course, some qualities you can't assess even with a half-hour interaction; you can tell a lot. But things like emotional stability are things that have to be assessed over time. And so one of the things that I advise people to do, and I'm not in the advice-giving business, but people ask all the time if they find out what I study; they say, "Well, I've got this problem, can you give me advice?" But one of the things to assess things like emotional stability, which is absolutely critical in long-term mating, is to do something like go on a trip together, take a vacation where you're even in an unfamiliar environment where you have to cope with things that you're not familiar with.

David Buss:

And as opposed to an environment where it's very predictable, and so you get a greater exposure because one of the hallmarks of emotional instability is how they respond to stress. So emotionally unstable people tend to have a long latency to return to baseline after a stressful event. And so this is the sort of information you can't get on a coffee date; you can only get by assessing it over time.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]

Andrew Huberman:

As somebody whose laboratory studies stress and tools to combat stress, that's great. It's yet more incentive for people to develop self-regulatory mechanisms for themselves. I'm guessing many of the features of deception in this context were present long before Internet dating. And so it's somewhat dark to think about, but is deception built in to this dance that we call mate selection? And has it been built in for a long time, or is this something that you think has emerged more as people are approaching each other through these electronic web-based mediums?

David Buss:

Yeah, some forms of deception have been there for a long time over human evolutionary history. So one form of deception which we haven't mentioned is deception about whether you're interested in a long-term committed relationship or a short-term hookup. And so there's deception about that, especially on the part of men. So men who are interested — like on Tinder, it has been reported, although Tinder denies this, there's been reported that something like 30% of the men on Tinder are either married or in long-term committed relationships, and they're looking for something on the side. But in terms of successfully attracting a mate, the overdisplay that, "Hey, I'm interested in just a short-term hookup, I'm interested in sex, so I want to have sex right now, let's just go back to my apartment." These are very ineffective tactics. And so effective tactics for men are often displaying cues to long-term interest.

David Buss:

And of course that's effective for a woman who's seeking a long-term interest, and so that's a deception. So we find in our studies of deception that men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman, exaggerate how similar they are and how aligned they are in their values and religious orientations and political values, and so forth. And so I think there's deception around that. And I think that's probably an evolutionarily recurrent form of deception that women have defenses against, by the way.

David Buss:

But I think that modern Internet dating opens the door for certain types of deception that, at a minimum, were difficult to accomplish, ancestrally. So things like photoshopping — it wasn't available back then. Plus, we evolved in the context of small group living, where you not only had your own personal observations of someone's qualities, you had also your relatives, your friends, your allies, the social reputation that someone had.

David Buss:

And these are all critical sources of information that are less available in modern environments because people migrate, they move from place to place, they can close down one Internet profile and put up another, or they can have six going simultaneously. So the modern environment opens up the door for forms of deception that weren't available, or weren't available to the same degree, ancestrally.

Andrew Huberman:

I see, very interesting. Would you mind touching on some of the features that are selected for in terms of sexual partner choice? We talked a little bit about mate choice, but in terms of sexual partner choice, are there any good studies exploring what people are selecting for, or is it that they are both just in a state of pure hypothalamic drive — I'm a neuroscientist, after all — and therefore it's hard to re-create in the laboratory?

David Buss:

Well no, we do know something about that. And we know something about how the preferences for a sex partner differ from preference for long-term mate. There is overlap, of course, but one thing is physical appearance. So physical appearance for women is important in long-term mating, not as important as it is for men, but it becomes more important in short-term mating, and so is the guy good-looking?

David Buss:

So those physical attributes are more important for women. They remain important for men, physical appearance, in short-term mating. But with the footnote that men are willing to drop their standards in short-term mating. If it's low commitment, low risk, just sex without entangling commitments, women are more likely to prioritize what I call bad-boy qualities. So guys who are very self-confident, guys who are strut guys who are a little arrogant, guys who are risk-taking, guys who defy conventions.

David Buss:

Women are more attracted to those guys in short-term mating than long-term mating. And whereas in long-term mating, they go more for the good-dad qualities. Is this guy dependable? Is he going to be a good father to my children? And then also in short-term mating, women use that mate-copying heuristic. That is if there are thousands of other women who find them attractive, women find them attractive, and so that's why you have the groupie phenomenon.

David Buss:

So with the rock stars for example, there are thousands of screaming women, all of whom want to sleep with this famous rock star, and they use that as information. They find if you took a still photo of some of these rock stars and asked women how attractive the guy is versus tell him he's a famous rock star and showed the thousands of women screaming at him, they judge him entirely differently in terms of his attractiveness, and this is an important point, that women's attraction to men is more context specific and varies more across contexts than men's attraction to women, and so I'll give you just an example of that.

David Buss:

This is a female colleague of mine — went to a conference, an academic conference, and she found the organizer of this conference to be really attractive. And then saw him six months later and wondered, "Well, what was I thinking? He doesn't seem very attractive at all." And what it was is when he was the organizer, he was at the center of the attention structure. He was the guy up on stage directing everybody, and everyone was attending to him. And then when he was just a normal presenter at a conference, he didn't command the attention structure like he did in that, when he was the organizer.

David Buss:

And so this is just an illustration of how circumstance-dependent women's mate attraction is for guys. It depends on his status, the number of women that are attracted to him, the attention structure, is, how he interacts with a puppy or a baby, if he's ignoring a baby in distress, or positively interacting with a young child. All these things, whereas for men, it almost doesn't matter. Context is more irrelevant. They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues that the woman is displaying and context be damned.

Andrew Huberman:

Very interesting. Let's talk about infidelity in committed relationships. What are some of the consistent findings around reasons for, and maybe even long-term consequences of infidelity for men and women? And this could be marriage or long-term partnership or infidelity of any kind, I suppose.

David Buss:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm guessing it does happen.

David Buss:

Yeah, well, that's-

Andrew Huberman:

How frequent is it?

David Buss:

Yeah, that's the interesting thing. Well, how frequent it is is difficult to gauge because it's one of the forms of human conduct that people like to keep secret. So if you go back now, say, 70 years, to the classic Kinsey studies, the questions about infidelity were the questions that most people refused to answer, and when the question was brought up, caused more people to drop out of the study. And so that tells you something that, what do people conceal? Infidelity, incest, murder ...

David Buss:

There is a small handful of things that people universally want to conceal, and infidelity is one of them, but people do it. And so Kinsey estimated 26% of married women committed an infidelity at some point during their marriage, and about 50% of men. Other studies have given lower figures. And so the exact figures bounce around, depending on anonymity provided and how comfortable they are with the interviewer, and so forth.

Andrew Huberman:

And by infidelity, does that mean intercourse with somebody else?

David Buss:

Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

So we're not talking about "emotional affairs"?

David Buss:

Right. Right.

Andrew Huberman:

We're talking about sex — sex with somebody other than their committed partner, unbeknownst to their partner?

David Buss:

Right. And there are other forms of infidelity which we could get into, including emotional infidelity and financial infidelity. But here, we're just talking about, for the moment, sexual infidelity. And the interesting thing about sexual infidelity is that the sexes really differ fundamentally in the motives for committing infidelity. So for men, the primary motive, and these are on average sex differences.

David Buss:

So whenever I talk about second, I'm talking about on average sex differences because there's overlap in the distributions. So these are generalizations of which there are exceptions. So for men, it's mainly a matter of sexual variety. So about 70% of the men, it's "The opportunity presented itself. I was out of town and I had this opportunity." So low-risk, low-cost pursuit of sexual variety, sexual novelty, is a key motivation for men.

Andrew Huberman:

Sorry to interrupt, I just want to ... So 70% of men that cheat, that's a primary cause? Or is it that 70% of men do cheat?

David Buss:

No, no, no. Of the men who cheat, 70%. Thank you for that clarification. Of the men who do cheat, 70% cite that as the key motive, the key reason why they committed an infidelity.

Andrew Huberman:

Like why mountain climbers climb mountains — because they're there?

David Buss:

Right. Because they're there. Well, the comedian, I think it was Chris Rock said, "Men are only as faithful as their opportunity."

Andrew Huberman:

Or how available their password on their phone is to their partner.

David Buss:

Right. Right. Yeah. And that's an exaggeration. But if you look at women, this just desire for pure novelty, sexual variety is much less of a motive. But women who have affairs cite that they're unhappy with their primary relationship, emotionally unhappy or sexually unhappy, and typically both, and this may seem totally obvious that, "Well of course, people, if they're unhappy in the relationship, are more likely to stray." But in fact, it's not true for men.

David Buss:

So if you compare men who are happy with their marriage and men who are not happy with their marriage, there's no difference in their infidelity rates. I think it goes down to that issue of motive for seeking variety. So now, why do women do it? Because it's a risky endeavor. She risks her long-term mate or losing a long-term mate. It's risky in terms of reputational damage for both sexes. So it's a risky thing. Why do women do it? And there are two competing hypotheses, at least two, but there are two primary competing hypotheses in the evolutionary literature.

David Buss:

One is called the dual mating strategy hypothesis, where women are seeking to get resources and investment from one guy and good genes from another guy. So in principle, that can work. And initially, this wasn't a hypothesis original with me, this is Steve Gangestad, Randy Thornhill, and some others, Martin Hazelton, a former student of mine, have advocated this dual mating strategy hypothesis. And originally I endorsed it because the data seemed to support it, we can get into which data seemed to support it. But over time, I became more and more dubious about this hypothesis and instead have advocated what I call the mate switching hypothesis.

David Buss:

And so if you look at a whole host of information around why women have affairs, it's not compatible with the dual mating strategy hypothesis and is compatible with the mate switching, that is women who are looking to either divest themselves from an existing mateship or trade up in the mating market to a mate who's more compatible with them or higher in mate value, or simply see whether they're sufficiently desirable so that it eases the transition into the mating pool or keep keeping a mate as a potential backup mate, what I call mate insurance.

David Buss:

So you have car insurance if something bad happens to your car, house insurance, we also have mate insurance, keeping someone. One woman said, "Men are like soup, you always want to have one on the back burner."

Andrew Huberman:

Interesting.

David Buss:

The best analogy or not, I'm not sure, but it captures something about why. So well, what evidence am I talking about? Well, for one thing, women who have affairs, and this is about 70% of them, they-

Andrew Huberman:

Again, sorry, I want to make sure people, of women who have affairs?

David Buss:

Yeah, of the women who have affairs. So let's say, ballpark, Kinsey was, let's say, roughly right: 25, 26% of women will have affairs. Let's just assume that he's right. And we don't know exactly, but of the women who do have affairs, about 70% say they have fallen in love with their affair partner. They become deeply emotionally involved with their affair partner. And to me, if you're just trying to get good genes from a guy, that is the last thing you want to do is fall in love with them or get emotionally involved. But it's very compatible if you want to switch mates.

David Buss:

And so that's one piece of evidence that suggests that women, the mate switching function of infidelity is a more likely explanation. Now these two are not inherently incompatible hypotheses. In other words, it's possible that some women do pursue a dual mating strategy hypothesis, but there's other evidence that suggests, so for example, what are the actual rates of genetic cuckoldry? Well, in the modern environment, anyway, they're pretty low. It turns out they're 2 to 3%.

Andrew Huberman:

Could you just explain for the audience what genetic cuckoldry is?

David Buss:

So this is where the man believes he is the genetic father of a child, but it turns out he's not, might be the mailman or the nextdoor neighbor or the guy she's having an affair with. So mistaken paternity and genetic cuckoldry is just one way to capture the-

Andrew Huberman:

Named after the cuckoo bird, right?

David Buss:

Named after the cuckoo bird, yes.

Andrew Huberman:

Who sneaks its eggs into the nest of the other, rolls — destroys the future offspring of the bird, and then basically offloads all the work onto another father.

David Buss:

Parasitizes. Yeah, the parental investment of different bird species. So anyway, so I think that, and there's other sources of evidence that I think points. So one of the sources of evidence that initially seemed to support the dual mating strategy hypothesis was ovulation shifts. So in other words, it looked like, from the early studies, that when women are ovulating, these are among non-pill-taking women, women not on a hormonal contraceptives, that they experienced a preference shift toward more men who were masculine and symmetrical, which were hypothesized markers for good genes, and there's an explanation for that.

David Buss:

But it turns out the effects of ovulation on women's mate preferences are far weaker than the initial studies looked like. And in fact, some larger scale studies have failed to replicate them entirely. And so that was one of the key sources of evidence, these ovulation shifts, that women were going after good genes because it's only when she's ovulating and she can get pregnant by having sex with another man that it would make sense for her to have sex with another man.

David Buss:

And there was even some early evidence that women were timing their affairs, timing sex with their affair partners to coincide with when they were ovulating. But as I said, some of these subsequent studies have failed to replicate these early findings, calling into question the dual mating strategy notion. And so I think I've shifted my views on this and now endorse the mate switching hypothesis as a more likely explanation for why most women have affairs.

Andrew Huberman:

Well, the way you describe this makes me wonder if, when, of the women that have affairs, do those affairs tend to be more long-lasting than the affairs that men have? Because the way you described it is men are seizing an opportunity, it's a carpe diem type approach to infidelity, and women potentially, on average, are capitalizing on something that is longer term.

Andrew Huberman:

Now, of course, if they're doing this around ovulation, then it would constrain the amount of times they would need to see or have sex with this other person that they're not married to. But is there any evidence that women have more ongoing affairs and men have more transient affairs?

David Buss:

Yes. Yeah, there is. And so if you look at people who have affairs, there's a sex difference there. So women tend to have affairs with one person and become emotionally involved with that one person over time. Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners. And so which then by definition can't be long last. You can't have the long-term affairs with six different partners

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, unless he's juggling multiple phone accounts or something.

David Buss:

Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah. Well, and in this day and age, it's easier to meet more people by virtue of online communications, but it's also easier to get caught. Meaning, it's harder to conceal interactions. Everything's in the cloud anyway. A good friend of mine who's a former very high level in special operations said, "Anything that's not in your head and only in your head is available for others to find, should they want it." And I think that's largely true.

David Buss:

Yeah, and phone information, text messages, and people are very good at hacking into their partner's phones, computers. And then also there are video cameras everywhere. So sneaking off to a quiet restaurant. There are probably eight video cameras that can record you walking in and out of that restaurant.

Andrew Huberman:

Everything can be found.

David Buss:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm certain of that. You mentioned emotional affairs and financial infidelity as well.

David Buss:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

I had a girlfriend once who as an early date discussion said, "Not that I get the impression that you are, but I want to be very clear." She said that, "You are not emotionally, physically, or financially tied to any other women." And I thought it was very interesting that now you bring up a financial infidelity. She's quite happily partnered now, and not with me, but it's interesting — it's the first time I heard anyone spell it out that way as a list, almost like specific aims in a grant. What is emotional infidelity? What is financial infidelity?

David Buss:

Yeah, yeah. Well this is a very smart woman to tap into all three.

Andrew Huberman:

Indeed she is. Yeah. Indeed she is.

David Buss:

And I assumed you gave honest responses to all of those three questions?

Andrew Huberman:

As I recall I did, but as we now know ... Well, you can ask her at some point.

David Buss:

Right. Okay.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm happy to provide you her information.

David Buss:

Well, and there's self-deception in the service of deception is another issue. So emotional infidelity is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's falling in love with someone else, becoming psychologically close to someone else, sharing intimate or private information with someone else, that's what I mean by emotional infidelity. And one of the hallmarks of a study done by a former student of mine, Barry Kuhle; it was very clever I thought.

David Buss:

He analyzed, there used to be this reality TV show called "Cheaters," where they would hire detectives, and when the detective would, say, follow someone to a hotel room, they'd call up the partner and say, "Your husband just walked into the hotel room with someone else. Would you like to come down to the hotel and confront him?" And a certain percentage of people would confront. And what he analyzed, so he analyzed all these episodes of this show called "Cheaters," and what he examined was the verbal interrogations when people confronted their partners.

David Buss:

And when men confronted their partners, the first question they want to know is, "Did you fuck him?" Women, their first question was, "Do you love her?" And so this captures that difference between a sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity. And also captures another sex difference when it comes to sexual jealousy, where men tend to be more focused on the sexual components of the infidelity because those are what compromise his paternity certainty that he's actually the genetic father of whatever offspring ensue, whereas love is a cue to ... "Do you love her?" That's a cue that he's going to leave you, the woman, for another woman. It's a cue to the long-term loss of that investment and commitment from that partner.

David Buss:

And so the sexes seem to differ in which aspects of the infidelity, with women were attuned to or more upset by the emotional infidelity, men, more by the sexual infidelity. Now, financial infidelity has been explored much less. But in my new book, "When Men Behave Badly," I have a section on financial infidelity where I summarize all the research that has been done. And I was flabbergasted by the percentage of people who do things like have credit cards that their spouse doesn't know about, keep secret bank accounts, have the credit card bills mailed to their office rather than their home, have basically resources and expenditures of pooled resources that they keep from their partner, and both sexes do it.

David Buss:

And the percentages vary from study to study, but they range from 30 to 60% of all people who are keeping financial information from their spouse in one way or another. It could be the woman's out buying designer purses or designer handbags, it could be the guy is out going to strip clubs or taking his affair partner to restaurants and doesn't want those charges to show up on a jointly held credit card.

David Buss:

So financial infidelity is critical, and then even things like diverting pooled resources to one set of genetic relatives versus another set is another thing that people tend to keep secret. So there are forms of financial infidelity as well. So yeah, infidelity, you're absolutely ... it's a great question because it shouldn't be confined to sexual infidelity, which is what most people think about, but also emotional and financial.

David Buss:

Interestingly, if you ask people, "What do you mean? What is infidelity in a marriage?" Men tend to say, "Well, it's obvious, it's that she had sex with someone else." That's infidelity. Whereas women are more likely to have a broader definition of infidelity. They will cite things like emotional infidelity, financial infidelity as part of the definition, whereas men have that more narrow definition.

Andrew Huberman:

Interesting. I have a good friend who's a couples counselor, a clinical psychologist, and she told me something interesting that relates to this, which is that in cases of infidelity, oftentimes some of the arguments between couples boil down to whether or not contraception was used or not; that becomes a key feature.

Andrew Huberman:

And she always thought that that was homing in on a detail which, of course, is an important detail as it relates to both paternity issues and pregnancy, but also disease. But as we're talking about all this, it makes me think that this may have deeper evolutionary roots further down in the brain, as we say in neuroscience literature.

David Buss:

Yeah. And using a condom versus not using a condom, not using is a more intimate act, in a way; you were literally physically more intimate with someone else than if you do use a condom. But whether evolutionary roots to this, I don't know. Condoms are probably relatively recent in, or at least a widespread use of them, relatively recent in evolutionary times. So I doubt we have adaptations specifically for them.

Andrew Huberman:

No. And presumably before condoms, one can only speculate because as we say when it comes to behavior, there's rarely a fossil record, but sometimes, there is. It would be the withdrawal method of contraception, which a good friend of mine who studies ... whose laboratory works on reproductive biology says the reason that's a poor choice of contraception is because it was designed not to work. So note to those of trying to avoid unwanted pregnancy.

Andrew Huberman:

So we talked a little bit about status in terms of what men and women are selecting for for different types of relationships. Is there anything else about status that you find particularly interesting, and what men are finding attractive besides these waist-to-hip ratios and quality of potential mothers, and so forth. Are there any hidden gems in the literature around this that I might not have heard of?

David Buss:

Well, yeah. So you mean among things like sex differences in what leads to high status or-

Andrew Huberman:

For instance, or perhaps things that are surprising in terms of what people are selecting for. Do people even know what they're selecting for or is this all subconscious? Any and all of those topics are of interest to me.

David Buss:

Yeah. So well, to take them in reverse order, I think a lot of it is conscious, but some of it is certainly unconscious, or there are elements which are totally unconscious. So I mentioned one earlier where a man looks at a woman, he's aware that he's attracted to her and attracted to her physical appearance, but he might not be aware of why.

David Buss:

We didn't evolve to be aware of why, just like with food preferences. We find certain things delectable and other things nauseating. We don't understand the adaptive logic of why our food preferences exist and why we have them. And the same is true with mating. And so men find women with a low waist-to-hip ratio attractive, but they might not that they-

David Buss:

... attractive, but they might not ... Rarely will they know, "Oh, low waist ratio is actually associated with higher fertility, lower endocrinological problems, lower age," et cetera. So, we're sometimes aware of what we want, but we are unaware of why we want it. So, I think there are unconscious elements that ... The whole topic of status and what leads to high status and low status, it's a topic I'm currently investigating. Published a couple scientific articles on it. But maybe we'll hold off on that for a future discussion.

David Buss:

I'll mention one. It intersects with mating in interesting ways in that higher status gives people the ability to choose from a wider pool of potential mates than they would if they have low status. And so, one of the reasons that people strive for status is because they have access to more desirable mates. Conversely, having desirable mates endows you with higher status. And so, if you're a male, you have a very attractive woman on your arm, that leads to high status. And so, there's a reciprocal link between status and mating, in that way.

David Buss:

There have been studies where, say, they pose a kind of unattractive guy — older, unattractive guy — and a stunningly beautiful woman as his girlfriend. And they say, "Well, what's this guy all about?" And they say, "Oh, he must be very high in status. He must be very wealthy. He must have a lot going for him." Whereas, the reverse, people don't make the same attributions. And so, there is an interesting reciprocal link between status and mating success, where mating success leads to high status, and high status leads to more mating success.

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:04:04]

Andrew Huberman:

So over and over again, there are these instances that you describe where the assessment of potential mate, sexual or long-term partnership, are being made in the contents of good statistical practices, looking at the choices of others as a readout of your own choices. This seems to be a theme that this is not being made in a very narrow context, but paying attention to what other people are paying attention to seems to come up again and again.

David Buss:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Slightly off-center from that, but still paying attention to what other people are paying attention to, what's known about jealousy in men versus women, and how frequent it is, how intense it is, and what people do with that jealousy? We hear, or I've heard at some point, that a large fraction of homicides are the consequence of jealous lovers. That's the darkest angle of all this. But, in evolutionary psychology context, what is jealousy? Does it relate to paternity issues only? What can you tell us about jealousy?

David Buss:

Yeah. It's a great set of questions. When I first started studying jealousy, I reviewed all the prior publications on jealousy. And at that time, jealousy was regarded as a sign of immaturity, a sign of insecurity, a sign of neurosis or pathology, or in some cases delusion. And what I argued, and do argue, is that jealousy is an evolved emotion that serves several adaptive functions, one of which you mentioned, is a paternity certainty function.

David Buss:

But to back up a second, basically, once you have the evolution of long-term mating, long-term pair bonds, you're talking about, from a male perspective, investing a tremendous amount of resources in a woman and her children over years or decades, even with boomerang kids now, it may even go more than two decades.

Andrew Huberman:

Boomerang kids?

David Buss:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Sorry.

David Buss:

Kids who leave home and then come back and live at home, because-

Andrew Huberman:

That happens.

David Buss:

Oh, yeah, that happens.

Andrew Huberman:

I don't have children, so I don't know.

David Buss:

Oh, okay. Yeah, no, that's a big thing.

Andrew Huberman:

But if I do, I'll just expect that they'll come back at some point.

David Buss:

They'll come back because they can't find a job, or they find it cheaper to live at the parents' house, or whatever.

Andrew Huberman:

Oh, goodness. I can't think of anything worse. I love my parents, but ...

David Buss:

I know. I know. I can't imagine it. But it happens, and it's happening more and more given the current economic situation. Okay but, so once you have long-term mating, you need a defense to prevent or preserve the investment that you've made and are making in the long-term mateship. And so, jealousy serves this mate-guarding function, if you will, or mate-retention function.

David Buss:

So, in other words, one way of phrasing this is that we know that there are affairs, we know that people break up, they get divorced, but people have adaptations to want to hold onto their mates. And that's what jealousy's in part about. And so, jealousy gets activated when there are threats to that romantic relationship. And there are other forms of jealousy, like sibling jealousy, and so forth, but we're focusing on mating jealousy in this context.

David Buss:

So, now, what's interesting is that the threats to an ongoing valued romantic relationship come from many sources. So, they could be you detect cues to your partner's infidelity, or cues of a lack, of an emotional distance between you and your partner. You say, "I love you," to your partner, and your partner says, "Oh, I wonder how the hell the Knicks are doing this scoring season?" or whatever. If you get an unreciprocated "I love you," is a bad cue.

Andrew Huberman:

Or some people are so tuned to this, if there's a half-millisecond delay ...

David Buss:

Right.

Andrew Huberman:

They can detect delays in responses.

David Buss:

Yes. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah.

David Buss:

Delays in responses. So, that's one set of cues, but then there's another set of interested mate poachers. So, if you're mated to someone who's desirable, which many people are, other people still desire them, and so sometimes try to poach them or lure them away from you for a short-term sexual encounter or for a longer term relationship. And so we have to be, jealousy motivates people to be attentive to potential mate poachers in their environment.

David Buss:

But even more subtle things like mate value discrepancies can trigger jealousy. So, even if there are no mate poachers and no cues to infidelity, if a mate value discrepancy opens up in a relationship ... So, in the American system, like you're a six or an eight or a 10, and people generally pair off based on similarity in mate value. So-

Andrew Huberman:

That tends to happen. Sixes end up with sixes, sevens end up with sixes, plus or minus one.

David Buss:

Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

Right.

David Buss:

So, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

And these are a somewhat subjective scale.

David Buss:

Okay. Somewhat subjective, but there's still some consensus about these things. So, even colloquially, people say things like, "He's not good enough for you." Or, "I think you could do better," to people, and implicitly have a notion of relative mate value and discrepancies they're in. Okay, but discrepancies can open up where none previously existed. So, you get fired from a job all of a sudden, and most people are very understanding and forgiving about that if it's not too long. But you go six months, eight months, people start having problems. Or if someone's career takes off, let's say a woman becomes a famous singer or actress, or a man does, career takes off, all of a sudden there's a mate value discrepancy, where you have access to a larger pool of potential mates and higher mate value potential mates.

David Buss:

So, people are attentive to mate value discrepancies. And so, jealousy can get activated even if there are no immediate threats to a relationship. But that the mate value discrepancy is a threat that looms on the horizon of the relationship, because we know statistically, the higher mate value person is more likely to have an affair and is more likely to dump the other person and trade up in the mating market.

Andrew Huberman:

And when people find new partners for long-term relationships, do they tend to trade up?

David Buss:

On average, yes, if the discrepancy is sufficiently large. So, there are costs associated with breaking up, divorcing, for example. It's emotionally, financially; it's a costly thing. And so, if you have a half a point mate value discrepancy, you're not going to see a lot of breakups. But if you have larger mate value discrepancies, that's going to auger more for trading up in the mating market.

David Buss:

Then you get into ... so what jealousy is, it's an emotion that gets activated by these circumstances, and then what people do about it depends on what their options are. And people do things that, in my published scientific work, I say range from vigilance to violence. So, there's a whole spectrum of things. In fact, I've identified 19 different tactics that people use to deal with problems once they get jealous. And one is increased vigilance and the other exchange-

Andrew Huberman:

Vigilance for the behavior of the mate.

David Buss:

Yeah, vigilance for the behavior of the mate, and that can include stalking, following, hacking into iPhones or computers, monitoring the behavior of mate poachers, looking at eye contact between other men and your partner. There's a whole suite of things that is involved in vigilance.

David Buss:

And then at the other extreme, and we can talk about things in between, but the other extreme is violence. And so, in my new book, "When Men Behave Badly," I have a whole chapter on intimate partner violence. And this is, what I argue, and this is really unfortunate, and I'm not endorsing ... It's illegal, it's bad, don't do it. But people engage in intimate partner violence. In America, something like 28 to 30% of all people who are married will experience intimate partner violence in their relationship. So, it's not a trivial percentage.

Andrew Huberman:

And that violence is between the two partners.

David Buss:

Between the two partners, yes. There's also violence that gets directed to our potential mate poachers, but that's a somewhat separate issue. But, one of the things that is functional about the violence is that it tends to reduce perceived mate value discrepancies. So, in other words, I'll say guys tend to engage in the violence more than women do, although some argue that there's more equality in the violence, but at a minimum, men tend to do more damage when they do the violence.

Andrew Huberman:

And when you're talking about violence, is this ever emotional violence?

David Buss:

Yeah, there's that as well. And in fact, the two tend to be correlated. So, in my studies of married couples, verbal violence is a good predictor of physical violence happening as well. So, one thing that'll happen, just to give a concrete example, guys will start insulting their partner's appearance. "You're really looking ugly today. Your thighs are heavy. You're not looking very good." So, they try to denigrate the woman's appearance, which is a key component of a woman's mate value.

Andrew Huberman:

So, they're trying to adjust more closely the mate value discrepancy.

David Buss:

Yeah, they're trying to reduce her self-perceived mate value. So if, let's say, he's a six, she's an eight, and he can convince her that she's actually only a six, then she's going to be more likely to stay with him.

Andrew Huberman:

Very diabolical.

David Buss:

It's terribly diabolical. But, the fact is, women don't feel good about themselves when they get beaten up by their partner. In fact, in the cases where it leaves physical evidence, women wear sunglasses or turtlenecks or cover up the bruises. It literally does lower the mate value of the woman by injuring her physical appearance.

Andrew Huberman:

And getting her to conceal herself. Stay home.

David Buss:

Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman:

Et cetera. Yeah. Taking her out of the ... literally reducing her visibility.

David Buss:

Right. And that's actually one of the predictors of violence, is if he starts doing things other than violence, like cutting off her relationships with her friends and her family, trying to sequester her and prevent her from getting exposed to potential other partners. And so, it is very diabolical but I think important to understand the potential functionality of intimate partner violence.

Andrew Huberman:

Sorry to interrupt again, but I'm just so curious. So, oftentimes my audience will say, "You interrupt too often," but I want to make sure that I don't miss an opportunity to ask you about the intimate partner violence in the other direction, female to male, where, stereotypically speaking, that the opportunity for physical violence is still there, but the idea in mind is that it would be more of a psychological nature. Although I think there is evidence that some women beat their husbands, right?

David Buss:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

But I'm guessing it's not as frequent, or am I off?

David Buss:

Well, different studies ... So, it depends on whether you just simply count up acts or whether you look at the damage that's done. And as I mentioned, men tend to do more physical damage. So, there are shelters for battered women all over the country. As far as I know, there's one for battered men. Now, it may be, and this is partly true, that men are more ashamed if they get beaten up by their partner or clocked with a frying pan. And it's possible, and there's evidence, that police don't take it as seriously. So, there's one case that I reported in my book where a guy called the police, and his wife had clocked him with something, and police shows up and he says, "If she so much as broke a fingernail in this altercation, they'll charge you and not her." And so, there is a potential police bias in this.

David Buss:

And so, there may be underreporting of women beating up men as a consequence. Okay, but the motivations are often different. So, one is that male sexual jealousy will trigger him to attack his partner, and then she will use physical violence to defend herself. So, she might pick up a frying pan or a weapon of some sort to defend herself. And so, the motivation is his sexual jealousy on his part, but self-defense on her part. And so, that accounts for some unknown percentage of the cases. And in some cases, it is women who were outraged when they discover their partner's been having sex with someone else, and infidelity of a sexual, financial, or emotional nature. And so there is some female-to-male violence that absolutely occurs, but the reduction of a perceived mate value discrepancy is a key function from male perspective. Now, again, not that he thinks about this; he's just angry and wants to hurt her.

David Buss:

Okay, but here's one other thing that is really interesting about the intimate partner violence, and that's the specificity of it, depending on circumstances. And namely, when the woman gets pregnant, she's more vulnerable to physical violence, and when the man suspects that he's not the father of that pregnancy, he's more likely to direct the violence toward blows to her abdomen. It's that specific.

Andrew Huberman:

Wow.

David Buss:

And so in that case, the function is, the hypothesized function is to terminate the pregnancy by a rival male as opposed to deterring the woman from committing an infidelity, or from leaving the relationship entirely. So, that's why one function of intimate partner violence is just sequestering the woman and keeping her all to himself. So, it's both to prevent infidelity and to prevent defection.

Andrew Huberman:

I have a friend whose wife told me that, "If he cheats, I'll kill him." That's what she said. "But it's actually just much easier to keep him very, very busy." And that statement now leaps to mind because of what you're describing, that there are many tactics by which people can engage this effort to reduce the mate value discrepancy, not all of which are overtly violent.

David Buss:

Yes.

Andrew Huberman:

But all of which are designed to constrain their behavior.

David Buss:

Right, right. Yeah. So, these would fall under what I would call mate retention tactics, only one or two of which fall under the violence category. There are even within-partner psychological manipulations about these things. So, there are psychological manipulations about perceived mate value. "No one else would want you. You're a loser." There's denigration of a partner within the relationship. Even feigning anger to make the partner feel guilty about, say, looking at someone else. So, there's all kinds of internecine warfare that goes on within relationships to manipulate perceptions of these things. I'm creating a much too jaded view of romance and love, I think.

Andrew Huberman:

Oh, no, we will get to the happy endings and long ... I mean, there are certainly many happy relationships out there. As a neuroscientist, I hear about this and the immediacy of how people fall into a pattern of jealousy or a pattern of cheating, and not always. And it just speaks to a brain circuitry that's evolved to protect something. And I'm sure this statement is not exhaustive, but I think it's accurate to say that every species, but especially humans, wants to make more of itself and protect its young.

Andrew Huberman:

But these issues of paternity and resource allocation, I think they're vital, and I look forward to a day where evolutionary psychology and neuroscience can merge at the level of underlying mechanism. But I don't think it's dark. I think it's just the way we're wired at some level. Speaking of dark, could you tell us about the Dark Triad?

David Buss:

Yeah, so the Dark Triad ... So, we've been talking about sex differences on average, but there are critical within-sex individual differences. And the Dark Triad is one of the most important ones. The Dark Triad consists of three personality characteristics. So, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

David Buss:

Hallmarks of narcissism are things like grandiosity, the person thinks that they're more intelligent, more attractive, more dazzling, more charming than they actually are. They think they're the greatest person since sliced bread. Importantly, with narcissism, you also get a sense of entitlement. So, they feel entitled to a larger share of the pie, whether that be the financial pie, the status pie, or the sexual pie. Machiavellianism is high scores tend to pursue an exploitative social strategy. So, they might feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.

David Buss:

And then psychopathy — one of the hallmarks of psychopathy is a lack of empathy. So, most people have a normal empathy circuit where if a child falls down and gets hurt, we feel compassion for the harm that that person is undergoing. Or if a puppy gets hit by a car or whatever, we feel compassion. Psychopaths don't. That is high on this ... It's a dimensional thing. It's not a categorical thing. So, those high on psychopathy basically lack empathy.

David Buss:

And so, if you combine these qualities, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, you have some very bad dudes. And I say bad dudes because men tend to score higher on these things than women, especially on the psychopathy dimension. So, when you talk about clinical levels of psychopathy, it's estimated to be something like 1% of women and about 4% of men. So, men are much higher in that.

David Buss:

So, why is this important? Well, it's important in the mating context, because those who are high on Dark Triad traits tend to be sexual deceivers, for one. So, they're often very charming, very good at seducing women and then abandoning them, sometimes after fleecing them or draining their bank account. They're very good at the art of seduction. They also tend to be serial sexual harassers and sexual coercers. So. when it comes to forms of sexual violence, high Dark Triad guys tend to be perpetrators of this.

David Buss:

And so, most men, I think, would find it ethically abhorrent to sexually harass, say, a woman in the workplace. Dark Triad guys, in part, maybe they feel entitled to it, and in part they do. In some cases that I report in the book, there are literal descriptions where the guys are writing in these journals, "Oh, I knew she was attracted to me. That's why she met me in the xerox room just when I was there, because she wanted to admire my bulging biceps," or whatever.

Andrew Huberman:

It's all about them.

David Buss:

Yeah. And this gets into a bias that I talk about, which is the male sexual misperception bias, where a woman smiles at a man, man thinks, "Oh, she wants my body, she's attracted to me." And women are thinking, "Oh, I'm just being friendly, I'm being polite or professional." But these guys, high Dark Triad guys, are more susceptible to the sexual over-perception bias, and they literally believe that the woman is attracted to them and sending them signals, green lights, to sexually approach.

David Buss:

And so, if you combine Dark Triad traits with the dispositional pursuit of a short-term mating strategy, that's an especially deadly combination. That's when you get sexual harassment, sexual coercion. So, these are very bad dudes. Also, predictors of intimate partner violence.

Andrew Huberman:

What approximate frequency in the male population have all three of the Dark Triad traits? And I realize that they're on a continuum: sociopathy, narcissism-

David Buss:

That's why you can't say, because they are on a continuum, and it's sort of arbitrary where you draw the line. But I think it's a minority of men. It's a subset of men who commit the vast majority of these acts of sexual violence. And that's why it's not like ... If you look at victims of sexual violence, they're more numerous than the perpetrators of sexual violence because the perpetrators tend to be serial offenders, so to speak. One guy in the workplace harassing 15 different women. One guy sexually coercing multiple women. So, that's why you have, in well-known cases in the news like Harvey Weinstein, probably over a hundred different women. Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, some of these more famous cases, these are a large number of victims, but pretty much sole perpetrators. And there's no question that these guys like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were definitely high on Dark Triad traits.

Andrew Huberman:

You mentioned stalking briefly. Maybe we could just talk about some of the less-known features about stalking. I think I once heard you give a lecture where you said that one of the scariest things about stalking is that sometimes it works.

David Buss:

Yes. Yeah. Well, stalking has multiple motivations, but one of the most frequent motivations is a mating motivation, where either there's a breakup and the woman dumps the guy, and the guy doesn't want to get dumped. He wants to maintain a relationship with her. And I should say that when it comes to criminal stalking, there's a huge sex difference. About 80% of the stalkers tend to be men, about 20% women. So, there are women stalkers, but they're about a fourth the number compared to men.

David Buss:

So, the motivation of the guys tends to be either an attempt to get back together with the woman, either sexually or in a relationship, and/or to interfere with her future mating prospects. And it works some of the time in two senses. One is it does interfere with her attempts to re-mate. In fact, it scares off some guys. Like, you show up and pick up a woman at her apartment for a date, and her ex is sitting out there glaring at you.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm actually familiar with the circumstance where early in a relationship somebody mentions that an ex has made veiled threats about surveillance, for instance.

David Buss:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I've actually had that happen several times in my dating history where someone would say ... You started opening up about previous relationships a little bit, as is appropriate, and someone says, "Yeah, he mentioned that he was going to send someone around to surveil me." That kind of thing, which is a very interesting factoid to pick up.

David Buss:

Right.

Andrew Huberman:

But I heard it enough times, and people I know have reported hearing this enough times, that I'm guessing that that's probably more frequent than people actually trailing people in cars and things of that sort. But planting that ... It's like, the psychological seed of surveillance is a form of harassment in some sense.

David Buss:

Yes, absolutely. I think you're right. There's that planting the psychological seeds. But then also with surveillance, some surveillors remain hidden, so you don't know necessarily.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, I confess in this case, it did not act as a deterrent for continuing the relationship, but that's another story. So, how often do women respond — I have to put this in quotes, for those that are listening, air quotes, end quotes — positively to stalking? I mean, how often does it work to resecure the partner after they've been broken up with?

David Buss:

Yeah. Well, so in our studies, it's a minority of cases that it works to reestablish. I think something like 15% of the time that it works either to temporarily reestablish a sexual relationship or lure the woman back in for a more permanent relationship. So, most of the time it doesn't work. But one woman in our study said the guy, every time she went out with another guy, he would threaten the other guy. And she said after about six months, there were no other guys. He basically scared off all the other guys. And so, she went back to him because there were no other guys around.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah, I experienced this when I was in college. I lived in a small town, very population dense — Isla Vista, UC Santa Barbara. And there was a couple where every time this woman would date someone, he'd basically beat up whoever the new suitor was, and pretty soon no one would go near them. They got a reputation as the Sid and Nancy couple. And indeed it worked. It worked in the sense that no one dared go near her, and they ended up together. So, I've seen real-life examples of this.

David Buss:

Yeah, so it happens, but it is, in general, not a successful strategy.

Andrew Huberman:

Oh, no. And it's not what I'm suggesting.

David Buss:

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:

I was just shocked to learn that, because we hear stalking, and we have this ... There's one very extreme image of it, but the underlying motivations, I think, reveal something about mating dynamics.

David Buss:

Yeah. And I think that the circumstances are often a mate value discrepancy, where the guy realizes correctly that he will be unable to replace her with a mate of equivalent mate value, or in some cases, any mate. It's like, "Well, she was with me once, maybe I can get her back with me again." So, the psychology is very understandable, but it tends not to work because ... Another thing we found ... We did a study of 2,500 victims of stalking. This is with Josh Duntley, a former student of mine who's now a professor in a criminology department. And what we found is there were large differences between the stalker and the victim of the stalker, where the stalker tends to be much lower in mate value than the victim.

David Buss:

And so, basically, it's typically the woman who realizes she can do a lot better on the mating market, and the guy realizes, "I am never going to be able to replace her with a woman of equivalent mate value, and so, I'm going to use this last-ditch, desperate measure to try to get her back," and occasionally it works.

Andrew Huberman:

I'm thinking more about this mate value thing, this number, this metric, the eight, 10, six, whatever it is, and mate value discrepancy playing such a strong role in all these dynamics. I should have asked this earlier, but what is the impact on mate value, perceived or real, of a woman having already had children? For instance, friends of mine who are married and divorced who have children will often post pictures of themselves with their children in their online profiles because it shows a strong sense of paternal instinct. There's the puppy thing, people with dogs or puppies, demonstrating a capacity to care and for-

Andrew Huberman:

... demonstrating a capacity to care and for caretaking. In women, the opposite is also true. Women with children show capacity, it demonstrates fertility. At least at one point, perhaps still fertility that's still present. Does it positively, negatively, or neutrally impact a woman to already have children when seeking another mate, regardless of whether or not she was married or had the children out of wedlock?

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:36:04]

David Buss:

As a general rule, it decreases her mate value because kids with another mate are viewed as a cost, not a benefit and they're a cost on multiple dimensions. One of which they're going to be a cost to the guy because he's going to have to invest resources, time, attention, so forth. But also a portion of her effort and resources are going to be devoted toward kids who are not genetically related to him, which is one reason why stepfamilies ... There's often a lot of conflict within stepfamilies, very explicable from an evolutionary perspective. In general, it's a cost, not a benefit.

David Buss:

Sometimes it can be a benefit though. I know one case where a woman got divorced, she had two kids, and she ended up successfully mating with a guy who was also divorced and had primary custody of his two kids. There was a compatibility there. But as a general rule, it will decrease a woman's, and a man's, mate value to have kids, especially kids who are young and financially dependent. But what happens is, let's say the woman would be an eight without kids, a guy who's a six might be able to attract her, and might feel lucky to attract her, because there's no way he would've been able to attract her under other conditions. That's why the display of effort, investing in her kids, is often a mating tactic. He's showing, "Okay. I'm willing to invest in kids. I'm willing to sacrifice," and so they, in essence, become equivalent in mate value as a result of that.

David Buss:

But will she be able to attract, on average, other eights? Less likely, but the same is true of guys. And this is why the reason that it affects women more than men is because more custody tends to go with women, that is the kids, women tend to have greater custody, and women tend to invest more in the kids throughout their lives. Now, there are other things like alimony, and child support payments, and so forth. But all the women I've talked to, I've talked one-on-one with many women about this; they view a guy with kids as a cost, not a benefit, unless the kids are old enough and they've left home and are no longer financially dependent.

Andrew Huberman:

And everything you just described is consistent with what you said earlier, which is that with subsequent marriages or as men get older, the tendency is to seek mates that are progressively younger, right? Because there's a lower probability they'll already have children if they're much younger.

David Buss:

Right, right. And if the guy's successful, if he has status and resources and has other qualities associated with higher mate value, then he will remain attractive to younger women.

Andrew Huberman:

I realize it's not your specific area of expertise, but these days there's a lot of discussion about how early childhood attachment to parents influences mate choice later on. This kind of general categorization of avoidant and anxious, and anxious-avoidant, and all this kind of thing. And again, putting my hat on as a neuroscientist, I think it makes sense that the neural circuits for attachment in childhood would be somehow, partially or in whole, repurposed for other forms of attachment. We don't just tend to say, "Okay. That brain circuitry was from when I was a kid, and now I'm an adult and so I'll develop this new attachment circuitry." I'm guessing it evolves and whatnot. But is there anything interesting about childhood attachment strategies, vis-à-vis stability of long-term partner choice, or is that too big of a leap for us to make here?

David Buss:

Yeah. Well, I mean I can offer some sort of informed speculation about it. And as you point, it's not my area of expertise, but I know a little bit about it. And I mean, I think that secure attachment style, if both partners have a secure attachment style, that's conducive to a long-term mateship. Avoidant attachment styles, avoidant people, tend to have more difficulty with intimacy and also higher probability of infidelity. And anxious attachment style, I don't know, can create problems of its own in the overly clingy, dependent, absorbing, what I call high relationship load. There's like mutation load, which we all have certain number of mutations. There's parasite load. There's also what I call relationship load, so what is the baggage that someone brings to the relationship and they-

Andrew Huberman:

Probably correlated with the frequency of demand of immediate text message responses.

David Buss:

Right.

Andrew Huberman:

Well, I think the frequency of demand, the expected low latency of text message responses plays out consistently in relationships. Early on, there's a very low expectation of response. Then as people get attached, depending on their level of anxiety, if they don't hear back from somebody really quickly, where the mind goes is a very interesting aspect. Do you become suspicious? Do you become anxious? Can you stabilize your own internal milieu, or do you need to see the dot, dot, dot that's coming back? I'd love to see a study on that at some point.

David Buss:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good one, and my intuition suggests that your prediction about that would pan out. That would be the insecure that would really be getting upset if there were not that immediate response to the texts.

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah. I have a friend, a female friend, who deliberately, using her language, "trains" her potential partners to be comfortable with a variable response latency. But then I asked her if she's comfortable with a variable response latency and she said, "Absolutely not." There's an asymmetry, at least in that case. This is almost certainly a more rare circumstance, but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about unconventional relationships. These days, I don't think it's just by virtue of living in California, you hear more and more about monogamish as opposed to monogamous, and various forms of polyamory that may or may not include the amory part.

Andrew Huberman:

Passes in permission, based on season, circumstance and prior infidelities, like, "Okay. Somebody had a mishap early on, you have one pass," so to speak. And you hear this kind of language getting thrown around, and it's intriguing to me because it seems like an effort to bypass some of the more, if you will, hardwired, or at least culturally hardwired, aspects of mate choice and sexual partner choice, acknowledging jealousy but confronting it by allowing your partner to be with somebody else, for instance. I confess I have friends who have unconventional relationships. I have friends with conventional relationships. Any thoughts on polyamory, or?

David Buss:

Yeah. Yeah, I do have a couple thoughts on it. I haven't studied it extensively, but I think that the way I would phrase it is that there's an attempt to overcome certain evolved features of our mating psychology, but often in the service of other aspects of our mating psychology. What I mean by that is this. So we talk about polyamory; first of all, there's a sex difference, on average. That is, men are more likely to want to initiate a polyamorous relationship than women.

David Buss:

There are lots of exceptions, and I actually know of at least one exception personally, friends of mine who are in a polyamorous relationship. But the motivation for men is that evolved desire for sexual variety. It gives him access to a wider variety of sex partners, which is part of our evolved sexual psychology, especially for men. Women, one motivation ... now women also have a desire for sexual variety. On average, tends not to be as great as that of men, but also have it. But some women agree to a polyamorous relationship as a mate retention tactic. That is this guy, in order to keep him, she has to agree to the relationship, and so the motivations for engaging in polyamory are somewhat sex-differentiated.

Andrew Huberman:

On average?

David Buss:

On average, on average. There's lots of exceptions. Now, when it comes to sexual jealousy, there is this recognition that, and the way that I would frame it, there's this evolved emotion where it triggers sexual jealousy, seeing your partner having sex or imagining your partner having sex or be falling in love with someone else. But interestingly, and there haven't been studies on this, but I know of this one polyamorous couple where they reported to me, both of them reported to me. She said it doesn't bother her at all if her husband, they're married, has sex with other women. They allow it. I think it's like every Thursday night or whatever, they have the ... Different couples that have different rules.

David Buss:

But one time she saw him walking down the street hand-in-hand, affectionately with a former girlfriend, and she got extremely jealous because it signaled an emotional connection. The sexual didn't bother, the emotional did. She happens to be bisexual, and she and her partner said that it really upset him when she slept with other men, but it was fine if she slept with other women.

Andrew Huberman:

I think that's a fairly common thing; among the men that I know that are in polyamorous relationships, that's a fairly common statement.

David Buss:

Yeah, and so he kept trying to ... these internecine manipulations, trying to encourage her to sleep with other women but not with men. And in her case, encouraging him not to get emotionally involved with other women, but the sex was okay. I think that in the modern environment, we have a very rich and complicated evolved mating psychology. And what we're doing in these novel forms, or seminovel because these things have a pretty deep history themselves, that we're attempting to maximize some of our evolved desires while keeping quiescent other evolved aspects of our sexual psychology like jealousy, so satisfying our desire for sexual variety, but keeping jealousy at bay.

David Buss:

And different couples do it in different ways. As you alluded to. So I know one couple live in Los Angeles, and the woman said she gives her husband permission to have an affair, sleep with other women, as long as it's outside of the city limits of L.A. And this other couple, it has to be Thursday night. People have different arrangements.

Andrew Huberman:

There are constraints, but the constraints are specific and somewhat arbitrary to the relationship.

David Buss:

Yeah. Yeah, they're specific. And often in polyamorous relationships, people talk it out and come to an agreement on what is acceptable and what's out-of-bounds. But in a way, it's just we can't change our evolved sexual psychology, I don't think. What we can do is we can activate certain elements of it and keep others quiescent, and that's all good. In a way, we do in the modern environment. Even to take it outside of polyamory, pornography, okay? Widely-consumed Internet pornography, what does that do? Well, there's a big sex difference there. Men tend to consume it a lot more than women.

David Buss:

The forms of the pornography are different, but in a way, the pornography, what it does is it parasitized men's evolved desire for sexual variety. They can, in some sense, psychologically experience sexual ... a variety of different women sexually without actually doing it, by just looking at their computer screen. In a way, another way of phrasing that is that we create modern novel cultural inventions in ways that satisfy our evolved desires and our evolved sexual desires.

Andrew Huberman:

It's interesting with the kind of explosion of online pornography, I have a colleague at Stanford, in psychiatry, Anna Lembke, who studies the dopamine system, and she mentioned two things of interest. One is that not only is there a tremendous variety of experiences that are available to people to view in pornography, but the intensity is also quite high, so much so that at least for young people who are observing a lot of pornography, it's possible, and there are studies looking at this now, that their brain circuits become wired to observing sexual acts as opposed to being engaged in them, which can be extremely problematic. It's a sharp blade, so to speak, this pornography thing. It isn't what it once was and it's evolving quickly. Very interesting.

Andrew Huberman:

How should one frame all this? I imagine a number of people listening are in relationships or would hope to be in a relationship. In terms of understanding what we are selecting for consciously or subconsciously, it seems like there are common themes. People want to feel attractive and attracted. People want to make sure that there's stability of the relationship. When we hear about security, oftentimes I think of this kind of warm, oxytocin, serotonin-like thing. But this mate value seems so powerful in all this — assessing mate value. How objective are people about assessing their own value in terms of finding, securing, and over time, maintaining a relationship? Securing is dynamic because people age at different rates. Is there an objective metric of this stuff?

Andrew Huberman:

I guess you get a lot of statistics about somebody's image, and you come up with an average value based on the population. But how should people assess themselves? Because it seems like one of the features that would be very powerful for leading to happiness, of good partner selection that's stable, where one doesn't have to resort to these Machiavellian or diabolical or any of these other strategies, would be to be very honest with oneself, and how does one do that?

David Buss:

Yeah, great questions, and I don't think that the science has all the answers. A couple things. One is that I think people are generally pretty good at self-assessing mate value, and even self-esteem has been hypothesized to be one internal monitoring device that tracks mate value. When we get a promotion at work or we get a rising status, we feel an elevated sense of self-esteem. We get fired, we get rejected, we get ostracized, our self-esteem plummets. Our self-evaluation, I think, does track mate value to some extent. There are people who overestimate their mate value, people high in narcissism, in particular. And some people underestimate their mate value.

David Buss:

Another important element is that there's consensual mate value. That is if you asked a group of a hundred people, there's a fair amount of consensus that this person's an eight, that person's a six. But there are also individual differences in mate value. One example is I know a woman who's a professor, and she places a high premium on guys who are deeply steeped in Russian literature, which she is, so that she can have in-depth conversations about Russian literature.

Andrew Huberman:

Note to young men, learn Russian literature.

David Buss:

But this is high and it's a dimension of mate value that's important for her, but probably not important for a lot of other people. Whereas other people, let's say, might be, let's say you're into football or some sport, and another partner thinks sports are stupid, then someone who's also into sports is going to be higher in mate value for you. There are these individual differences in components of mate value, which is good because that means if everyone were going after the same people, and there was total consensus on mate value, then there would be a lot of mateless people and a lot of problems in the world and a lot of dissatisfied people. Both are important, the consensual aspects and the individually differentiated components of mate value. But in terms of accuracy of assessment, there are no good measures scientifically to do this. Because it's sufficiently complicated. We've mentioned maybe a dozen different components of mate value. Physical attractiveness, kindness, emotional stability, health status, et cetera. These aren't the only ones.

David Buss:

I teach a course on psychology of human mating, and I ask the people — it's a large course, couple hundred people, "Tell me, what do women want in a mate?" I started with the blackboard — this is back in the old days when there was a blackboard, a piece of chalk — and they say, "I want a mate who has a good sense of humor," so I write, "sense of humor." "Intelligent." "Kind." I go through this, and I go through five blackboards, and then I run out of space over what women want. Now, I do the same for men and men kind of run out of space after about a blackboard and a half. But what that tells me is that these qualities are large in number and complicated in nature.

David Buss:

You say you want a guy who's nice and generous, they say, "Yeah." A guy who, at the end of every month, takes his whole paycheck and gives it to the wino, homeless person? "Well, no, not that generous. Generous toward me, but not toward everyone else." Nice in general, but not so nice that they're getting exploited. Now there are some things; you can't be too healthy. That's unidimensional, but you want a guy, women want a guy who's confident but not too confident. Too confident will mean he is either arrogant, narcissistic, or not sufficiently manipulable. Anyway, so my point is that because there's so many different components of mate value and that they vary in amount, so it's not just listing the qualities and summing them up, they vary in amount.

David Buss:

It's a very complicated endeavor to assess accurately. But I think people have a good intuitive sense of people's relative mate value, especially if you're in a group and you've been able to interact with them for a long time. And one indication is again, that attention structure. How many other people really want to mate with this person? That's a good cue that they're high in mate value. Nobody wants to mate with you, then cue that you're low in mate value.

Andrew Huberman:

Reminds me of the time when one is trying to decide who to ask to the prom. There's a complicated assessment based on who one would like to go with, whether or not you're already partnered, who would say yes, who would say no, because there's a risk in rejection too because that, if I'm guessing correctly, would could lower one's own perceived mate value.

David Buss:

Getting rejected.

Andrew Huberman:

Right. Frequency of rejections probably doesn't lend itself well to increasing one's own view of their mate value.

David Buss:

Right, which is why many guys have what I call mating anxiety. That is, they don't approach women because they risk getting shot down.

Andrew Huberman:

They're trying to maintain that number by reducing the amount of data?

David Buss:

Right.

Andrew Huberman:

Very interesting.

David Buss:

But it backfires in the modern environment. There's a famous psychologist, Albert Ellis, who had mating anxiety, and he assigned himself the task of approaching, asking, like I can't remember what the number was, but let's say 50 women out on dates. He lived in New York City, so it was a lot of women.

Andrew Huberman:

He could just stand still and they would stream past.

David Buss:

Yeah, and he assigned himself, like, ask 50 women on a date every week. And he said after two weeks his mating anxiety disappeared. Because most of them said, "Buzz off, creep." But he decided, "Well, actually getting rejected didn't cause my world to collapse. And it actually was okay." He kind of inured himself to this rejection, and so he ended up doing quite well on his mating life.

Andrew Huberman:

Another point for cognitive behavioral desensitization.

David Buss:

Yes, exactly.

Andrew Huberman:

He ran the experiment. Just a couple more questions. Earlier you mentioned self-deception-based deception or something of that sort, self-deception, that people aren't always trying to convince somebody else of something that secretly they know isn't true, but that they deceive themselves. Could you embellish on that a little bit?

David Buss:

Yeah. Well, this is actually, this hypothesis is the famous evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, first advanced this hypothesis in the preface in 1976 to Dawkins' book "The Selfish Gene." And he's subsequently written more about it, both in scientific article and in a more popular book. But the core idea is that successful deception is facilitated by self-deception, so if you really believe in X, then you're going to be a more successful salesman to convince other people of X. If you believe you're, let's say, a 10 in mate value, you truly believe it, even if you're not, I'm going to have a more successful time convincing you that I am as well. The hypothesis is basically that people self-deceive in order to increase the effectiveness of actual deception.

David Buss:

In one other dimension I'll mention too is that animals often take each other at our own word for things. If we're self-confident, people assume that we must have the goods to back up that self-confidence. If we're a quivering mass of insecurity, people believe, well, we don't have the goods to back up anything. People use other people's displays of their self-confidence as a cue to their goods. And it's in general a pretty reliable cue, but then there are overestimates and underestimates, as we've talked about, like with narcissism.

Andrew Huberman:

We see this with the job candidates. You are taught to look very carefully at the application and consider all aspects. But ultimately you consider that also in light of how firmly someone believes in the vision of what they're trying to bring to the profession. And that's, I think, largely a subconscious process. And being aware of it can be helpful, but yeah, when somebody's confident, you tend to think that they're going to get where they say they're going to go. And it acts as a bit of a heuristic for not needing ... the impulse is that one then doesn't need to go vet all the information quite as carefully. But I guess if one is aware of it, then to dig deeper, because it seems like there's a lot of deception going on.

David Buss:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and something we talked about earlier, people high on psychopathy are very good at deception. I don't know whether they are good at self-deception or whether they're just really good deceivers, but they can be very effective. And out in California; you live out in California, I'm sure you've seen your fair share of cases like that.

Andrew Huberman:

Oh, yeah. I think across today's discussion, various examples pop to mind of seeing these features in humans. It's so interesting. I find the work that you do incredibly interesting. I think this field of evolutionary psychology is fascinating. And I hope — I said it before, but I'll say it again — I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are nudging towards one another.

David Buss:

Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:

And it's only a matter of time before they merge in some formal way. I mean, there is the work, for instance, on polygamous versus monogamous prairie voles and levels of vasopressin. But it's a big leap to go from vasopressin in a prairie vole, no disrespect to that beautiful work, but to humans and say, "Oh, vasopressin inhalers are going to make you monogamous," or something. I probably got the direction of the effect wrong, but you get the point.

David Buss:

Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. And I think it will happen. I think it's starting to happen, and it will happen, because getting at the neuroscience is getting at the underlying mechanisms that are driving the process. What an evolutionary perspective brings to bear is evolved function and ultimate explanation. The selective forces that created adaptations, the functions of those adaptations and the neuroscience brings, well, what is the underlying machinery that these mechanisms are instantiated in?

Andrew Huberman:

Yeah. That would be wonderful to collaborate someday. Maybe we'll do a brain imaging study on jealousy, or something and, I don't know, and throw it ... You're the psychologist; you would come up with a beautiful experimental design. I'm certain that people are going to want to learn more about your work. Certainly we will give them links to your social media and other sites. You've written a tremendous number of really interesting books. Tell us about your most recent book and maybe some of the others that if people are interested in these topics and they want to learn more, that they could explore.

David Buss:

Sure. Okay. Well, my most recent book is called "When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault." And that book deals with conflict between the sexes, sexual conflict. It deals with both in what I call mating market conflicts. Some of the topics we've been talking about, deception in Internet dating, and things like that. Second is conflict that occurs within mating relationships of the sort that we've been talking about as well. Financial infidelity, emotional infidelity, sexual infidelity, coping with conflict within a relationship. And I actually have some suggestions for strategies for coping with conflict within a relationship. Dealing with the aftermath of breakups. Often there's an asymmetry, one person wants to break up, the other doesn't. I talk about coping in the aftermath. Then I also talk in this book, "When Men Behave Badly," about some of the darker sides of human mating, like intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual coercion.

David Buss:

That's what that book's about. And I think it's gotten well-reviewed, and people find it very useful in understanding what is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena. Why do men and women seem at odds with each other in so many domains? Why do some of these recurrent forms of sexual conflict occur? That's what that book's about. My previous books, so my first book, which I've had the good fortune to be able to revise a couple times, deals more broadly with human mating strategies. It's called "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating," and gives people a broad overview of what people want in a mate, tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention, and so forth, throughout the whole mating process; serial mating, causes of divorce, and so forth. Then even more broadly, I have a textbook called "Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind," which is in its sixth edition right now.

David Buss:

And it's the most widely used textbook in evolutionary psychology around North America and Europe, and actually it's been translated even into Arabic and other countries. That deals somewhat with mating, but also deals with survival problems, our evolved fears and phobias, issues about kin and family, extended family, friendships, social hierarchies, status hierarchies, warfare, and other topics. The "Evolutionary Psychology" textbook is the broadest book. Then maybe the second broadest is "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating," and then for those interested in conflict between the sexes, the latest book, "When Men Behave Badly."

Andrew Huberman:

Fantastic. I love your work. I'm so grateful for the clarity and depth and rigor with which you do it, and you-

David Buss:

Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:

... convey it to us. I know I speak for many people when I just want to say, Thank you. This is a tremendously informative conversation.

David Buss:

Thank you. Well, it's been a delight to talk with you, and I hope we do engage in that research collaboration of merging neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

Andrew Huberman:

Let's do it.

David Buss:

All right.

Andrew Huberman:

Great. Thank you, David.

David Buss:

Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:

Thank you for joining me for my conversation with Dr. David Buss. Be sure to check out the link to his website in the show caption, and be sure to check out his new book, "When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault." If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please put any questions you have in the comment section on YouTube, and also in the comment section you can make suggestions about future topics for the podcast or future podcast guests that you would like us to host.

Andrew Huberman:

Also, check out our sponsors mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. That's one of the best ways to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple and/or Spotify, and on Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can also provide us questions and feedback. Thank you once again for joining me for my discussion with Dr. David Buss about human mate selection and strategy, and many other extremely interesting topics, today. And last but not least, thank you for your interest in science.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [02:07:49]

‍