Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. 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. Bus 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. Buses laboratory is responsible for understanding.
Ending the strategies that humans use to select mates in the short and long term and is an expert in sex differences in mating strategy. His laboratory is 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.
Proclamations of Love or Promises of finances or sexual activity? Dr. Buses 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
Is 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 and relationships such as lost 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 in
He'd that other people don't seek their mate. Dr. Buses work also relates to how biological influences such as ovulation or time within the menstrual cycle influences, mate, selection War tendency to have sex or not with a potential short or long-term mate. And more recent work from dr. Buses. 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. Bus, 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 root.
Of sexual deception, harassment and assault. 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 hate 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 rumors speculation and outright fabrication of ideas about why human select particular mates in the short, and long term, what men and women do differently. And so on, what I love about dr. Buses 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 wrapped with attention trying to extract as much information. As I can, from. Dr. Boss, about the real science of human make
Selection and mating strategy, I'm certain that everyone will take away extremely valuable knowledge that. They can use an existing or future relationships from this discussion with dr. Bus. Before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate for 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. Our first sponsor is rokka. Rokka makes
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Now, my conversation with dr. David Buss, 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. He's super interesting topics about how people select mates, how they lie cheat and but also behave well in the dance that we call Mate
Choice. Yes. Yeah, fortunately, there are, there are well behaving humans in the, in the mix here.
Good to know.
Just to start off, perhaps you could just Orient us a little bit about mate choice, you know, some of the primary criteria that studies show men and women use in order to select mates, both. Shall we call them transient mates, as well as lifetime, mates,
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.
Antic relationship is different from what people look for in a hook-up or casual sex or one-night stand or even a brief affair. So, so that's actually critical. Wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework for understanding mate Choice. Sure. 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, you know, Stags for example, have these massive antlers and the females of the species do not. 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
And he identified two causal processes by which mating Advantage could occur. One is intrasexual competition with the stereotyping to Stags locking horns and combat with the Victor gaining sexual access to the female loser, ambling off with a broken antler and dejected and low self-esteem and needing Psychotherapy perhaps or mate, value Improvement therapy. And the logic was
Whatever qualities led to success in the 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. And we know that the logic of that is more General. Now in a Voss things like in our species competing for position and Status hierarchies. So anyway, so intrasexual competition is one but the second most relevant.
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 than 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 of armed become in cells. 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 so 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,
If we set the ground rules for competition in the opposite sex, 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 on among men to claw their way, you know, 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, this one of the interesting things about
In humans, is that we have mutual May Choice, which is not true in all species. So, and that is that it's not just a matter of, you know, you selecting someone to be your mate. They have to reciprocally select you. And so with, mutual mate, mate choice, we have both preferences May preferences that women have and mate preferences that men have and consequently competition among men for access to the most desirable women in,
Competition among women for access to the most desirable man. So that's sort of a little bit of 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-bonded, mating them in The Chimps. The females come into estrus, almost all the sexual activity.
Is during the estrus phase after that males and females basically ignore each other, for the most part, with some some exceptions, but with humans, you have the evolution of long-term pair bonding, attachment heavy male investment in Offspring, relatively concealed ovulation. And so, and so these are kind of unique aspects of the human mating system. So, so to get to your question, so what are
The quality. So the, the best the the most large-scale study that's been done on this is 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 prefer the more than men or men prefer the more than women and
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. Yeah, that will be great. I'd love to know what, some of the common themes were across these cultures in terms of what's being sexy, maid and sexually selected
for. Yeah. So, so some of the things that were. So if you talk about Universal desire,
So things that men and women, share their 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 closing song and Botswana and they describe pretty much the same experience as a falling in love, as we do. And even to,
I have the distinction between this kind of infatuation stage of love and the attachment phase where, you know, 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
those are those dopamine circuits firing at high frequency. Yeah.
Yeah. So so 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, but, no one knew this in advance of the 37 culture study. So, these were some Universal preferences. So,
Go to the Zulu tribe in South Africa, or, you know, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, or Portugal, or Oslo, or anywhere in the world. And these are qualities that people universally desire and long-term mates, sex differences. So, sex difference is basically fell into two clusters. So women more than men, prioritized, good earning capacity.
Citee 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 the ambitious it 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 this? True?
Factory
and so Scott, just sorry to interrupt, but may I ask, is there anything known about the commonalities of how that is assessed? You know, it is it, you know, 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 nose went, you know, I mean, obviously, they're integrating multiple cues. The brain is a complex place, but it is there any information?
Nation about what those variables are across.
Cultures. 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 cultures is that women attend to the attention structure? So, the attention structure is a key determine of status. So does people who are high in status, are those to whom the most people pay the most attention?
So the attention of others to them. Not how well,
In potential, mate, pay can focus and pay attention necessarily.
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And but, but, but women look, I mean, you know, 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
and what he's going to do with his life. So those are some of the qualities that, that people look for. And also, women use what's called in the literature, mate Choice copying, and this is related in part to the attention structure. That is guys who have passed the filters of multiple women. Those are like pre-approved pre-approved man. So we've done.
That is where you just take a guy photograph him alone versus take the same guy. Put an attractive woman. Next one. We'll put two women next to them and women judge exactly the same guy to be much more attractive. If there is, if there is paired with women, then if then then if he's not. And so, and some guys exploit this in the modern world, by hiring women to go with them and dates. And so forth, though. This is my sister former girlfriend or whatever.
So, but, but, but you're correct in much in that, women use multiple cues to assess these things and they change over time, you know, so, you know, in the modern environment, even 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
Our community. So 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, women bear the burdens of the nine month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive as well as creating opportunity costs in terms of mobility and, and solving other
Tasks that people need to solve in the course of their lives. And so one way to phrase that is that the costs of making a bad mate choice or 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,
Amanda value more than women physical attractiveness.
They rank that much as a more important criteria than do women about men. Yes. Yeah, exactly, assistant Lee across
call consistently and it's not that women are indifferent to it. So women do pay attention to a guy's physical appearance, his his Fitness and so forth and guys are actually off base in thinking that women prefer more muscular men than
They actually do so like in muscle magazines, these men are with bulging biceps and so forth. Women don't find that, especially Dairy, but they do prioritize fit men, a good shoulder to hip ratio and other qualities of physical appearance, as well as things like choose to health. So in physical. 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.
A her reproductive value now. Not that man. Think about that, consciously, I mean, you 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 and the cues are cues associated with youth and health, because we know that youth is a very powerful Q2 fertility and reproductive value. So men, prioritize physical appearance and
And in the field of psychology at used to I was taught When I Was An undergraduate that you can't judge a book by it's cover that physical attractiveness was infinitely, arbitrary infinitely, culturally variable and 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, women are not at all arbitrary. There is some variation across cultures like in
That of 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 have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness. And so, and so it's not just that men. Are these superficial creatures?
Ooh, evaluate women on the basis of appearance. There's, there's an underlying logic to why they do so. And as I said, relative youth, this this age thing is one of the largest sex differences. You find in long-term mate selection with women preferring somewhat older men and men preferring somewhat younger. Women.
Is there a consistent age Gap through to relate to that
statement? Yes, there is. So the age Gap though. Depends on the
Age of the man. So so we can document this. So, 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 are 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.
So one way to gauge this, so they're their actual marriage statistics and then there are expressed preferences and both sexes kind of converge. So if you look at, you know, first marriage, second marriage, third, marriage. As 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 me.
Courage, so that it says men are getting older and getting divorced and remarry. 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, so like a say, a 25 year old man would say prefer a woman, who's 20 or in her, early twenties, 35 year-old man might prefer a woman who's in her late 20s or early 30s.
50 year old man might prefer a woman who say 35 to 38. So 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 man prioritizing 25 year old women? Well,
As I mentioned we have a its reciprocal Mutual mate Choice phenomenon. So
constrains the equation is
she? Well, she constrains it but also marriage and long-term mating are things other than reproductive unions and the modern environment that is there. You know, we are supposed to do things as a couple and if you get too large an age Gap, then essentially you're in different cultures, you know, you, you know, you grow up with different songs and
And and, and if the cultural Gap gets too large, you don't understand each other. So, so there are constraints on that. But if you look at context where there are no constraints of that sort, so, historically, Kings Emperors despots, Etc, and I'll give one more modern example, they basically prefer young fertile, attractive, females. And if they have,
Arms, they stock the harems with those and then circulate them out when they're 30 and so forth. And so, 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 were 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 what you need.
I hear that it that most of the time, he got what he
needed. Right? Right. He got what he wanted, right? Yeah.
Yeah, and maybe what he needed but he was in a position. I don't know if he still is either. He's in his 70s now, but he was in a position as was, let's say Rod Stewart, take another example or Leonardo DiCaprio. If you were a male who's in a position where there are thousands of women potentially available to you and you can have your pick. Then you see that clearer expression for younger females. I, there was a chart that was floating around.
Learn at the girlfriends of Leonardo Leonardo DiCaprio as he got older. And as he's getting older and older and the graph of the age of the his girlfriend's, it basically stayed the same was in the early early 20s, or so.
He values
consistency. He is consistency. But so, so any of the data Converge on that, and so these are Universal sex differences in long-term mate selection. So now when we shift to
20 and I should mention cultural variability because that's a critical thing because there is in the 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
The other end you have Sweden where Sweden swedes typically place close to zero value on it and some even find it undesirable. Like you're a weird if you're a virgin and so you have this whole Spectrum,
this is virginity in the female or is this. Also this is not in when China was it preference at the male and the female be? Okay. It's a mutual
makes a selection. Yeah. It was a preference for both sexes, but it's a good question because we're 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 and China, especially in the urban areas and the sex difference that did things this before has now emerged where males value of more than females. And I think part of it was in previous times.
You hit you hit ceiling effects, you know, where both sexes say. Yeah, it's absolutely important to be a virgin. So there's cultural variation and cultural change over time in some of these qualities, but the sex differences that I described have a remain 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 culture. So I mentioned we've gone back to China, Brazil and India to look at cultural changes over time. And there have been, you know, in some cases dramatic, cultural changes over time, but the sex differences that I described are invariant. They haven't changed a bit.
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
Actually lie about right. I'm guessing that there are people who do that online profiles and whatnot. From what I understand, people also lie about height and other features 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 it, if you would, could you tell us about how men and women leverage deception,
Has truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate Choice
selection. Yeah. Well, so basically the both men and women do deceive. So we have the modern cultural invention of online dating which you know 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 make
Frances 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 percent. They, they add they tack on about 2 inches to their height. So if they're 510, they Round Up to 6 feet. So they don't like if they're 510, they don't say that they're gigantic, but they kind of rounded up in the more desirable Direction women. Tended.
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 what they actually look like. So they might post photos of themselves when they were younger or they're even advice tips on how to create the best selfie of the best angle, that will maximally, you know, enhance what you look like.
Or two, or just doctoring, a photos. I'm guessing yakar
photoshopping absolutely. And and, and one of the things about it, now he say like, well do people find out? Of course, people people do find out. I mean, I could 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 127 on attractiveness. So the most attractive, so as self-reported and so into
And it was one woman and she was missing her front teeth. And he said, we'll call me picky but missing front teeth. And she thinks she's like the top of a drag was he was a little disappointed about that and women of course are disappointed. They meet a guy who they think is this physically fit, you know, athletic guy and he comes up he's you know, 300 pounds and overweight. So people do find out and and so and there are
Some internet dating sites have kind of vetting of the accuracy of something. So some things you can look up through public records and does. This guy have a criminal record for example, is he is he on a, you know, a sexual offenders website. So so there's some things you can verify. But what I tell people is,
You really have to meet the person and interact, you know, because the impart because of the deception. But also because what happens with internet dating is that the physics, 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 evolve to respond to physical cues, but and
Men tend to attend to the visual cues much more than women. So women in their mate selection they have olfactory cues to what is the guy sound like is vocal qualities, that's auditory cues, but all Factory cues, what does he smell like and so women have a more acute sense of smell than men do and and so if the guy doesn't smell right, even if he embodies all the other qualities, women want, that's a deal-breaker.
And and so I encourage people just you know, stop with the hundred text back and forth or messaging and meet a person for a cup of coffee and interact and then you'll you know, you'll get a more accurate bead on the person and then of course some qualities you can't assess even with a with a half hour interaction. You can tell a lot but things, like, emotional stability, or 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 me all the time if they find out what I study, they say, well Tom, I got this problem. Can you give me advice? And, but one of the things to assess things like emotional stability, which is absolutely critical and long-term mating is to do something like go on a trip together. Take take a vacation and where you're even in a unfamiliar environment. Where you're you have to cope with things that you're not familiar with it.
And as opposed to an environment where it's very predictable and and so you get a greater exposure because one of the 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 a sort of information. You can't get on a coffee date, you know, you can
We get by assessing it over time.
Well, somebody who's laboratory studies stress and tools to combat stress either. 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, is it? It's somewhat dark to think about, but is is deception built into this.
The dance that we call Mate selection and has it been built in for a long time or is this or is this something that you think is emerge more? As people are approaching each other through these electronic? Yeah, based mediums.
Yeah, I mean 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 the men. So men who were interested, like on Tinder, it has been reported. Although tender denies this. There's been reported that something, like, 30% of the man on Tinder, or either married or in long-term committed relationships, and they're looking for something on the side, but the, in terms of successfully attracting a mate, the over display that, hey, I'm interested in just a short time.
Term hook Island interested in sex. 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. And so, and of course, that's effective for a woman who's seeking a long-term interest. And so, and so that's a deceptive. And 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 were in their values and religious, orientations, and political values, and so forth. And so, 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, but I think that modern internet dating opens the door for certain types of deception, that it were at a minimum
More difficult to accomplish ancestrally. So like things like photoshopping, you know, 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 the, your relatives, your friends allies, the social reputation that someone had and this is, these are all critical sources of information.
That are less available in modern environments because, you know, people migrate they move from place to place. They can close down one internet profile and put up another or that could have six going simultaneously. So they're 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. I
see.
Very interesting, would you touch on some of the features that are selected for? In terms of sex sexual partner choice? We talked a little bit about mate choice, but in terms of sexual partner Choice are there is there 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, you know, a neuroscientist after all.
And therefore, it's hard to recreate in the laboratory.
Well, no. No, we do know something about that and we know something about how the preference is 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, it is for men, but it becomes more important than short-term mating.
And so is the guy good-looking. So, those physical attributes are more important for women. They are, they remain important for men, physical appearance in short-term mating, but with the footnote that men are willing to drop their standards and short-term mating. If it's low commitment, low-risk, just sex, you know, 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 were risk-taking guys, who defy conventions, women are more attracted to those guys in short-term mating than long-term baiting. And where is it?
Alternating, 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 make copying heuristic? That is if there are thousands of other women who find him attractive, women find him attractive. And so that's why you have the groupie phenomenons? Or so, with the rock stars. For example, there are thousands of screaming women, all of whom want to
I sleep with this famous rock star and they use that as information. They find if you took, like a still photo of some of these rock stars and asked women, how attractive the guy he is versus, tell him, he's a famous rock star and showed the thousands of women screaming. Adam. They judge them entirely differently terms of his attractiveness. So so are even in this is this is an important point.
That woman'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. 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 and then Psalm 6 months later and wondered, what was I thinking, I isn't seen very attractive at all. And what it was is when he was the organizer.
I was at the center of the attention structure, you know, he was the guy up on stage at directing everybody and everyone was attending to him. And then when he was just a normal presenter at a conference, he wasn't didn't command the attention structure, like he did in that when he was the organizer. And so, this is just an illustration of how circumstance, dependent, women's attract a mate, attraction is for guys. It depends on, you know, his status.
Attis the number of women that are attracted to him. The attention structure. Is he 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 worse for men. It almost doesn't matter, you know, context is more irrelevant. They're honing in on the specific psycho physical cues, that the woman is displaying and context be damned
very
Testing.
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 or long-term partnership or you know, infidelity of any kind I suppose.
Yeah, so we're
guessing it does happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
that's how frequent is it? Yeah, that's that's the interesting thing. Well, well.
How frequent it is, is difficult to gauge? Because it's the the one of the forms of human conduct that people like to keep secret. So, so the if you go back now, say, 70 years to the classic Kinsey studies, the questions about infidelity, were the questions that most people refuse to answer and when the question was, brought up cause more people to drop out of the study, so that kind of tells you something that
What do people conceal? You know, infidelity incest murder, you know, there is a small handful of things that people universally want to conceal. An infidelity is one of them so but people do it and so Kinsey estimated twenty six percent 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 that the the exact figures Bounce Around depending on, you know, anonymity.
Provided and how comfortable they are with the interviewer and so forth. But
and by infidelity as I mean intercourse with somebody else. Yeah, so we're not talking about quote-unquote emotional Affairs. We're talking about this. We're just sex sex with somebody other than their committed partner with unbeknownst to their
partner. Right? 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 sex is really differ fundamentally in the motives for committing infidelity. So for men, the primary motive and these are on average sex differences. So whenever I talk about second and I'm talking about on average sex differences because there's overlap in the distributions. And but so these are generalizations of which there are exceptions, so,
So for men, it's it's mainly a matter of sexual variety. So about 70% of the mountain. Mm. 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 as a key motivation for men.
Sorry to interrupt. I just want to so 70% of men that cheat. That's the primary cause or is it that 70% of men do cheat?
No.
No, no, seven of the men who cheat 70%, Thank you for that clarification of The Men Who cheat 70% cite that as the key motive. The key reason why they committed an
infidelity or like why mountain climbers climb mountains because they're they're
right because they're there if they well, you know the comedian. I think it was Chris Rock said men are only is faithful was their opportunity
or how how available their password on their phone as to their partner.
Right? Right. Yeah.
So, but and that's an exaggeration. But but if you look at women, this just desire for Pure Novelties. Sexual variety is much less of a motive, but women who have affairs site that they're unhappy with their primary relationship, emotionally, unhappy, or sexually, unhappy, and typically both, and this may seem like totally obvious that. Well, of course, people.
Laughs are unhappy in the relationship or more likely to stray. But in fact, it's not true for men. So if you compare men who are happy with their marriage and then who are not happy with their marriage, there's no difference in their infidelity rates. And I think it goes down to that issue of you know, motive for seeking variety. So now why do women do it? Because it's a risky Endeavor. She risks her long-term made or losing the long term.
Eight. 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 one is called the Dual mating strategy hypothesis where women are seeking to get resources in investment from one guy, and good genes from another guy. So in prints and in principle that
That can that can work. And I initially this isn't wasn't hypothesis original with me. This is Steve gang instead, Randy, Thornhill and some others have Marty Hazelton. Former student of mine have advocated. This dual mating strategy hypothesis. And originally, I was in endorsed it because the data seem to support it, we can get into which data seem to support it. But over time, I became more and more dubious about this hypothesis and
Instead of advocated, what I call the mate, switching hypothesis. 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. So and is compatible with the mate switching that is women who are looking to either divest themselves from an existing made ship or trade up in the mating Market.
To a mate, who's more compatible with them or higher and make value or simply see whether they're sufficiently desirable so that it eases the transition into the mating pool or keep keeping a made as a potential backup made with a call Mate insurance. If you have car insurance, if something bad happens to your car, how should house insurance. We also have made Insurance, you know, keeping someone one moment said men are like soup. You always want to have one on the
Burner, so interesting whether that that's the best analogy and I'm not sure. But but it kind of captures something about about why so? So well what evidence am I talking about? Well for one thing women who have affairs and this is about 70% of them,
they eat again. Sorry. Just I want to make sure people of the women who have it was the
women who have a fear. So let's say ballpark Kenzie was let's say roughly, right?
85 26 percent of women who 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 percent, say they have fallen in love with their Affair partner. They become deeply emotionally involved with their Affair for 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, and so the so that's sort of that's one piece of evidence that suggests that women, the mate switching function of infidelity is a more likely explanation that these two are not inherently incompatible hypotheses. In other words, it 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
Actual rates of genetic cuckoldry well in the modern environment. Anyway, they're pretty low. It turns out there like two to three percent. Could you
just explain for the audience with genetic code? So
this is where we're the woman 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 next door neighbor, or the guy, she's having an affair with so mistaken, paternity and genetic cuckoldry.
I just want a way to
capture and after the cuckoo bird,
right named after the cuckoo birds. Yes,
who sneaks its eggs into the nest of the other roles, destroys the future, offspring of the right Bird, and then, basically off loads. All the work onto another right
father parasitizes. Yeah, the parental investment of different bird species. So so anyway, so I think that and there's other sources of evidence that I think
Think point. So one of the sources of evidence that initially seem to support the Dual mating strategy. Hypothesis was ovulating and shifts. So in other words, it looked like from the early studies that when women are ovulating. These are among non pill taking women on women, not on a hormonal contraceptives, that they experienced a preference shift toward more men who were masculine and symmetrical which were hypothesized.
Is for good genes and there's an explanation for that but it turns out the effects of ovulation on women's May preferences or a far weaker than initially, then the initial studies look like. And in fact, some larger scale Studies have failed to replicate them entirely. And so it's that was one of the key source of evidence. These ovulation ships that women were going after good genes because it's only when she's ovulating and she can get pregnant.
Don't by having sex with another man that it would make sense for her to have sex with another man. And there was even some early evidence that women and 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,
I'll endorse the made switching hypothesis as a more likely explanation for why most women have
affairs. 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 to sort of a carpet diem type approach. Yeah, infidelity and women potentially on average are capitalizing on something.
That is longer term. 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 the other person that they're not married to. But is there any evidence that women have more ongoing Affairs in man? Men have trans more, transient Affair?
Yes. Yeah, there is. And so if you look at people who have affairs, there's a sex difference there so that women tend to have affairs with one person and become emotionally involved.
That one person over time. Men tend to 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 a long-term affairs with six different partners.
Yeah, unless he's juggling multiple phone accounts or
something, right? So, right? And some men tried to do that, but I think it's a could be very taxing.
Yeah. Well, and in this day and age, it's it's easier to meet more people.
People by virtue of online Communications, but it's also easier to get caught. Meaning it's harder to conceal, interactions. Everything is in the cloud. Anyway, a good friend of mine, who's a former very high level, and Special Operations, said, anything that's not in your head and only in your head is available for others to. Yeah. Find should they want it? Yeah, I think that's. And I think that's largely true.
Yeah, and, yeah. So fun information, text messages. And people are very good at
Looking into their Partners funds computers and then also their video cameras everywhere. So, sneaking off to this quiet restaurant. I mean, they're probably eight video cameras that can record you walking in and out of that
restaurant. Everything can be found. Yeah. I'm certain of that. You mentioned, emotional Affairs and financial infidelity as well. I had a girlfriend once Who as a 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 was very interesting that now you bring up a financial infidelity. She's quite happily partnered now and not with me, but but it's interesting is the first time I heard anyone, spell it out that way as a list almost like specific games in a grant, what is emotional infidelity. What is financial
infidelity? Yeah. Well,
Is a very smart woman, that's really tough is all three. And so and I assumed you were, you gave honest responses to all of those three
questions as I recall, I did. But because we now know that they're well, you can ask her at some point, right about it. All right? You are
and there's self-deception in the service of deception. That 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 this study done by a former student of my berry, coulis is very clever. I thought he analyzed there used to be this reality TV show called cheaters where they would hire detectives. And they would when the detective with like, say, follow someone to a hotel room, they call up the partner and
Say your husband just walked into the hotel room with someone else. Do you would you like to come down to the hotel and confront him and 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 and when men confronted their Partners, the first question they want to know, is, did you fuck him women?
The first question was, do you love her? And so this kind of captures that difference between a sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity and also kind of captures another sex difference when it comes to sexual jealousy, you know, where men tend to be more focused on the sexual components of the infidelity, because those are what compromise his paternity certainty is certainty. That he's actual actually. The genetic father of whatever.
Um Offspring and Sue 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 as a cue that to the long-term loss of that investment and commitment from that partner. And so and so the sex is seem to differ in which aspects of the infidelity with women were attuned to a more upset by the emotional.
Fidelity 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 or I summarize all the research that has been done and I was kind of 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, mail to their office rather than their home. How
Of basically resources and expenditures of pooled resources that they keep from their partner and both sexes, do it and and the percentages vary from study to study. But they range from like 30 to 60 percent of all people who are keeping financial information from their, from, their spouse in one way or another. Could be the woman's out buying designer purses or designer handbags could be the guys out.
About going to strip clubs or taking his affair partner to restaurants and doesn't want those charges to show up on you know, jointly held credit card. So Financial infidelity is critical and that 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 interesting lie, if you ask people, what do you mean? What what is infidelity in a marriage men? Tend to say, well, it's obvious. As she has sex with someone else. That's infidelity. Whereas women are more likely to have a broader definition.
Mission of infidelity they will cite things like emotional infidelity Financial infidelity as part of the definition. Whereas men have that more narrow definition.
Interesting. I have a good friend who's a, couple's, counselor clinical psychologist. And she told me something interesting that relates to this, which is that in cases of infidelity, often times. The sum of the arguments between couples boil down to whether or not contraception was used or not. That becomes a key feature.
And she always thought that that was, you know, home homing in on a detail, which of course is an important detail as it relates to both paternity issues and pregnancy but also disease, right? But as we're talking about all this, it makes it makes me think that this may have deeper evolutionary roots in our further down in the brain as we say. And yeah,
there are some yeah, and yeah, and I'm using a condom versus not use.
Being a condom not using as a more intimate act in a way. You were, literally physically more intimate with someone else than if you do use a condom. So, you know, but whether it's weather evolutionary roots to this, I don't know. I mean, condoms are probably relatively recent in, or at least a widespread use of them relatively recent in evolutionary time. So I doubt we have adaptation specifically for them.
No. And presumably before condoms at
One can only speculate because as we say with and 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. Yes, so note note to those of trying to avoid unwanted pregnancy. So we talked a little bit about status in terms of what men and women are.
Acting for four different types of relationships. Is there anything else about status that you find particularly interesting? And you know what? Men are finding attractive besides these, you know waist to hip ratio, 's and quality of potential mothers and so forth, there any kind of hidden gems in the literature around this that might not have heard
of well. Yeah, so you mean among
You know, things like sex differences in what leads to high status or or
for instance or what or perhaps things that are surprising in terms of what people are selecting for. Do people even know what they're selecting for. This is or is this all subconscious any? And all of those topics are of interest to
me? Yeah. So we'll to take them in reverse order. You know, I think a lot of it is conscious, but some of it is certainly unconscious where there are elements which are
Are totally unconscious. So I mentioned one earlier where man looks at a woman. He's not, he's aware that he's attracted to her and attracted to her physical appearance, but he might not be aware of why, you know, 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
Drew amazing, you know. And so men find women with with a low, waist-to-hip ratio attractive, but they might not the, they almost rarely rarely. Will they know? Oh Louise. Waist-hip ratio is actually associated with higher fertility, lower endocrine, logical problems. You lower age, Etc. So so we're sometimes aware of what we want, but we are unaware of why we
Want it so so think they're unconscious elements that the whole topic of status and what leads to high status on low status topic. I'm currently investigating published a couple scientific articles on it. And so but maybe we'll hold off on that for a future discussion. But but it enter it intersects, 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 in douse, you with higher status. And so if you have, 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. And there have been studies where you say they oppose a kind of unattractive, guy, older, unattractive, guy, and a stunningly beautiful woman as a girlfriend. And they say, well what what's this guy all about and they say, oh, he must be very high in status. He must be very wealthy. You must have a lot going for him. You know, where is the reverse?
Don't make the same attributions. And so. And so there is an interesting reciprocal link between status and mating success, where make success leads to high status and Status leads to more mating success to
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 that I keep. 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. It seems to come up again and again, 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. I mean, we hear or I've heard at some point that
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.
Yeah, so well as a great set of questions, and and 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 is and do argue is that jealousy is an evolved emotion. That serves several adaptive functions. Okay. One of which you mentioned is is a paternity certainty.
But 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, you with Boomerang Kids, and now maybe even go more than two decades
Boomerang Kids. Yeah,
kids kids who leave home and then come back and live at home because I have because they oh, yeah, that I don't have.
Children, so, I okay. Yeah. No, that's a big thing.
But if I do I'll just expect that they'll come back and they'll
come back to the they can't find a job or they find it cheaper to live at the parents house or whatever.
Oh goodness. I can't think of anything worse. I mean, I love my parents,
but I know I can't imagine but, but it happens and it's happening more and more in the given the current economic situation. Okay, but so once you have long-term mating, you need a
Fence to prevent or preserve the investment that you've made and are making, and long-term mateship. And so jealousy serves this mate guarding function if you will, or mate retention function. So, in other words, one way of phrasing, this is that we know that they're there Affairs. We know that people break up, they get divorced, but people have adaptations to want to hold on to their mates. Okay, and that's what jealousies import about.
And so jealous, he gets activated. When there are threats to that romantic relationship. There are other forms of jealousy, like sibling Jealousy and so forth, but we're focusing on mating jealousy in this context. 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.
Lack of an emotional distance between you and your partner. You you say I love you to your partner and your partner says wonder how the how the Knicks are doing this scoring season or whatever. If you get an unrestricted, I love you's a bad Cube
or a half for some people are so tuned to this. If there's a half millisecond delay, right? We can detect delays in
response. Yes. Yeah, delays and responses, but even things like so that's one set of cues, but then there's another
Set of interested make poachers. So, you know, 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 were lure them away from you for a short term sexual encounter, or for a longer-term relationship. And so we have to be so jealous. He motivates people to be attentive to potential mate poachers in their environment, but even more subtle, things like mate value,
Is can trigger jealousy. So even if there are no mate poachers and no cused infidelity, if a mate value discrepancy opens up in a relationship. So in the American system, by cure, six, or an eight, or a ten, and people generally pair off based on similarity and make value. So
that tends to happen. Tennis is end up with six s7's end up with 6X plus or minus
one. Yeah. Yeah, right. So yeah,
these are somewhat subjective skin.
Okay is somewhat subjective, but there's still some
Isis about these things. So, even in colloquially people colloquially people say things like he's not good enough for you, you know, where I think you could do better to people and implicitly have a notion of relative mate value and discrepancies there in. Hey, but discrepancies can open up where none previously existed. So you get fired from a job, all of a sudden, you know, 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 someone's career takes off. Let's say a woman becomes 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. So so people are attentive to make 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.
And, and when people find a new partners for long-term relationships, do they tend to trade
up?
On average. Yes, if the discrepancy, if the discrepancy is sufficiently large, so small. So there are costs associated with breaking up, you know, divorcing, for example, I mean, is it emotionally financially? It's a costly thing. And so if you have like a half a point made value discrepancy, you're not going to see a lot of breakups. But, you know, if you have larger May value discrepancies, that's going to Auger more for trading up in the mating Market.
But so, 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 I in my published scientific work is a range from vigilance to violence. So there's a whole spectrum of things and 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
stimulants for the behavior of the
bait. Yeah. Vigilance for the behavior of the made and that can include stalking following hacking into I phones 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, you know, and is involved in vigilance.
Um, and then at the Other Extreme, and we talked about things in between, but the other extreme is violence. And so in my new book when I behaved badly, I have a whole chapter on intimate partner violence. And this is what I argue in. This is really unfortunate and I'm not endorsing, it's illegal. It's bad, don't do it, but people will engage in intimate partner violence in America. Something like 28 to 30 percent of all people, who are married.
Will experience intimate partner violence in their, in their relationship, so, it's not a trivial
percentage and that violence is between the two part
between the two partners. Yes. There's also violence that gets directed to a potential mate poachers, but that's that's a somewhat separate issue. Okay, but one of the things that is functional about the violence is that it tends to reduce perceived mate value discrepancies. So another as I say, it's a
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. And when you're talking about violence, is this ever emotional violence. I mean,
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 things that will happen just to give
Concrete example, guys will start insulting their Partners appearance. You're really looking ugly today. Your thighs are heavy or, you know, you know, not looking very good. So they try to denigrate the woman's appearance, which is a key component of woman's mate
value. So they're trying to adjust more closely to make value discrepancies
there, trying to reduce her perceive 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 6 then she's going to be more likely to stay with them. Very diabolical. 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, it in the cases where it leaves, physical evidence, you know, women wear sunglasses or turtlenecks or cover up the the bruises it is as it literally does lower the main body of the woman by
Injuring her physical
appearance, and getting her to conceal herself. Stay home. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. She's taking her out of the, the literally, to reducing her
visibility. 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 other other partners, and so it is
Is very diabolical, but I think important understand, you know, the the potential functionality of the of intimate partner violence.
So, what about us? Sorry to interrupt again, but I'm just so curious. So oftentimes my audience will say, yeah, 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, the idea in mind,
Is that it would be more of a psychological nature? Although I think there is evidence that that some women beat their husbands. Yes, but it I'm guessing, it's not as frequent or am I?
Well, different studies. So, it depends on whether you just simply count up Acts or whether you look at the damage that's done. Okay, 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
Maybe. And this is partly true. That men are more ashamed. If they get beaten up by their partner clock 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 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
Her. And so there's a, there is a police bias potential police bias in this and so there may be Under reporting 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 ourselves.
Herself, so she might pick up and frying pan or you know, or a weapon of some sort of Defenders. So 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 Partners been having sex with someone else and then Fidelity of a sexual Financial or emotional nature.
And so, there is some female-to-male violence that absolutely occurs, but the, 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. Okay. Okay, but, 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 suspect that he's not the father of that pregnancy. He's more likely to direct the violence toward blows to her abdomen. Okay, it's that's that's Pacific. And so in that case, the function is is hypothesis 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, is just sequestering the woman and keeping her all to himself. So it's both to prevent infidelity and to prevent defection.
I have a friend who wife told me that if she, 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 and that statement now that leaps to mind because of what you're describing that there are many tactics by which people can engage this effort to reduce the made value discrepancy. Not all of which are virtually violent. Yeah, but summer but all of which are designed to constrain their
behavior, right? Right. Yeah. These were so these would fall under what I would call Mate retention tactics and only one or two.
Of which fall under the violence category? Yeah, there are even. Yeah. Within partner psychological manipulations about these things. So there are psychological manipulations about perceived made value, you know, no one else would want you, you know, you're a loser. There's denigration of partner within the relationship, even feigning anger to make the partner feel guilty about
About say, looking at someone else. So, so there's all kinds of internecine warfare that goes on within our relationships to manipulate perceptions of these things. This is I'm creating a much too jaded view of romance and love. I think.
Oh no, I, we will get to the, the Happy Endings and, and Lon. I mean, there are certainly, many happy relationships out there. I owe, you know, as a neuroscientist. I hear about this in and the immediacy of how
You don't fall into a pattern of jealousy or a pattern of cheating and not always but and I it just speaks to 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 but these issues of paternity and resource allocation. I think they're vital and you know, I look forward to a day where evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience are
Can merge at the level of underlying mechanism, but I don't think it's dark. I think it's just that the way we're wired at some level. Speaking of dark. Could you tell us about the dark
Triad? Yeah, so the dark Triad. So we've been talking about sex differences on average but there are critical with insects individual differences. And the dark. Triad is one of the most important ones, the dark Triad consists of three personality characteristics. So narcissistic
ISM machiavellianism and psychopathy Hallmarks of narcissism or things. Like a grandiosity person thinks that there are more intelligent, more attractive, more dazzling, more Charming than they actually are. I 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
By or the sexual pie machiavellianism is high scores tend to pursue an exploited of social strategy. So they might feign cooperation, but then cheat, you know, on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains. And then psychopathy one of the Hallmarks of psychopathy is a lack of empathy. So most people have a normal empathy.
Cookware. 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 dumb, though. That is those high on this. Damn. It's a dimensional thing. It's not a categorical thing. So those high and psychopathy basically lack empathy. And so if you combine these qualities, narcissism psychopathy and
Mac environment machiavellianism, you have some very bad dudes. And I say bad dudes because men tend to score higher in 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 four percent of men said, men are much higher than that. So why is this important? Well, it's important in The Mating context.
As those who are high on dark Triad traits, tend to be sexual deceivers for one. So they're very often, very Charming, very good at seducing women, and then abandoning them sometimes with after fleecing them or draining their bank account. They're very good at at The Art of Seduction. They are also tend to be
Sexual harassers, serial sexual harassers, and sexual coerce others. So when it comes to forms of sexual violence, hi dark Triad guys, tend to be perpetrators of this and so like most men I think would be find it. Ethically abhorrent to sexually harass a a woman in the workplace, dark Triad guys, import maybe they feel entitled to it and and and import they do.
I think some cases that I report in the book. There are like literal descriptions where the guys are writing in these journals. All I knew she was attracted to me, you know, that's why she she met me in the Xerox room. Just when I was there because she wanted to admire my bulging biceps or whatever is all about them. Yeah, and they, and this gets into bias that I talked about, which is the male sexual misperception bias, where woman Smiles at a man man, think. So. She's
She wants my body. She's attracted to me. And women are thinking, I'm just being friendly, I'm being polite or professional, but these guys hide our try 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 light to sexually approach. And so if you combined dark Triad traits with the dispositional purse,
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.
What? What? Approximate frequency in the male population. Or these have all three of the dark Triad traits and I realize that they're on a Continuum
sociology. Absolutely. That's why you can't say. Yeah. Because they are on a Continuum and it's sort of arbitrary where you where you draw the line.
But but I think it's a it's a minority of man. 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 are 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, you know,
Once that's why you have like in well, known cases, in the news, like Harvey Weinstein, you know, probably over 100 different. Women Bill, Cosby Jeffrey Epstein. Some of these more famous cases. These are large number of victims, but pretty much Soul. So, you know the perpetrators and there's no question that these guys like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were definitely high on dark Triad
traits.
You mentioned stocking briefly. 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?
Yes. Yeah, so well stocking has multiple motivations, but one of the most frequent motivations is
Mating motivation, where either the, 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 in when it comes to criminal stalking. There's a huge sex difference about 80% of the stalkers tend to be men about twenty percent women. So there's so there are women stalkers, but they're, you know, about a fourth, the number compared to men. 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 or and or to interfere with her future mating prospects and it works in some of the time in two senses, one is it does interfere with her attempts to remate? So in fact, it scares off some guys. So like you show
Up and pick up a woman at her apartment for a dating her or X's sitting out there glaring at you
or and I am actually familiar with the circumstance, where early in a relationship, somebody mentions that an ex has made veiled threats about surveillance. For instance. Yes. I've actually had that happen several times in my dating history, where someone would say, you know, you started opening up about previous relationships, a little bit as it's appropriate and someone says, yeah, you know, he mentioned that
He was going to, you know, send someone around to, you know, to surveil me. You know, that kind of thing, which is a very interesting factoid to pick up an but I heard it enough times and people I know have reported hearing this enough times that I am guessing that that's it. Probably, more frequent than people actually trailing people in cars and things of that sort, but planting that it's like the psychological see have surveillance is a form of harassment in
some sense.
Yes, absolutely. I think that you're a oh and there's that planting the psychological seeds. But then also with surveillance some survey lers remain hidden so you don't know necessarily.
Yeah, I confess in this case. It did not act as a deterrent for continuing the relationship, but that's, but that's another story. So, so, how often do women respond. I have to put this in quotes, for those that are, listening, are quotes and quotes positively to stalking me. Now.
How often does it work to re-secure the partner after they've been broken?
Oh, so in our in our studies, it's a minority of cases that it works to re-establish. I think something like 15% of the time that it works either to temporarily re-establish, a sexual relationship or lower the woman back in for a more permanent relationship. So most of the time, it doesn't work, but one woman in our studies.
Add 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 another guys. He'd basically scared off all the other guys. And so she went back to him because there were no other guys
around. 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 will go near them. They got a reputation as the kind of sit in Nancy couple and indeed it worked. It worked in the sense that no one dare, go near her and they ended up together. So I so I've seen real life examples of this.
Yeah, so it happens but but it is it isn't in general not and not a successful
strategy. No, it's not what I'm suggesting. I was just shocked to learn that because we here stalking and we have this there's one very extreme image of it, but the underlying
Motivations. I think our our reveal something about, yeah, mating Dynamics.
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 made of equivalent value. Or, in some cases any mate, you know, it's like, well, she she was with me once, maybe she can get her back with me again. So,
So the psychology is very understandable. But but it tends it tends not to work because the other thing we found we just study of 2500 victims of stalking. This is with Josh, don't lie, a former student of mine who's now a professor and a criminology department. And what we found is, there were large sex, different large differences between the stalker and the victim of the stalker, where the stalker tends to be much lower in made value than the
Demand. So basically the is 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 value. And so I'm going to use this last-ditch desperate measure to try to get her back and occasionally it
works. I'm thinking more about this V8 mate value.
Thing, this this this number this metric, the 8, 10 6, whatever it is, and made 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, you know, for instance, they're friends of mine, who are married and divorced who have children will often post.
Is it themselves with their children in their online profiles? Because it shows a strong sense of paternal Instinct, you know, there's the puppy thing people with dogs or puppies, a demonstrating care capacity to care. And for caretaking in women that the opposite is also true women with children show capacity. It demonstrates fertility, at least at, at one point. Perhaps still fertility, that still present. Does it positively negatively.
Or neutrally impact a woman to already have children. When seeking a another mate regardless of whether or not she was married or had the children out of What ya,
as a general rule. It decreases, formate value because kids with another Mater viewed. As a cost, not a benefit and there 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. And which is one reason why stepfamilies, there's often a lot of conflict within stepfamilies, very explicable from an evolutionary perspective in G. So in general, it's a cost. Not a benefit. Sometimes it can be a benefit that. So now 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. And
So there was a compatibility there but as a general rule, it will decrease a woman's and the man's made value to have kids, especially kids, who are financially, who are young and financially dependent. But what happens is, let's say the woman would be 1/8 without kids. A guy who's a 6 might be able to attract her and might feel lucky to attract her because there's no way he would have been able to
Actor under other conditions, but 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 in kids. I'm willing to sacrifice. And so they, in essence, become equivalent inmate value. As a result of that. But will she be able to attract on average, you know, other eights less likely but the same is true of guys. And this is why the the
The reason that 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 have talked to had a factor 1, a 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 fun. No longer financially
dependent and everything. You just described is consistent. Whether you 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? Right. Because there's a higher lower probability. They'll already have children if they're if they're much younger,
right? And they're in and if the guy is successful, if he has status and resources and has other
Qualities associated with higher mate value, then he will remain attractive to younger women.
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 categorisation of avoidant and anxious and anxious avoidant and all this kind of thing. And again, putting my hat on as a neuroscientist. I think, you know, it makes sense that the neural
Circuits for for attachment in childhood would be somehow partially or in whole re purposed for other forms of attachment. We don't just tend to say, okay, that brain circuitry was for when I was a kid and now I'm an adult. And so, I'll develop this new attachment circuitry. I'm guessing it involves and and whatnot. But is there anything interesting about that 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. Yeah. Well, I mean I can offer some sort of informed speculation about it. And and as you put it's not my area of expertise, but I know a little bit about it and I mean, I think that, you know, a secure attachment style. If both Partners have a secure attachment style, that's conducive to a long-term mateship avoidant. Attachment styles of wooden people tend to have more difficulty with the intimacy and also higher,
Of infidelity and anxious attachment style. I don't know can create problems of its own, you know, in the overly clingy dependent, you know, absorbing what I call High relationship load. So, you know, there's like mutation load which we all have certain number of mutations. There's, you know, parasite load. There's also what I call relationship load. So what is the baggage that someone brings to the relationship and
probably
Correlated with the frequency of demand of immediate text message responses. Right? Well, I think the frequency of demand like the latent. The expected low latency of text message responses. Yeah, plays out consistently in relationships, you know, early on there's a very low expectation of response. And 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, you know, our do you become suspicious? Do you become anxious? Can you stabilize your own internal me?
You, or do you 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good one. And I'm on my intuition suggests that your prediction about that would pan out. That would be the insecure. That would really be, you know, getting upset if there were, if there were not that immediate response to the text.
Yeah. I have a friend female friend who deliberately quote unquote, using her language trains her potential partners.
Has to be comfortable with a variable response latency, but then I asked her if she's comfortable with a variable response late and she said, absolutely not. So there's an asymmetry. Yeah, 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 monogamy.
as opposed to monogamous and various forms of polyamory, that may or may not include the Amory part, you know, passes in permission based on season circumstance and prior infidelities, like, okay, somebody had a mishap early on, you know, you have one pass so to speak or and you hear this kind of language getting thrown around and and it's intriguing to me because it
Just like an effort to bypass some of the more fuel hardwired, or at least, culturally hardwired aspects of mate choice and sexual partner choice, you know, acknowledging jealousy, but to confronting it by allowing your partner to be with somebody else. For instance. I confess I have friends who have an conventional relationships. I have friends with conventional relationships. Any thoughts on that
polyamory. 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, so what I mean by that is this so talk about polyamory. First of all, there's a sex difference on and on average that is men are more likely to
I want to initiate A polyamorous relationship than women. There are lots of exceptions and I actually know of at least one exception personally friends friends of mine who are in a polyamorous relationship, but the motivation for men is that evolved desire for sexual variety. So in it gives him access to a wider, variety of sex partners, which is part of our evolve sexual psychology, especially for men women one.
Ation, a 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, and so, the motivations for engaging in polyamory are somewhat sex differentiated on average, on average, on average scores lots of exceptions. So now I want to
To sexual jealousy. There is this recognition that there in? Am, I the way that I would frame it. There's this evolved the motion. We are. We it triggers sexual jealousy. Senior partner. Having sex or imagining your partner? Having sex or be falling in love with someone else and 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 she doesn't, it doesn't bother her at all of her.
Her husband, they're married has sex with other women. She they allow it. I think it's like every Thursday night or whatever. They have. The different couples have different rules. But one time she saw him walking down the street hand in hand affectionately with a former girlfriend and she got extremely jealous. So because it signaled an emotional connection. So the sexual didn't bother the emotional. Did she happen to be bisexual? And she and her partner said that it really
At him when she slept with other men, but it was fine. If she slept with other woman. Well, I
think that's a fairly common thing that I see among the men that I know that her and polyamorous relationships that. Yeah, that's a fairly
calm. Yeah, so he kept trying to into these into his 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, so I think
I think that, you know, I think that in the modern environment, you know, we have a very rich and complicated evolved mating psychology and what we're doing in these novel forms or semi novel because these things have a pretty deep history themselves. That we're attempting to maximize some of our evolve desires, while men while keeping quiescent other revolved aspects of our sexual psychology like jealousy.
So satisfying or desire for sexual variety, but keeping jealousy at Bay and different couples. Do it in different ways. So as you as you alluded to, so I know, one couple we're live in Los Angeles and the woman from the what said she gives her husband permission have an affair sleep with other women as long as outside of the city limits of Allah, you know, and this other couple it's has to be Thursday night, you know, and so different people have different learning,
constraints on, but the constraints are
The specific and somewhat arbitrary to the
relationship. Yeah. Yeah, there's specific and often in polyamorous relationships, people talk it out and come to an agreement about what is acceptable on? What's out of bounds. So, but but in a way, I mean, it in a way, it's just, you know, 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
And and that's all good in a way we do in the modern environment. So even to take it outside of polyamory pornography. Okay widely consumed internet pornography. What does that do? Well, there's a big sex different their men tend to consume a lot more than women that forms of the pornography are different but in a way, the pornography what it does is it. Parasitize men's evolve desire for sexual variety so they can in some in some
Some sense. Psychologically experience, sexual desire, variety of different, women sexually without actually doing it by just looking at their computer screen. And so, in a way, what you get another way of phrasing that is, that we create modern novel cultural inventions in ways that satisfy our evolve desires and our evolved sexual desires.
Yeah. It's interesting with the kind of explosion of online pornography.
I have a colleague at Stanford in Psychiatry on a Lemke 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 and pornography? But the in 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. So it's a, it's a sharp blade. So, to speak, this pornography thing isn't what it once was and it's evolving quickly. Very interesting. So, how should one frame all this. So, I imagine the number of people listening are in relationships or would hope to be in a relationship, you know, in terms of understanding what we are selecting for consciously or subconsciously,
Lee, it seems like there are common themes. It's people want to feel attractive and attracted, people want to make sure that their stability of the relationship. So, when we hear about security, oftentimes, I think of this kind of warm, oxytocin serotonin like thing, but, but this mate value and seems so powerful in all this, assessing mate value. So, 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, right? Is there a an objective metric of this stuff? I guess you get a lot of statistics about somebody's image and you find come up with a valid 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 with that stable, where you 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? Yeah, great questions, and and I don't think that the science has all the answers. So a couple things. So one is that I think people are generally pretty good at self assessing mate.
You and even self-esteem has been hypothesized to be one. Internal monitoring device that tracks made value. So we get a promotion at work or we get a rise in status. We feel an elevated sense of self-esteem. We get fired. We get rejected, we get ostracized our self-esteem plummets. So so our self evaluation I think does track meet value to some extent. There are people who over
Our estimate, their mate value. People high on narcissism, or particular in particular and some people underestimate their mate value. Another important element is that there's consensual mate value. So, that is, if you asked a group of 100 people, you know, there's fair amount of consensus that this person's in a that person's a 6. Ok, but there are also individual differences inmate value. So one example is I know 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 note, two young men. Learn Russian literature, but
this is high and it's a dimension of meat value. That's important for her, but probably not important for a lot of other people. And so, whereas other people, let's say, might be lets say you're into football or or some sport then
then and the other partner think sports are stupid, you know, then that's you know, you someone who's also into sports is going to be higher and make value for you. So there are these individual differences in components and a about which is good because that means if everyone were going after the same people and there was total consensus on me value, then there would be a lot of maitlis people on a lot of problems in the world and a lot of dissatisfied people. So so both are important, the consensual
Aspects and the individually, different differentiated components of mate value, but in terms of accuracy of assessment, it's there are no no good measure scientifically to do this because it's sufficiently complicated. So I mentioned, you know, we've mentioned, maybe have maybe a dozen different components of made value, physical attractiveness, kindness emotional stability, health,
Etc. And and these aren't the only ones. So why I teach a course on the psychology of human mating and I asked the people. It's a large course, couple hundred people tell me what do women want in a mate. And so I started with the Blackboard. This is back in the old days when there was a Blackboard, a piece of truck. They say I want to make her as a good sense of humor. So right sense of humor intelligent, right? Him kind. And so 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 but what that tells me is that these qualities are large in number and complicated in nature. So he said, you want a guy who's a nice and generous. They say, yeah, so like a guy who at the end of every month takes this whole paycheck and gives it to the wino homeless person. Well, no, not that generous, you know, generous toward me but not toward everyone else. Nice.
In general but not so nice that they're getting exploited. So or even you know, another something you can't be too healthy. So if you put that's unit dimensional but you want a guy, women want a guy who's confident but not too confident, you know, because too confident will mean he's either arrogant narcissistic were not sufficiently manipulable so on. So 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. 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've 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 inmate value. Nobody wants to mate with you. Then q that you're low in meat value
reminds me of the time when one is trying to decide who to ask to the prom, you know, there's a, 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 there's a risk in rejection to because that if I'm guessing correctly with wood, can lower one's own perceived mate. Yeah.
Value rejected, right? Frequency of rejections. Probably doesn't lend itself well to increasing Matrix. Yeah, one's own view of their main
value, right? Which is why many guys have what I call mating anxiety. That is they don't approach him because they risk getting shot down
there trying to maintain that number in the, by reducing the amount of data. All right. Yeah,
very easy, but it's but it's but it's
Backfires in the modern environment. So there's a famous psychologist Albert Ellis who had made 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 either a lot of women.
He could just stand still and they've extreme.
Yeah. And any signs of like ask 50 women on a date, you know, every every week and he said after two weeks has made anxiety disappear because most of them said buzz off creep.
But he decided, Fonzie's get actually getting rejected didn't cause my world, the collapse and it actually was okay. And so, he kind of been nerd himself to this rejection. And so, it ended up, I ended up doing quite well on this mating
life. Another point for cognitive behavioral to sensitization. Yes, exactly. The ran, the experiment, just a couple more questions. Earlier, you mentioned self-deception, based deception and or something of that sort self-deception that people aren't.
He's trying to convince somebody else of something that secretly they know isn't true. But that they deceive themselves. Did you embellish on that a little bit?
So well, this is actually the this hypothesis is the famous evolutionary biologist. Robert trivers first, Advanced this hypothesis in the preface 1976 to Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene and and he subsequently written written more about it. Both in scientific article and in a more popular book, but the
Is that if the core idea is that successful deception is facilitated by self-deception. So, if you really believe that an X, then you're going to be a more successful salesman to convince other people of X. So, if you believe your, let's say, a 10 and made 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. And so the hypothesis is basically that
Self to see you in order to increase the effectiveness of actual deception. Okay, but I think that there are people who are so in one other dimension, I'll mention too. Is that as that animals often take each other at our own word for things. So, 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, you know, and so people use other people's displays of their self-confidence as a cue to their goods and it's Jen General, pretty reliable Cube, but then there are over estimates and under estimates. As we've talked about like with
narcissism. Yeah. We see this with the job candidates, you know, you are taught to look very carefully at the application and consider all aspects But ultimately you consider that
That also in light of, you know, how firmly someone believes in the vision of what they're trying to bring to the profession. Yeah, and and that's a I think a 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 and it acts as a bit of a heuristic for not needing the impulses that one Ben doesn't need to go vet all the information quite as carefully, but if I guess, if one is aware of it then, you know, to dig deeper in
because it seems like there's a lot of deception going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Well and you know and and something we talked about earlier, people high on psychopathy are very good at at Deception. I don't know whether they are good at self deception or whether they're just really good to severs, you know, so but they can be very effective then out in California. You know, you live out in California. I'm sure.
You've seen your fair share of cases like
that. Oh, yeah, I think into across today's discussion in a 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 and I hope I said it before but I'll say it again. I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are judging towards one another and it's only a matter of time before.
They emerge in some formal way. I mean there is the work for instance on polygamous versus monogamous Prairie voles and levels of these oppression, but it's a big leap to go from vasopressin and a prairie vole. No disrespect to that beautiful work. But to humans and say oh vasopressin inhaler are going to make you monogamous or something. I think that's a probably got the direction the effect wrong, but you
get the yeah. No. No, you're absolutely right. And and I think it will happen. I think it's starting to happen and and it will happen because getting it the neurosciences.
At the underlying mechanisms that are driving the process. So, you know what an evolutionary perspective brings to Bear is evolve 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,
would be wonderful to collaborate someday? Maybe we'll do a brain Imaging study on jealousy or something in
I don't throw it. You're the psychologist. He would come up with the 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 sure.
Okay, so well, my most recent book is called when men
Of badly, the hidden roots of sexual deception, harassment and assault. And that book deals with conflict between the Sexes, sexual conflict. And so it deals with them both in what, what I call mating Market conflict, says, some of the topics we've been talking about deception, and 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.
These sexual infidelity coping with conflict within a relationship, and I actually have some suggestions for strategies for coping with conflict within a relationship, coping in the after dealing with the aftermath of breakups. So often there's an asymmetry. One person wants to break up the other dozen. So I talked about coping in the aftermath and then I also talked 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. So that's what that books about. And I think it, you know, it's gotten well reviewed and people find it very useful in understanding. What is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena in a? 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? So, that's what that books about. My previous books on my first book, which I have
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 and I made tactics of Attraction tactics of mate, retention and so forth throughout the whole mating process, serial mating causes of divorce, and so forth. And then even more broadly I have a textbook called evolutionary
Ecology the new science of the mind which is in its sixth edition right now 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. So that deals somewhat with mating, but also deals with survival problems or evolved. Fears and phobias issues about Ken and family.
Extended family, friendships social hierarchies, status hierarchies Warfare and other topics. So the evolutionary psychology textbook is the broadest book and then maybe the second broadest is the evolution of Desire, strategies of human mind mating. And then for those interested in conflict between the Sexes, the latest book, when men behave badly,
fantastic. I love your work. I'm so grateful.
For the clarity and depth and rigor with which you do it and you and you convey a toss. I know I speak for many people when I just want to say thank you. This is a tremendously informative
conversation. Thank you. 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. Let's do it. Alright, great. Thank you, David. Thank you.
Thank you for joining me, for my conversation, with dr. David boss. 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 comments section on YouTube and also in the comment section, you can make suggestions about future topics for the podcast or future podcast. Guess that you would like us to host. Also, check out our sponsor.
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