back to indexDr. David Buss: How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term | Huberman Lab #48
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology
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and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
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My guest today is Dr. David Buss.
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Dr. Buss is a professor of psychology
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at the University of Texas, Austin,
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and he is one of the founding members and luminaries
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in the field of evolutionary psychology.
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Dr. Buss's laboratory is responsible
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for understanding the strategies that humans use
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to select mates in the short and long term.
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And he is an expert in sex differences in mating strategy.
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His laboratory has explored, for instance,
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why women cheat on their spouses or their long-term partners
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as well as why men tend to cheat on their spouses
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and long-term partners.
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He's also explored a number of things related
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to the courtship dance that we call dating
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and securing a mate,
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including the use of deception related
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to proclamations of love or promises of finances
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or sexual activity.
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Dr. Buss's laboratory has also evaluated
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how status is assessed,
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meaning how we evaluate our own worth
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and our potential as a mate,
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and who is, let's just say, within range
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of a potential mate, both in the short and long term.
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For instance, today we talk about
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how people don't just make direct assessments
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of their own and other people's value
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as a potential mate,
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but also using the assessments of others
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to indirectly determine whether
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or not they stand a chance or not
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in securing somebody as a short or long-term mate.
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His laboratory has also focused on some
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of the complicated and varied emotions
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related to mating love in relationships,
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such as lust and jealousy.
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And he's extensively explored something
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called mate poaching,
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or the various strategies that men and women use
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to make sure that the person that they want to be with
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or the person they are with is not with anyone else
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or seeking anyone else,
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and indeed that other people don't seek their mate.
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Dr. Buss's work also relates to how biological influences,
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such as ovulation or time within the menstrual cycle,
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influences mate selection or tendency to have sex or not
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with a potential short or long-term mate.
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And more recent work from Dr. Buss's laboratory focuses
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on the darker aspects of mating
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and sexual behavior in humans,
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including stalking and sexual violence.
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Today, we discuss all those topics.
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We also discuss some of the strategies that humans can use
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to make healthy mate selection choices,
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and for those that are already in committed relationships
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to ensure healthy progression
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of those committed relationships.
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In addition to publishing dozens
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of landmark scientific studies,
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Dr. Buss has authored many important books.
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A few of those include The Evolution of Desire
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and Why Women Have Sex.
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And his most recent book is the one that I'm reading now,
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which is called When Men Behave Badly,
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The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,
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Harassment, and Assault.
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And it's an absolutely fascinating read.
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It has endorsements from Dr. Robert Sapolsky,
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professor at Stanford,
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who's been on this podcast as a guest before,
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as well as Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt,
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who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind.
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It's a really important book, I believe,
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and one that doesn't just get into the darker aspects
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of human mating behavior and violence,
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but also strategies that people can take
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to ensure healthy mating behavior and relationships.
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There's so much rumor, speculation,
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and outright fabrication of ideas
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about why humans select particular mates
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in the short and long term,
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what men and women do differently, and so on.
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What I love about Dr. Buss's work
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is that it's grounded in laboratory studies
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that are highly quantitative using rigorous statistics.
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And so throughout today's discussion,
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you'll notice that I'm wrapped with attention,
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trying to extract as much information as I can
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from Dr. Buss about the real science
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of human mate selection and mating strategy.
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I'm certain that everyone will take away
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extremely valuable knowledge
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that they can use in existing or future relationships
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from this discussion with Dr. Buss.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast
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is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
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and science related tools to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss.
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Well, David, delighted to be here.
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I've followed your work for a number of years,
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and I'm excited to ask you a number of questions
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about these super interesting topics
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about how people select mates,
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how they lie, cheat,
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but also behave well in this dance
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that we call mate choice.
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Fortunately, there are well-behaving humans in the mix here.
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Just to start off,
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perhaps you could just orient us a little bit
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about mate choice.
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You know, some of the primary criteria
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that studies show men and women use
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in order to select mates,
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both shall we call them transient mates
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as well as lifetime mates.
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Right, well, that's a critical distinction
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because what people look for
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in a long-term committed mateship,
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like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship
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is different from what people look for
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in a hookup or casual sex or one night stand
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or even a brief affair.
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So that's actually critical.
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Wonder if we could maybe just back up a second
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and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework
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for understanding mate choice.
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So it basically stems from Darwin's theory
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of sexual selection.
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And most people, when they think about evolution,
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they think about cliches like survival of the fittest
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or nature, red in tooth and claw.
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And Darwin noticed that there were phenomena
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that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival
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selection, things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks,
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sex differences like in stags, for example,
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have these massive antlers
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and the females of the species do not.
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And so he came up with the theory of sexual selection,
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which deals not with the evolution of characteristics
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due to their survival advantage,
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but rather due to their mating advantage.
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And he identified two causal processes
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by which mating advantage could occur.
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One is intra-sexual competition
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with the stereotyping two stags locking horns in combat
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with the victor gaining sexual access
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to the female loser ambling off with a broken antler
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and dejected and low self-esteem
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and needing psychotherapy perhaps
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or mate value improvement therapy.
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And the logic was whatever qualities led to success
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in these same sex battles,
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those qualities get passed on in greater numbers.
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And so you see evolution, which has changed over time
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and increase in frequency of the characteristics
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associated with winning these,
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what Darwin called contest competition.
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And we know that the logic of that is more general now
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and involves things like in our species competing
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for position and status hierarchies.
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So anyway, so intra-sexual competition is one,
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but the second most relevant to your question
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about mate choice is preferential mate choice.
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That was the second causal pathway.
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And the logic there is that
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if members of one sex agree with one another,
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if there's some consensus about the qualities
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that are desired, then those of the opposite sex
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who possess the desired qualities
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or embody those desired qualities,
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they have a mating advantage.
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They get chosen, they get preferred.
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Those lacking desired qualities get banished, shunned,
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ignored, or in the modern environment become incels.
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And so the logic there is very simple,
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but also very powerful.
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And that is that whatever qualities are desired,
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consensually desired,
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if there's some heritable basis to those,
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then those increase in frequency over time.
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And so, and in the human case,
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these two causal processes of sexual selection
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are related to each other
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in that the make preferences of one sex
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basically set the ground rules
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for competition in the opposite sex.
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So if, for example, hypothetically,
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women preferred to mate with men
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who were able and willing to devote resources to them,
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then that would create competition among men
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to claw their way and beat out other men
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in resource acquisition,
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and then displaying their willingness
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to commit that to a particular woman.
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And same with women, though.
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And this is one of the interesting things about humans
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is that we have mutual mate choice,
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which is not true in all species.
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So, and that is that it's not just a matter of,
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you know, you selecting someone to be your mate.
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They have to reciprocally select you.
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And so with mutual mate choice,
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we have both preferences,
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mate preferences that women have,
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and mate preferences that men have,
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and consequently competition among men
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for access to the most desirable women,
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and competition among women
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for access to the most desirable men.
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So that's sort of a little bit of the theoretical backdrop.
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So you asked, well, what are the qualities
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that men and women desire?
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And maybe we'll start with long-term mating,
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and then shift to short-term mating.
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And long-term mating is interesting in and of itself
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in that it's very rare in the mammalian world.
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So there are more than 5,000 species of primates,
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of which, I'm sorry, more than 5,000 species of mammals,
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of which we are one.
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But the percentage of mammals
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that have anything resembling
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like a pair-bonded long-term mating strategy,
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it's about three to 5%.
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It's extremely rare.
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And even our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees,
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they don't have a long-term mating strategy.
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They don't have anything resembling pair-bonded mating.
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In the chimps, the females come into estrus.
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Almost all the sexual activity occurs
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during the estrus phase.
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After that, males and females basically ignore each other
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for the most part, with some exceptions.
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But with humans, you have the evolution
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of long-term pair-bonding, attachment,
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heavy male investment in offspring,
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relatively concealed ovulation.
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And so these are kind of unique aspects
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of the human mating system.
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So to get to your question, so well, what are the qualities?
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So the best, the most large-scale study
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that's been done on this is a study that I did
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a while back of 37 different cultures.
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And it's now been replicated by other researchers.
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But basically what we found is three clusters of things.
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We found qualities that both men and women wanted
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in a long-term mate.
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We found some qualities that were sex-differentiated,
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where women preferred them more than men
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or men preferred them more than women.
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And then we found some attributes
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that were highly variable across cultures
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in whether people found these as desirable
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or indispensable or irrelevant in a mate.
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And so I could give examples of each of these, if that.
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Yeah, that would be great.
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I'd love to know what some of the common themes were
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across these cultures in terms of what's being
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made and sexually selected for.
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Yeah, so some of the things that were,
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so you've talked about universal desire,
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so things that men and women share.
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There are things like intelligence, kindness,
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mutual attraction, and love,
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which is really kind of heartwarming
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because some people think that love
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is a recent Western invention by some European poets,
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but it turns out it's not true.
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You go to the Klungsan in Botswana,
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and they describe pretty much the same experience
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as a falling in love as we do,
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and even describe the distinction
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between this kind of infatuation stage of love
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and the attachment phase where you can't maintain
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this frenzy of infatuation and obsession for very long,
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six weeks, maybe six months at most,
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otherwise you can get nothing else done in your life.
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Those are those dopamine circuits firing at high frequency.
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Yeah, so mutual attraction, love, good health,
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dependability, emotional stability,
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although there's a bit of a sex difference there
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with women preferring it a bit more than men,
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and so basically, and these may seem obvious,
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so no one wants a stupid, mean, ugly, disease-ridden mate,
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and so perhaps obvious, but no one knew this
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in advance of the 37 culture study.
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So these were some universal preferences.
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So you go to the Zulu tribe in South Africa
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or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil,
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or Portugal, or Oslo, or anywhere in the world,
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and these are qualities that people universally desire
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in long-term mates.
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So sex differences basically fell into two clusters.
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So women more than men prioritized good earning capacity,
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slightly older age, and the qualities associated
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with resource acquisition.
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So these are things like a man's social status.
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Does he have drive?
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Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory
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is one way that I like to phrase it,
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because women often, they don't look at necessarily
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the resources that a guy possesses at this moment,
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but what is his trajectory?
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Just sorry to interrupt, but may I ask,
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is there anything known about the commonalities
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of how that is assessed?
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You know, is it, you know, he's rolling out of bed early
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and running eight miles.
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He's showing proficiency in school.
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He handles himself well socially at parties,
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isn't drinking too much, but knows when, you know,
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I mean, obviously they're integrating multiple cues.
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The brain is a complex place,
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but is there any information about
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what those variables are across cultures?
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Yeah, well, I think that there's been less attention
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to that, so that's a great question.
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One of the things that we do know across cultures
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is that women attend to the attention structure.
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So the attention structure is a key determinant of status.
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So there's people who are high in status
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are those to whom the most people pay the most attention.
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Ah, so the attention of others to them,
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not how well a given potential mate can focus
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and pay attention necessarily.
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Yes, yeah, exactly.
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But women, look, I mean, you know,
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is the guy, even in the modern environment,
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is the guy spending eight hours a day playing video games,
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eating Cheetos and drinking beer,
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or is he devoting effort to his professional development?
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So hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals,
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or is he in an existential crisis
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not knowing what he's gonna do with his life?
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So those are some of the qualities that people look for.
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And also, women use what's called in the literature
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mate choice copying, and this is related in part
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to the attention structure, that is,
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guys who have passed the filters of multiple women,
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those are like pre-approved men.
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So we've done studies where you just take a guy
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and photograph him alone, versus take the same guy,
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put an attractive woman next to him,
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or put two women next to him,
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and women judge exactly the same guy
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to be much more attractive if he's paired with women
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And some guys exploit this in the modern world
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by hiring wing women to go with him on dates and so forth.
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This is my sister, a former girlfriend, or whatever.
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So, but you're correct in that women use multiple cues
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to assess these things, and they change over time.
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So in the modern environment,
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even things like the attention structure,
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does this guy have a million Twitter followers
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or three Twitter followers?
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So that is an index of the attention structure,
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and hence the status of the guy within the broader community.
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So, and from an evolutionary perspective,
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it's reasonable that women would prioritize these qualities
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because of the tremendous asymmetry
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in our reproductive biology,
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namely that fertilization occurs internally within women,
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Women bear the burdens of the nine-month pregnancy,
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which is metabolically expensive,
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as well as creating opportunity costs
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in terms of mobility and solving other tasks
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that people need to solve in the course of their lives.
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And so one way to phrase that is that the costs
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of making a bad mate choice are much heavier for women
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when it comes to sexual behavior, certainly,
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because, and the benefits correspondingly
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of making a wise mate choice are higher for women
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in the sexual context.
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But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species,
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and so what do men value more than women?
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Physical attractiveness.
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They rank that as a more important criteria
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than do women about men?
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Yes, yeah, exactly.
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Consistently across cultures.
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Consistently, and it's not that women
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are indifferent to it.
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So women do pay attention to a guy's physical appearance,
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his fitness and so forth,
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and guys are actually off base in thinking
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that women prefer more muscular men than they actually do.
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So like in muscle magazines,
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these men with bulging biceps and so forth,
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women don't find that a specialty,
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but they do prioritize fit men,
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a good shoulder to hip ratio
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and other qualities of physical appearance,
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as well as things like cues to health.
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So physical appearance provides a wealth of information
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about a person's health status,
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but also provides for men a wealth of information
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about a woman's fertility, her reproductive value.
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Now, not that men think about that consciously.
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I mean, men don't walk down the street and see a woman
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and say, oh, I find her attractive
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because I think she must be very fertile.
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Maybe a few weird people do that,
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but most men, it's like they just find those cues attractive
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and the cues are cues associated with youth and health,
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because we know that youth is a very powerful cue
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to fertility and reproductive value.
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So men prioritize physical appearance
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and in the field of psychology,
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it used to, what I was taught when I was an undergraduate,
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that you can't judge a book by its cover,
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that physical attractiveness was infinitely arbitrary,
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infinitely culturally variable,
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and it's simply not true.
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We know now based on the last 20 years of scientific studies
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that the cues that men find attractive women
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are not at all arbitrary.
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There is some variation across cultures,
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like in relative plumpness versus thinness,
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but things like clear skin, clear eyes,
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symmetrical features, a low waist to hip ratio, full lips,
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lustrous hair, all these are qualities
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that are associated with youth and health
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and hence have evolved to be part
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of our standards of attractiveness.
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And so it's not just that men are these superficial creatures
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who evaluate women on the basis of appearance,
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there's an underlying logic to why they do so.
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And as I said, relative youth,
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this age thing is one of the largest sex differences
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that you find in long-term age selection
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with women preferring somewhat older men
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and men preferring somewhat younger women.
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Is there a consistent age gap to relate to that statement?
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So the age gap though depends on the age of the man.
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So we can document this.
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So in my studies, what we found is that men preferred women
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who were about three to four years younger than they were
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on average, and I'll qualify this in a second,
link |
women preferred guys who were about three and a half
link |
to four and a half years older than they were.
link |
So there was a sex difference
link |
going in the opposite direction.
link |
But as men get older, they prefer women
link |
who are increasingly younger than they are.
link |
So one way to gauge this,
link |
so there are actual marriage statistics
link |
and then there are expressed preferences
link |
and both sexes kind of converge.
link |
So if you look at first marriage, second marriage,
link |
third marriage, as if people get divorced and remarried,
link |
average age gap is, in America anyway,
link |
is three years at first marriage with the guys being older,
link |
five years at second marriage
link |
and eight years at third marriage.
link |
So that is as men are getting older
link |
and getting divorced and remarrying,
link |
they are marrying women
link |
who are increasingly younger than they are.
link |
In terms of preferences, it's also expressed in preferences.
link |
So it doesn't go down, so like say a 25-year-old man
link |
would say prefer a woman who's 20 or in her early 20s.
link |
A 35-year-old man might prefer a woman
link |
who's in her late 20s or early 30s.
link |
A 50-year-old man might prefer a woman who's, say, 35 to 38.
link |
So the preferences do go up,
link |
but the gap gets increasingly larger.
link |
And the reason that you don't see things like
link |
why aren't men preferring women,
link |
so peak fertility in humans is around age 24, 25.
link |
And so you say, well, why aren't the 60-year-old men
link |
prioritizing 25-year-old men?
link |
Prioritizing 25-year-old women.
link |
Well, as I mentioned, it's a reciprocal,
link |
mutual mate choice phenomenon.
link |
She constrains the equation, too.
link |
Well, she constrains it,
link |
but also marriage and long-term mating
link |
are things other than reproductive unions
link |
in the modern environment.
link |
That is, you're supposed to do things as a couple,
link |
and if you get too large an age gap,
link |
then essentially you're in different cultures.
link |
You grow up with different songs,
link |
and if the cultural gap gets too large,
link |
you don't understand each other.
link |
So there are constraints on that.
link |
But if you look at contexts
link |
where there are no constraints of that sort,
link |
so historically kings, emperors, despots, et cetera,
link |
and I'll give one more modern example,
link |
they basically prefer young, fertile, attractive females,
link |
and if they have harems, they stock the harems with those
link |
and then circulate them out when they're 30 and so forth.
link |
And so if you look at marriage systems
link |
that are unconstrained,
link |
then the preferences are more likely to be revealed,
link |
or within cultures.
link |
That is, if you look at men who are in a position
link |
to get what they want.
link |
So as Mick Jagger noted,
link |
you can't always get what you want,
link |
but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.
link |
I hear that most of the time he got what he needed.
link |
Right, right, he got what he wanted.
link |
Yeah, and maybe what he needed,
link |
but he was in a position,
link |
I don't know if he still is, he's in his 70s now,
link |
but he was in a position as was,
link |
let's say Rod Stewart, to take another example,
link |
or Leonardo DiCaprio.
link |
If you were a male who's in a position
link |
where there are thousands of women
link |
potentially available to you,
link |
and you can have your pick,
link |
then you see that clearer expression for younger females.
link |
There was a chart that was floating around the internet
link |
of the girlfriends of Leonardo DiCaprio.
link |
As he got older, so he's getting older and older,
link |
and the graph of the age of his girlfriends,
link |
it basically stayed the same.
link |
It was in the early 20s or so.
link |
He values consistency.
link |
He values consistency.
link |
So anyway, the data converge on that.
link |
So these are universal sex differences
link |
in long-term mate selection.
link |
So now when we shift to,
link |
oh, and I should mention cultural variability,
link |
because that's a critical thing,
link |
because there is, in my 37 culture study,
link |
what I found was the preference for virginity,
link |
that is no prior sexual experience,
link |
that was the most variable desire across cultures.
link |
So you had cultures like, at the time of the study, China,
link |
it was basically indispensable that a partner be a virgin.
link |
And then at the other end, you have Sweden,
link |
where Sweden, Swedes typically place
link |
close to zero value on it,
link |
and some even find it undesirable,
link |
like you're weird if you're a virgin.
link |
And so you have this whole spectrum.
link |
This is a virginity in the female,
link |
or is this also, this is not,
link |
and when China was it preference
link |
that the male and the female be a virgin?
link |
So mutual mate selection.
link |
Yeah, it was a preference for both sexes.
link |
But it's a good question,
link |
because where there was a sex difference,
link |
it was always in the direction
link |
of males preferring virginity more than females.
link |
And we've gone back to China.
link |
So I still do research in China, among other places,
link |
and we've gone back and retested modern urban populations,
link |
and the importance of virginity has gone down in China,
link |
especially in the urban areas.
link |
And the sex difference that didn't exist before
link |
has now emerged, where males value it more than females.
link |
And I think part of it was,
link |
in previous times, you hit ceiling effects,
link |
where both sexes say,
link |
yeah, it's absolutely important to be a virgin.
link |
So there's cultural variation and cultural change over time
link |
in some of these qualities.
link |
But the sex differences that I described
link |
have remained invariant over the years.
link |
So since my 37 culture study,
link |
this has been replicated in at least
link |
a couple dozen different cultures,
link |
and we've gone back to some of the cultures.
link |
So I mentioned we've gone back to China,
link |
Brazil, and India to look at cultural changes over time.
link |
And there have been, in some cases,
link |
dramatic cultural changes over time,
link |
but the sex differences that I described are invariant.
link |
They haven't changed a bit.
link |
I'd be remiss if I didn't ask
link |
about truth-telling and deception,
link |
because some of the measures that you're describing,
link |
age, for instance, one can potentially lie about, right?
link |
I'm guessing that there are people
link |
who do that on online profiles and whatnot.
link |
From what I understand, people also lie about height
link |
and other features on online profiles,
link |
but some of them are much harder to hide, right?
link |
Eventually, the truth comes out about some,
link |
if not all of these things.
link |
So if you would, could you tell us about
link |
how men and women leverage deception
link |
versus truth-telling and communicating
link |
some of the things around mate choice selection?
link |
Yeah, well, so basically, both men and women do deceive.
link |
So we have the modern cultural invention of online dating,
link |
which was little used 10 years ago
link |
and virtually absent 20 years ago, and people do lie,
link |
but they lie in predictable ways.
link |
They lie in ways that attempt to embody
link |
the mate preferences of the person
link |
they're trying to attract.
link |
And so men do lie, they deceive about their income,
link |
their status, so they exaggerate their income by about 20%.
link |
They tack on about two inches to their height,
link |
so if they're 5'10", they round up to six feet.
link |
So they don't, like if they're 5'10",
link |
they don't say that they're gigantic,
link |
but they kind of round it up
link |
in the more desirable direction.
link |
Women tend to deceive about weight,
link |
so they tend to shave about 15 pounds
link |
off of their reported weight.
link |
And both sexes post photos that are not truly representative
link |
of what they actually look like.
link |
So they might post photos of themselves
link |
when they were younger, or they're even advice tips
link |
on how to create the best selfie of the best angle
link |
that will maximally enhance what you look like.
link |
Or just doctoring of photos, I'm guessing.
link |
Or yeah, yeah, photoshopping, absolutely.
link |
And one of the things about it,
link |
now you say like, well, do people find out?
link |
Of course, people do find out.
link |
I mean, I'll just give you one story
link |
about a colleague of mine who was doing,
link |
is a male who's doing internet dating,
link |
and he picked only women who self-describe as sevens
link |
on the one to seven on attractiveness.
link |
So the most attractive, as self-reported.
link |
And so he went out with this one woman,
link |
and she was missing her front teeth.
link |
And he said, well, call me picky,
link |
but I'm missing her front teeth,
link |
and she thinks she's like the top of her drag.
link |
He was a little disappointed about that.
link |
And women, of course, are disappointed.
link |
They meet a guy who they think is this physically fit,
link |
you know, athletic guy, and he comes up,
link |
he's 300 pounds and overweight.
link |
So people do find out.
link |
And so, and there are some internet dating sites
link |
have kind of a vetting of the accuracy of something.
link |
So somethings you can look up through public records,
link |
and does this guy have a criminal record, for example?
link |
Is he on a sexual offender's website?
link |
So there's some things you can verify,
link |
but what I tell people is you really have to meet the person
link |
and interact, you know, in part because of the deception,
link |
but also because what happens with internet dating
link |
is that the photograph tends to overwhelm all the other cues
link |
and all the other cues are written statements.
link |
And we weren't really evolved to process written statements,
link |
but we were evolved to respond to physical cues.
link |
But, and men tend to attend to the visual cues
link |
much more than women.
link |
So women in their mate selection, they have olfactory cues.
link |
So what does the guy sound like, his vocal qualities?
link |
That's auditory cues, but olfactory cues,
link |
what does he smell like?
link |
And so women have a more acute sense of smell than men do.
link |
And so if the guy doesn't smell right,
link |
even if he embodies all the other qualities women want,
link |
that's a deal breaker.
link |
And so I encourage people just, you know,
link |
stop with the hundred texts back and forth or messaging
link |
and meet a person for a cup of coffee and interact.
link |
And then you'll, you know,
link |
you'll get a more accurate beat on the person.
link |
And then of course, some qualities you can't assess
link |
even with a half hour interaction, you can tell a lot,
link |
but things like emotional stability
link |
are things that have to be assessed over time.
link |
And so one of the things that I advise people to do,
link |
and I'm not in the advice giving business,
link |
but people ask me all the time,
link |
once they find out what I study,
link |
they say, well, Tom, I got this problem.
link |
Can you give me advice?
link |
But one of the things to assess things
link |
like emotional stability,
link |
which is absolutely critical in long-term mating,
link |
is to do something like go on a trip together,
link |
take a vacation where you're even
link |
in an unfamiliar environment where you have to cope
link |
with things that you're not familiar with,
link |
as opposed to an environment where it's very predictable.
link |
And so you get a greater exposure
link |
because one of the hallmarks of emotional instability
link |
is how they respond to stress.
link |
So emotionally unstable people tend to have a long latency
link |
to return to baseline after a stressful event.
link |
And so this is the sort of information
link |
you can't get on a coffee date.
link |
You know, you can only get by assessing it over time.
link |
Well, as somebody who's laboratory studies stress
link |
and tools to combat stress, that's great.
link |
It's yet more incentive for people
link |
to develop self-regulatory mechanisms for themselves.
link |
I'm guessing many of the features of deception
link |
in this context were present long before internet dating.
link |
And so is it, it's somewhat dark to think about,
link |
but is deception built into this dance
link |
that we call mate selection,
link |
and has it been built in for a long time?
link |
Or is this something that you think has emerged
link |
more as people are approaching each other
link |
through these electronic web-based mediums?
link |
Yeah, I mean, some forms of deception have been there
link |
for a long time over human evolutionary history.
link |
So one form of deception which we haven't mentioned
link |
is deception about whether you're interested
link |
in a long-term committed relationship or a short-term hookup.
link |
And so there's deception about that,
link |
especially on the part of men.
link |
So men who are interested, like on Tinder,
link |
it has been reported, although Tinder denies this,
link |
there's been reported that something like 30% of the men
link |
on Tinder are either married
link |
or in long-term committed relationships,
link |
and they're looking for something on the side.
link |
But in terms of successfully attracting a mate,
link |
the overt display that,
link |
hey, I'm interested in just a short-term hookup,
link |
I'm interested in sex, so I wanna have sex right now,
link |
let's just go back to my apartment,
link |
these are very ineffective tactics.
link |
And so effective tactics for men
link |
are often displaying cues to long-term interest.
link |
And so, and of course that's effective
link |
for a woman who's seeking a long-term interest.
link |
And so that's a deception.
link |
So we find in our studies of deception
link |
that men tend to exaggerate the depths
link |
of their feelings for a woman,
link |
exaggerate how similar they are
link |
and how aligned they are in their values
link |
and religious orientations and political values
link |
And so I think there's deception around that,
link |
and I think that's probably
link |
an evolutionarily recurrent form of deception
link |
that women have defenses against, by the way.
link |
But I think that modern internet dating
link |
opens the door for certain types of deception
link |
that were, at a minimum,
link |
were difficult to accomplish ancestrally.
link |
So things like Photoshopping wasn't available back then.
link |
Plus, we evolved in the context of small group living
link |
where you not only had your own personal observations
link |
of someone's qualities, you had also your relatives,
link |
your friends, allies,
link |
the social reputation that someone had.
link |
And these are all critical sources of information
link |
that are less available in modern environments
link |
because people migrate, they move from place to place,
link |
they can close down one internet profile
link |
and put up another,
link |
or they could have six going simultaneously.
link |
So the modern environment opens up the door
link |
for forms of deception that weren't available
link |
or weren't available to the same degree ancestrally.
link |
Would you mind touching on some of the features
link |
that are selected for in terms of sexual partner choice?
link |
We've talked a little bit about mate choice,
link |
but in terms of sexual partner choice,
link |
are there any good studies exploring
link |
what people are selecting for,
link |
or is it that they are both just in a state
link |
of pure hypothalamic drive?
link |
You know, I'm a neuroscientist after all.
link |
And therefore it's hard to recreate in the laboratory.
link |
Well, no, no, we do know something about that.
link |
And we know something about how the preferences
link |
for a sex partner differ from preference
link |
for a long-term mate.
link |
There is overlap, of course,
link |
but one thing is physical appearance.
link |
So physical appearance for women
link |
is important in long-term mating,
link |
not as important as it is for men,
link |
but it becomes more important in short-term mating.
link |
And so is the guy good looking?
link |
So those physical attributes are more important for women.
link |
They remain important for men,
link |
physical appearance in short-term mating,
link |
but with the footnote that men are willing
link |
to drop their standards in short-term mating
link |
if it's low commitment, low risk, just sex,
link |
you know, without entangling commitments.
link |
So women are more likely to prioritize
link |
what I call bad boy qualities.
link |
So guys who are very self-confident,
link |
guys who are strut, guys who are a little arrogant,
link |
guys who are risk-taking, guys who defy conventions,
link |
women are more attracted to those guys
link |
in short-term mating than long-term mating.
link |
And whereas in long-term mating,
link |
they go more for the good dad qualities.
link |
Is this guy dependable?
link |
Is he gonna be a good father to my children?
link |
And then also, in short-term mating,
link |
women use that mate copying heuristic.
link |
That is, if there are thousands of other women
link |
who find them attractive, women find them attractive.
link |
And so that's why you have the groupie phenomenon.
link |
So with the rock stars, for example,
link |
there are thousands of screaming women,
link |
all of whom wanna sleep with this famous rock star,
link |
and they use that as information.
link |
They find, if you took like a still photo
link |
of some of these rock stars
link |
and asked women how attractive the guy is
link |
versus tell him he's a famous rock star
link |
and showed the thousands of women screaming at him,
link |
they judge him entirely differently
link |
in terms of his attractiveness.
link |
And so even, and this is an important point,
link |
that women's attraction to men is more context-specific
link |
and varies more across contexts
link |
than men's attraction to women.
link |
And so I'll give you just an example of that.
link |
This is a female colleague of mine went to a conference,
link |
an academic conference, and she found the organizer
link |
of this conference to be really attractive.
link |
And then saw him six months later,
link |
and wondered, well, what was I thinking?
link |
He doesn't seem very attractive at all.
link |
And what it was is when he was the organizer,
link |
he was at the center of the attention structure.
link |
You know, he was the guy up on stage directing everybody
link |
and everyone was attending to him.
link |
And then when he was just a normal presenter at a conference,
link |
he didn't command the attention structure
link |
like he did in that when he was the organizer.
link |
And so this is just an illustration
link |
of how circumstance-dependent women's attraction,
link |
mate attraction is for guys.
link |
It depends on, you know, his status,
link |
the number of women that are attracted to him.
link |
The attention structure is how he interacts
link |
with a puppy or a baby.
link |
If he's ignoring a baby in distress
link |
or positively interacting with a young child.
link |
So all these things, whereas for men,
link |
it almost doesn't matter.
link |
You know, context is more irrelevant.
link |
They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues
link |
that the woman is displaying in context be damned.
link |
Let's talk about infidelity in committed relationships.
link |
What are some of the consistent findings
link |
around reasons for, and maybe even long-term consequences
link |
of infidelity for men and women?
link |
And this could be marriage or long-term partnership
link |
or infidelity of any kind, I suppose.
link |
I'm guessing it does happen.
link |
How frequent is it?
link |
Yeah, that's the interesting thing.
link |
Well, how frequent it is is difficult to gauge
link |
because it's one of the forms of human conduct
link |
that people like to keep secret.
link |
So if you go back now, let's say 70 years
link |
to the classic Kinsey studies,
link |
the questions about infidelity were the questions
link |
that most people refused to answer.
link |
And when the question was brought up,
link |
caused more people to drop out of the study.
link |
And so that kind of tells you something that,
link |
I mean, what do people conceal?
link |
You know, infidelity, incest, murder.
link |
You know, there is a small handful of things
link |
that people universally want to conceal
link |
and infidelity is one of them, but people do it.
link |
And so Kinsey estimated 26% of married women
link |
committed an infidelity at some point during their marriage
link |
and about 50% of men.
link |
Other studies have given lower figures.
link |
And so the exact figures bounce around
link |
depending on anonymity provided
link |
and how comfortable they are with the interviewer
link |
And by infidelity, does that mean intercourse
link |
with somebody else?
link |
So we're not talking about quote unquote emotional affairs.
link |
We're talking about sex with somebody
link |
other than their committed partner
link |
with unbeknownst to their partner.
link |
And there are other forms of infidelity
link |
which we could get into, including emotional infidelity
link |
and financial infidelity.
link |
But here we're just talking about,
link |
for the moment, sexual infidelity.
link |
And the interesting thing about sexual infidelity
link |
is that the sexes really differ fundamentally
link |
in the motives for committing infidelity.
link |
So for men, the primary motive,
link |
and these are on average sex differences.
link |
So whenever I talk about sex differences,
link |
I'm talking about on average sex differences
link |
because there's overlap in the distributions.
link |
But so these are generalizations
link |
of which there are exceptions.
link |
So for men, it's mainly a matter of sexual variety.
link |
So about 70% of the men, the opportunity presented itself.
link |
I was out of town and I had this opportunity.
link |
So low risk, low cost, pursuit of sexual variety,
link |
sexual novelty is a key motivation for men.
link |
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
I just want to, so 70% of men that cheat,
link |
that's the primary cause,
link |
or is it that 70% of men do cheat?
link |
Of the men who cheat 70%, thank you for that clarification.
link |
Of the men who do cheat 70%, cite that as the key motive,
link |
the key reason why they committed an infidelity.
link |
Sort of like why mountain climbers climb mountains
link |
because they're there.
link |
Right, right, because they're there.
link |
If they, well, the comedian, I think it was Chris Rock,
link |
said men are only as faithful as their opportunity.
link |
Or how available their password on their phone is
link |
Right, right, yeah.
link |
And that's an exaggeration.
link |
But if you look at women,
link |
this just desire for pure novelty, sexual variety,
link |
is much less of a motive.
link |
But women who have affairs cite that they're unhappy
link |
with their primary relationship, emotionally unhappy,
link |
or sexually unhappy, and typically both.
link |
And this may seem like totally obvious that,
link |
well, of course, people if they're unhappy
link |
in the relationship are more likely to stray.
link |
But in fact, it's not true for men.
link |
So if you compare men who are happy with their marriage
link |
and men who are not happy with their marriage,
link |
there's no difference in their infidelity rates.
link |
And I think it goes down to that issue of,
link |
motive for seeking variety.
link |
So now, why do women do it?
link |
Because it's a risky endeavor.
link |
She risks her long-term mate, or losing long-term mate.
link |
It's risky in terms of reputational damage for both sexes.
link |
So it's a risky thing.
link |
Why do women do it?
link |
And there are two competing hypotheses, at least two,
link |
but there are two primary competing hypotheses
link |
in the evolutionary literature.
link |
One is called the dual mating strategy hypothesis
link |
where women are seeking to get resources and investment
link |
from one guy and good genes from another guy.
link |
So, and in principle, that can work.
link |
And I initially, this wasn't a hypothesis original with me.
link |
This is Steve Gangestad, Randy Thornhill,
link |
and some others of Marty Hazleton, a former student of mine,
link |
have advocated this dual mating strategy hypothesis.
link |
And originally, I was endorsed it
link |
because the data seemed to support it.
link |
We can get into which data seemed to support it.
link |
But over time, I became more and more dubious
link |
about this hypothesis and instead have advocated
link |
what I call the mate switching hypothesis.
link |
And so if you look at a whole host of information
link |
around why women have affairs,
link |
it's not compatible with the dual mating strategy hypothesis
link |
and is compatible with the mate switching.
link |
That is, women who are looking to either divest themselves
link |
from an existing mateship or trade up in the mating market
link |
to a mate who's more compatible with them
link |
or higher in mate value,
link |
or simply see whether they're sufficiently desirable
link |
so that it eases the transition into the mating pool,
link |
or keeping a mate as a potential backup mate,
link |
what I call mate insurance.
link |
So you have car insurance if something bad happens
link |
to your car, house insurance.
link |
We also have mate insurance, you know,
link |
keeping someone, one woman said, men are like soup.
link |
You always want to have one on the back burner.
link |
So, whether that's the best analogy or not,
link |
I'm not sure, but it kind of captures something about why.
link |
So, well, what evidence am I talking about?
link |
Well, for one thing, women who have affairs,
link |
and this is about 70% of them, they-
link |
70, again, sorry, just I want to make sure people,
link |
of women who have affairs, yeah.
link |
Of the women who have affairs.
link |
So let's say Ballpark Kinsey was, let's say, roughly right.
link |
25, 26% of women will have affairs.
link |
Let's just assume that he's right.
link |
And we don't know exactly,
link |
but of the women who do have affairs,
link |
about 70% say they have fallen in love
link |
with their affair partner.
link |
They become deeply emotionally involved with their affair
link |
partner, and to me,
link |
if you're just trying to get good genes from a guy,
link |
that is the last thing you want to do,
link |
is fall in love with them or get emotionally involved,
link |
but it's very compatible if you want to switch mates.
link |
And so, that's one piece of evidence that suggests
link |
that women, the mate switching function of infidelity,
link |
is a more likely explanation.
link |
Now, these two are not inherently incompatible hypotheses.
link |
In other words, it's possible that some women
link |
do pursue a dual mating strategy hypothesis,
link |
but there's other evidence that suggests,
link |
so for example, what are the actual rates
link |
of genetic cuckoldry?
link |
Well, in the modern environment anyway, they're pretty low.
link |
It turns out they're like 2 to 3%.
link |
Could you just explain for the audience
link |
what genetic cuckoldry is?
link |
So, this is where the woman, where the man believes
link |
he is the genetic father of a child,
link |
but it turns out he's not.
link |
Might be the mailman or the next door neighbor
link |
or the guy she's having an affair with.
link |
So, mistaken paternity.
link |
And genetic cuckoldry is just one way to capture-
link |
Named after the cuckoo bird, right?
link |
Named after the cuckoo bird, yes.
link |
Who sneaks its eggs into the nest of the other,
link |
rolls, destroys the future offspring of the bird
link |
and then basically offloads all the work
link |
onto another father.
link |
Parasitizes, yeah, the parental investment
link |
of different bird species.
link |
So, anyway, so I think that,
link |
and there's other sources of evidence that I think point,
link |
so one of the sources of evidence that initially seemed
link |
to support the dual mating strategy hypothesis
link |
was ovulation shifts.
link |
So, in other words, it looked like from the early studies
link |
that when women are ovulating,
link |
these are among non pill-taking women,
link |
women not on hormonal contraceptives,
link |
that they experienced a preference shift toward more men
link |
who were masculine and symmetrical,
link |
which were hypothesized markers for good genes.
link |
And there's an explanation for that.
link |
But it turns out the effects of ovulation
link |
on women's mate preferences are far weaker
link |
than the initial studies looked like.
link |
And in fact, some larger scale studies have failed
link |
to replicate them entirely.
link |
And so, that was one of the key sources of evidence,
link |
these ovulation shifts that women were going after good genes
link |
because it's only when she's ovulating
link |
and she can get pregnant by having sex with another man,
link |
that it would make sense for her to have sex
link |
And there was even some early evidence
link |
that women were timing their affairs,
link |
timing sex with their affair partners
link |
to coincide with when they were ovulating.
link |
But as I said, some of these subsequent studies
link |
have failed to replicate these early findings
link |
calling into question the dual mating strategy notion.
link |
And so, I think I've shifted my views on this
link |
and now endorse the mate switching hypothesis
link |
as a more likely explanation for why most women have affairs.
link |
Well, the way you described this makes me wonder if
link |
when of the women that have affairs,
link |
do those affairs tend to be more long lasting
link |
than the affairs that men have?
link |
Because the way you described it is
link |
men are seizing an opportunity
link |
to sort of a carpe diem type approach to infidelity
link |
and women potentially on average are capitalizing
link |
on something that is longer term.
link |
Now, of course, if they're doing this around ovulation,
link |
then it would constrain the amount of times
link |
they would need to see or have sex
link |
with this other person that they're not married to.
link |
But is there any evidence
link |
that women have more ongoing affairs
link |
and men have more transient affairs?
link |
Yes, yeah, there is.
link |
And so, if you look at people who have affairs,
link |
there's a sex difference there
link |
so that women tend to have affairs with one person
link |
and become emotionally involved with that one person
link |
Men who have affairs tend to have affairs
link |
with a larger number of affair partners.
link |
And so, which then by definition can't be long lasting.
link |
You can't have long-term affairs
link |
with six different partners.
link |
Yeah, unless he's juggling multiple phone accounts
link |
or something of that sort.
link |
Right, right, right.
link |
And some men try to do that,
link |
but I think it could be very taxing.
link |
Yeah, well, and in this day and age,
link |
it's easier to meet more people by virtue
link |
of online communications,
link |
but it's also easier to get caught,
link |
meaning it's harder to conceal interactions.
link |
Everything's in the cloud anyway.
link |
A good friend of mine,
link |
who's a former very high level in special operations said,
link |
anything that's not in your head and only in your head
link |
is available for others to find should they want it.
link |
And I think that's largely true.
link |
Yeah, and yeah, so fun information, text messages,
link |
and people are very good at hacking into their partners,
link |
phones, computers,
link |
and then also there are video cameras everywhere.
link |
So, sneaking off to this, a quiet restaurant,
link |
I mean, there are probably eight video cameras
link |
that can record you walking in and out of that restaurant.
link |
Everything can be found.
link |
I'm certain of that.
link |
You mentioned emotional affairs
link |
and financial infidelity as well.
link |
I had a girlfriend once who, as a early date discussion,
link |
said, not that I get the impression that you are,
link |
but I want to be very clear.
link |
She said that you are not emotionally, physically,
link |
or financially tied to any other women.
link |
And I thought it was very interesting
link |
that now you bring up financial infidelity.
link |
She's quite happily partnered now and not with me,
link |
but it's interesting.
link |
It was the first time I heard anyone spell it out that way
link |
as a list, almost like specific aims in a grant.
link |
What is emotional infidelity?
link |
What is financial infidelity?
link |
Well, this is a very smart woman to tap into all three.
link |
So, and I assumed you gave honest responses
link |
to all of those three questions.
link |
As I recall, I did, but as we now know that there,
link |
well, you can ask her at some point.
link |
I'm happy to provide you her information.
link |
Yeah, and there is self-deception in the service of deception
link |
that is another issue.
link |
So emotional infidelity is basically
link |
exactly what it sounds like.
link |
It's falling in love with someone else,
link |
becoming psychologically close to someone else,
link |
sharing intimate or private information with someone else.
link |
That's what I mean by emotional infidelity.
link |
And one of the hallmarks of this,
link |
a study done by a former student of mine, Barry Cooley,
link |
was very clever, I thought.
link |
He analyzed, there used to be this reality TV show
link |
called Cheaters, where they would hire detectives
link |
and they would, when the detective would like say,
link |
follow someone to a hotel room,
link |
they'd call up the partner and say,
link |
your husband just walked into the hotel room
link |
with someone else, would you like to come down
link |
to the hotel and confront him?
link |
And a certain percentage of people would confront.
link |
And what he analyzed, so he analyzed all these episodes
link |
of this show called Cheaters,
link |
and what he examined was the verbal interrogations
link |
when people confronted their partners.
link |
And when men confronted their partners,
link |
the first question they wanted to know is,
link |
Women, their first question was, do you love her?
link |
And so this kind of captures that difference
link |
between a sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity,
link |
and also kind of captures another sex difference
link |
when it comes to sexual jealousy,
link |
where men tend to be more focused
link |
on the sexual components of the infidelity,
link |
because those are what compromise his paternity certainty,
link |
his certainty that he's actually the genetic father
link |
of whatever offspring ensue.
link |
Whereas love is a cue to, do you love her?
link |
That's a cue that he's gonna leave you, the woman,
link |
for another woman as a cue to the long-term loss
link |
of that investment and commitment from that partner.
link |
And so the sexes seem to differ
link |
in which aspects of the infidelity
link |
with women were attuned to or more upset
link |
by the emotional infidelity,
link |
men more by the sexual infidelity.
link |
Now, financial infidelity has been explored much less,
link |
but in my new book, When Men Behave Badly,
link |
I have a section on financial infidelity
link |
where I summarize all the research that has been done.
link |
And I was kind of flabbergasted by the percentage of people
link |
who do things like have credit cards
link |
that their spouse doesn't know about,
link |
keep secret bank accounts,
link |
have the credit card bills mailed to their office
link |
rather than their home,
link |
have basically resources and expenditures of pooled resources
link |
that they keep from their partner.
link |
And both sexes do it.
link |
And the percentages vary from study to study,
link |
but they range from like 30 to 60% of all people
link |
who are keeping financial information from their spouse
link |
in one way or another.
link |
It could be the woman's out buying designer purses
link |
or designer handbags.
link |
It could be the guy's out going to strip clubs
link |
or taking his affair partner to restaurants
link |
and doesn't want those charges to show up on,
link |
you know, a jointly held credit card.
link |
So financial infidelity is critical.
link |
And then even things like diverting pooled resources
link |
to one set of genetic relatives versus another set
link |
is another thing that people tend to keep secret.
link |
So there are forms of financial infidelity as well.
link |
So yeah, infidelity, you're absolutely,
link |
it's a great question because it shouldn't be confined
link |
to sexual infidelity, which is what most people think about,
link |
but also emotional and financial.
link |
Interestingly, if you ask people, what do you mean,
link |
what is infidelity in a marriage?
link |
Men tend to say, well, it's obvious
link |
she has sex with someone else.
link |
That's infidelity.
link |
Whereas women are more likely to have a broader definition
link |
of infidelity, they will cite things like
link |
emotional infidelity, financial infidelity
link |
as part of the definition.
link |
Whereas men have that more narrow definition.
link |
I have a good friend who's a couples counselor,
link |
a clinical psychologist.
link |
And she told me something interesting that relates to this,
link |
which is that in cases of infidelity,
link |
oftentimes some of the arguments between couples
link |
boil down to whether or not contraception was used or not.
link |
That becomes a key feature.
link |
And she always thought that that was, you know,
link |
homing in on a detail,
link |
which of course is an important detail
link |
as it relates to both paternity issues and pregnancy,
link |
but also disease, right?
link |
But as we're talking about all this,
link |
it makes me think that this may have deeper evolutionary
link |
roots in our, further down in the brain,
link |
as we say in neuroscience literature.
link |
And yeah, and using a condom versus not using a condom,
link |
not using as a more intimate act in a way,
link |
you were literally physically more intimate
link |
with someone else than if you do use a condom.
link |
So, you know, but whether it's,
link |
whether evolutionary roots to this, I don't know.
link |
I mean, condoms are probably relatively recent
link |
in, or at least a widespread use of them,
link |
relatively recent in evolutionary time.
link |
So I doubt we have adaptation specifically for them.
link |
No, and presumably before condoms, one can only speculate,
link |
because as we say, when it comes to behavior,
link |
there's rarely a fossil record, but sometimes there is,
link |
it would be the withdrawal method of contraception,
link |
which a good friend of mine who studies,
link |
whose laboratory works on reproductive biology says,
link |
the reason that's a poor choice of contraception
link |
is because it was designed not to work.
link |
So note to those of trying to avoid unwanted pregnancy.
link |
So we talked a little bit about status
link |
in terms of what men and women are selecting
link |
for different types of relationships.
link |
Is there anything else about status
link |
that you find particularly interesting
link |
and, you know, what men are finding attractive
link |
besides these, you know, waist to hip ratios
link |
and quality of potential mothers and so forth.
link |
Are there any kind of hidden gems in the literature
link |
around this that I might not have heard of?
link |
So you mean among, you know, things like sex differences
link |
in what leads to high status or-
link |
For instance, or what, or perhaps things that are surprising
link |
in terms of what people are selecting for.
link |
Do people even know what they're selecting for?
link |
This is, or is this all subconscious?
link |
Any and all of those topics are of interest to me.
link |
Yeah, so we'll have to take them in reverse order.
link |
You know, I think a lot of it is conscious,
link |
but some of it is certainly unconscious.
link |
Or there are elements which are totally unconscious.
link |
So I mentioned one earlier where a man looks at a woman,
link |
he's not, he's aware that he's attracted to her
link |
and attracted to her physical appearance,
link |
but he might not be aware of why.
link |
You know, we didn't evolve to be aware of why.
link |
Just like with food preferences,
link |
we find certain things delectable
link |
and other things nauseating.
link |
We don't understand the adaptive logic
link |
of why our food preferences exist and why we have them.
link |
And the same is true of mating, you know?
link |
And so men find women with a low waist tip ratio attractive,
link |
but they might not, they almost rarely,
link |
rarely will they know, oh, low waist waist tip ratio
link |
is actually associated with higher fertility,
link |
lower endocrinological problems, lower age, et cetera.
link |
So we're sometimes aware of what we want,
link |
but we are unaware of why we want it.
link |
So I think there are unconscious elements
link |
that the whole topic of status
link |
and what leads to high status and low status,
link |
it's a topic I'm currently investigating.
link |
Published a couple scientific articles on it and so,
link |
but maybe we'll hold off on that for a future discussion.
link |
But it intersects, I'll mention one,
link |
it intersects with mating in interesting ways
link |
in that higher status gives people the ability
link |
to choose from a wider pool of potential mates
link |
than they would if they have low status.
link |
And so one of the reasons that people strive for status
link |
is because they have access to more desirable mates.
link |
Conversely, having desirable mates
link |
endows you with higher status.
link |
And so if you have, if you're a male,
link |
you have a very attractive woman on your arm
link |
that leads to high status.
link |
And so there's a reciprocal link
link |
between status and mating in that way.
link |
There've been studies where you say they pose
link |
a kind of an unattractive guy,
link |
older unattractive guy and a stunningly beautiful woman
link |
as a girlfriend and they say,
link |
well, what's this guy all about?
link |
And they say, oh, he must be very high in status,
link |
he must be very wealthy, he must have a lot going for him.
link |
You know, whereas the reverse,
link |
people don't make the same attributions.
link |
And so there is an interesting reciprocal link
link |
between status and mating success
link |
where mating success leads to high status
link |
and high status leads to more mating success.
link |
So over and over again,
link |
there are these instances that you described
link |
where the assessment of potential mate sexual
link |
or long-term partnership are being made
link |
in the contents of good statistical practices,
link |
looking at the choices of others
link |
as a readout of your own choices.
link |
I keep, this seems to be a theme
link |
that this is not being made in a very narrow context,
link |
but paying attention to what other people
link |
are paying attention to seems to come up again and again.
link |
Slightly off center from that,
link |
but still paying attention
link |
to what other people are paying attention to.
link |
What's known about jealousy in men versus women
link |
and how frequent it is, how intense it is,
link |
and what people do with that jealousy.
link |
I mean, we hear, or I've heard at some point
link |
that a large fraction of homicides
link |
are the consequence of jealous lovers.
link |
And that's the darkest angle of all this,
link |
but in evolutionary psychology context, what is jealousy?
link |
Does it relate to paternity issues only?
link |
What can you tell us about jealousy?
link |
Yeah, so, well, it's a great set of questions.
link |
And when I first started studying jealousy,
link |
I reviewed all the prior publications on jealousy.
link |
And at that time, jealousy was regarded
link |
as a sign of immaturity, a sign of insecurity,
link |
a sign of neurosis or pathology,
link |
or in some cases, delusion.
link |
And what I argued is, and do argue,
link |
is that jealousy is an evolved emotion
link |
that serves several adaptive functions, okay?
link |
One of which you mentioned
link |
is a paternity certainty function.
link |
But to back up a second,
link |
basically, once you have the evolution of long-term mating,
link |
long-term pair bonds,
link |
you're talking about, from a male perspective,
link |
investing a tremendous amount of resources
link |
in a woman and her children over years or decades,
link |
even with boomerang kids now may go more than two decades.
link |
Yeah, kids who leave home
link |
and then come back and live at home.
link |
Because they, oh yeah, that happens.
link |
I don't have children, so I-
link |
Okay, yeah, no, that's a big thing.
link |
But if I do, I'll just expect
link |
that they'll come back at some point.
link |
They'll come back because they can't find a job
link |
or they find it cheaper to live
link |
at the parents' house or whatever.
link |
Oh, goodness, I can't think of anything worse.
link |
I mean, I love my parents, but-
link |
I know, I know, again, I can't imagine, but it happens.
link |
And it's happening more and more
link |
given the current economic situation.
link |
Okay, but, so once you have long-term mating,
link |
you need a defense to prevent
link |
or preserve the investment that you've made
link |
and are making in long-term mateship.
link |
And so jealousy serves this mate-guarding function,
link |
if you will, or mate-retention function.
link |
So in other words, one way of phrasing this
link |
is that we know that there are affairs,
link |
we know that people break up, they get divorced,
link |
but people have adaptations
link |
to want to hold on to their mates, okay?
link |
And that's what jealousy is in part about.
link |
And so jealousy gets activated when there are threats
link |
to that romantic relationship.
link |
And there are other forms of jealousy,
link |
like sibling jealousy and so forth,
link |
but we're focusing on mating jealousy in this context.
link |
So now what's interesting is that the threats
link |
to an ongoing valued romantic relationship
link |
come from many sources.
link |
So they could be, you detect cues to your partner's
link |
infidelity or cues of a lack of an emotional distance
link |
between you and your partner.
link |
You say, I love you to your partner,
link |
and your partner says, oh, I wonder how the Knicks
link |
are doing this scoring season or whatever.
link |
If you get an unreciprocated I love you is a bad cue.
link |
Or some people are so tuned to this,
link |
if there's a half millisecond delay,
link |
they can detect delays in responses.
link |
Yes, yeah, delays in responses.
link |
But even things like, so that's one set of cues.
link |
But then there's another set of interested mate poachers.
link |
So if you're mated to someone who's desirable,
link |
which many people are, other people still desire them.
link |
And so sometimes try to poach them or lure them away
link |
from you for a short term sexual encounter
link |
or for a longer term relationship.
link |
And so we have to be, so jealousy motivates people
link |
to be attentive to potential mate poachers
link |
in their environment.
link |
But even more subtle things like mate value discrepancies
link |
can trigger jealousy.
link |
So even if there are no mate poachers
link |
and no cues to infidelity, if a mate value discrepancy
link |
opens up in a relationship, so in the American system
link |
like you're a six or an eight or a 10,
link |
and people generally pair off based on similarity
link |
So that tends to happen.
link |
Sixes end up with sixes, sevens end up with sixes,
link |
plus or minus one.
link |
And these are somewhat subjective scare.
link |
Okay, it's somewhat subjective,
link |
but there's still some consensus about these things.
link |
So even colloquially people say things like,
link |
he's not good enough for you,
link |
or I think you could do better to people
link |
and implicitly have a notion of relative mate value
link |
and discrepancies therein.
link |
Okay, but discrepancies can open up
link |
where none previously existed.
link |
So you get fired from a job all of a sudden,
link |
and most people are very understanding and forgiving
link |
about that if it's not too long.
link |
But you go six months, eight months,
link |
people start having problems.
link |
Or someone's career takes off.
link |
Let's say a woman becomes a famous singer
link |
or actress or a man does.
link |
All of a sudden there's a mate value discrepancy
link |
where you have access to a larger pool of potential mates
link |
and higher mate value potential mates.
link |
So people are attentive to mate value discrepancies,
link |
and so jealousy can get activated
link |
even if there are no immediate threats to a relationship,
link |
but that the mate value discrepancy
link |
is a threat that looms on the horizon of the relationship
link |
because we know statistically the higher mate value person
link |
is more likely to have an affair
link |
and is more likely to dump the other person
link |
and trade up in the mating market.
link |
And when people find new partners
link |
for long-term relationships, do they tend to trade up?
link |
On average, yes, if the discrepancy
link |
is sufficiently large.
link |
So there are costs associated with breaking up.
link |
You know, divorcing, for example.
link |
I mean, it's emotionally, financially, it's a costly thing.
link |
And so if you have like a half a point mate value discrepancy
link |
you're not gonna see a lot of breakups,
link |
but you know, if you have larger mate value discrepancies
link |
that's gonna augur more for trading up in the mating market.
link |
So, but, so then you get into,
link |
so what jealousy is it's an emotion
link |
that gets activated by these circumstances.
link |
And then what people do about it
link |
depends on what their options are.
link |
And people do things that I, in my published scientific work
link |
I say range from vigilance to violence.
link |
So there's a whole spectrum of things.
link |
And in fact, I've identified 19 different tactics
link |
that people use to deal with problems once they get jealous.
link |
And one is increased vigilance and the other is-
link |
Vigilance for the behavior of the mate.
link |
Yeah, vigilance for the behavior of the mate.
link |
And that can include stalking, following,
link |
hacking into iPhones or computers,
link |
monitoring the behavior of mate poachers,
link |
looking at eye contact between other men and your partner.
link |
There's a whole suite of things that, you know,
link |
is involved in vigilance.
link |
And then at the other extreme,
link |
and we can talk about things in between,
link |
but the other extreme is violence.
link |
And so in my new book, When Men Behave Badly,
link |
I have a whole chapter on intimate partner violence.
link |
And this is what I argue, and this is really unfortunate,
link |
and I'm not endorsing, it's illegal, it's bad, don't do it,
link |
but people engage in intimate partner violence.
link |
In America, something like 28 to 30% of all people
link |
who are married will experience intimate partner violence
link |
in their relationship.
link |
So it's not a trivial percentage.
link |
And that violence is between the two partners.
link |
Between the two partners, yes.
link |
There's also violence that gets directed
link |
to our potential mate poachers,
link |
but that's a somewhat separate issue.
link |
But one of the things that is functional about the violence
link |
is that it tends to reduce
link |
perceived mate value discrepancies.
link |
So in other words, guys tend to engage in the violence
link |
more than women do, although some argue
link |
that there's more equality in the violence.
link |
But at a minimum, men tend to do more damage
link |
when they do the violence.
link |
And when you're talking about violence,
link |
is this ever emotional violence?
link |
Yeah, there's that as well.
link |
And in fact, the two tend to be correlated.
link |
So in my studies of married couples,
link |
verbal violence is a good predictor
link |
of physical violence happening as well.
link |
So one thing that'll happen, just to give a concrete example,
link |
guys will start insulting their partner's appearance.
link |
You're really looking ugly today.
link |
Your thighs are heavy, you're not looking very good.
link |
So they try to denigrate the woman's appearance,
link |
which is a key component of woman's mate value.
link |
So they're trying to adjust more closely
link |
the mate value discrepancy.
link |
Yeah, they're trying to reduce
link |
her perceived, self-perceived mate value.
link |
So if let's say he's a six, she's an eight,
link |
and he can convince her that she's actually only a six,
link |
then she's gonna be more likely to stay with him.
link |
It's terribly diabolical,
link |
but the fact is women don't feel good about themselves
link |
when they get beaten up by their partner.
link |
In fact, in the cases where it leaves physical evidence,
link |
women wear sunglasses or hot turtlenecks
link |
or cover up the bruises,
link |
it literally does lower the mate value of the woman
link |
by injuring her physical appearance.
link |
And getting her to conceal herself, stay home.
link |
Yeah, she's taking her out of the,
link |
literally reducing her visibility.
link |
Right, and that's actually one of the predictors of violence
link |
is if he starts doing things other than violence,
link |
like cutting off her relationships
link |
with her friends and her family,
link |
trying to sequester her and prevent her
link |
from getting exposed to potential other partners.
link |
And so it is very diabolical,
link |
but I think important to understand the potential
link |
functionality of intimate partner violence.
link |
What about, sorry to interrupt again,
link |
but I'm just so curious.
link |
So oftentimes my audience will say interrupt too often,
link |
but I want to make sure that I don't miss an opportunity
link |
to ask you about the intimate partner violence
link |
in the other direction, female to male,
link |
where stereotypically speaking,
link |
the opportunity for physical violence is still there.
link |
But the idea in mind is that it would be more
link |
of a psychological nature.
link |
Although I think there is evidence
link |
that some women beat their husbands,
link |
but I'm guessing it's not as frequent or am I off?
link |
Well, different studies.
link |
So it depends on whether you just simply count up acts
link |
or whether you look at the damage that's done, okay?
link |
And as I mentioned, men tend to do more physical damage.
link |
So there are shelters for battered women
link |
all over the country.
link |
As far as I know, there's one for battered men.
link |
Now it may be, and this is partly true,
link |
that men are more ashamed if they get beaten up
link |
by their partner or clocked with a frying pan.
link |
And it's possible, and there's evidence
link |
that police don't take it as seriously.
link |
So there's one case that I report in my book
link |
where a guy called the police
link |
and his wife had clocked him with something
link |
and the police shows up and he says,
link |
if she so much as broke a fingernail in this altercation,
link |
they'll charge you and not her.
link |
And so there is a police bias,
link |
a potential police bias in this.
link |
And so there may be under-reporting of women
link |
beating up men as a consequence, okay?
link |
But the motivations are often different.
link |
So one is that male sexual jealousy
link |
will trigger him to attack his partner
link |
and then she will use physical violence to defend herself.
link |
So she might pick up a frying pan
link |
or a weapon of some sort to defend herself.
link |
And so the motivation is his sexual jealousy on his part,
link |
but self-defense on her part.
link |
And so that accounts for some unknown
link |
percentage of the cases.
link |
And in some cases, it is women who were outraged
link |
when they discover their partner's been having sex
link |
with someone else, an infidelity of a sexual,
link |
financial or emotional nature.
link |
And so there is some female to male violence
link |
that absolutely occurs,
link |
but the reduction of a perceived mate value discrepancy
link |
is a key function from male perspective.
link |
Now, again, not that he thinks about this,
link |
he's just angry and wants to hurt her, okay?
link |
Okay, but here's one other thing
link |
that is really interesting
link |
about the intimate partner violence.
link |
And that's the specificity of it depending on circumstances.
link |
And namely, when the woman gets pregnant,
link |
she's more vulnerable to physical violence.
link |
And when the man suspects that he's not the father
link |
of that pregnancy, he's more likely to direct the violence
link |
toward blows to her abdomen, okay?
link |
And so in that case, the function is,
link |
the hypothesized function is to terminate the pregnancy
link |
by a rival male as opposed to deterring the woman
link |
from committing an infidelity
link |
or from leaving the relationship entirely.
link |
So that's why one function of intimate partner violence
link |
is just sequestering the woman
link |
and keeping her all to himself.
link |
So it's both to prevent infidelity
link |
and to prevent defection.
link |
I have a friend whose wife told me
link |
that if he cheats, I'll kill him, that's what she said.
link |
But it's actually just much easier
link |
to keep him very, very busy.
link |
And that statement now leaps to mind
link |
because of what you're describing,
link |
that there are many tactics
link |
by which people can engage this effort
link |
to reduce the mate value discrepancy,
link |
not all of which are overtly violent,
link |
but all of which are designed to constrain their behavior.
link |
Right, right, yeah, so these would fall
link |
under what I would call mate retention tactics,
link |
only one or two of which fall under the violence category.
link |
Yeah, there are even, yeah,
link |
within partner psychological manipulations
link |
about these things.
link |
So there are psychological manipulations
link |
about perceived mate value, no one else would want you,
link |
you're a loser, there's denigration of partner
link |
within the relationship, even feigning anger
link |
to make the partner feel guilty
link |
about, say, looking at someone else.
link |
So there's all kinds of internecine warfare
link |
that goes on within relationships
link |
to manipulate perceptions of these things.
link |
This is, I'm creating a much too jaded view
link |
of romance and love, I think.
link |
Oh, no, we will get to the happy endings and long,
link |
I mean, there are certainly many happy relationships
link |
Oh, you know, as a neuroscientist, I hear about this
link |
and the immediacy of how people, you know,
link |
fall into a pattern of jealousy or a pattern of cheating
link |
and not always, and it just speaks to brain circuitry
link |
that's evolved to protect something.
link |
And I'm sure this statement is not exhaustive,
link |
but I think it's accurate to say that every species,
link |
but especially humans, wants to make more of itself
link |
and protect its young.
link |
But these issues of paternity and resource allocation,
link |
I mean, I think they're vital.
link |
And, you know, I look forward to a day
link |
where evolutionary psychology and neuroscience
link |
can merge at the level of underlying mechanism,
link |
but I don't think it's dark,
link |
I think it's just the way we're wired at some level.
link |
So speaking of dark, could you tell us about the dark triad?
link |
Yeah, so the dark triad,
link |
so we've been talking about sex differences on average,
link |
but there are critical within sex, individual differences.
link |
And the dark triad is one of the most important ones.
link |
The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics.
link |
So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
link |
Homeworks of narcissism are things like grandiosity,
link |
person thinks that they're more intelligent,
link |
more attractive, more dazzling,
link |
more charming than they actually are.
link |
I think they're the greatest person since sliced bread.
link |
Importantly with narcissism,
link |
you also get a sense of entitlement.
link |
So they feel entitled to a larger share of the pie,
link |
whether that be the financial pie, the status pie,
link |
or the sexual pie.
link |
Machiavellianism is high scores tend to pursue
link |
an exploitative social strategy.
link |
So they might feign cooperation,
link |
but then cheat on subsequent moves.
link |
They view other people as pawns to be manipulated
link |
for their own instrumental gains.
link |
And then psychopathy,
link |
one of the hallmarks of psychopathy is a lack of empathy.
link |
So most people have a normal empathy circuit
link |
where if a child falls down and gets hurt,
link |
we feel compassion for the harm that that person
link |
Or if a puppy gets hit by a car or whatever,
link |
we feel compassion.
link |
Psychopaths don't, that is those high on this,
link |
it's a dimensional thing, it's not a categorical thing.
link |
So those high on psychopathy basically lack empathy.
link |
And so if you combine these qualities,
link |
narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,
link |
you have some very bad dudes.
link |
And I say bad dudes because men tend to score higher
link |
in these things than women,
link |
especially on the psychopathy dimension.
link |
So when you talk about clinical levels of psychopathy,
link |
it's estimated to be something like 1% of women
link |
and about 4% of men.
link |
So men are much higher on that.
link |
So why is this important?
link |
Well, it's important in the mating context
link |
because those who are high on dark triad traits
link |
tend to be sexual deceivers, for one.
link |
So they're very often very charming,
link |
very good at seducing women and then abandoning them
link |
sometimes after fleecing them
link |
or draining their bank account.
link |
They're very good at the art of seduction.
link |
They also tend to be sexual harassers,
link |
serial sexual harassers, and sexual coercers.
link |
So when it comes to forms of sexual violence,
link |
high dark triad guys tend to be perpetrators of this.
link |
And so like most men,
link |
I think would find it ethically abhorrent
link |
to sexually harass, say, a woman in the workplace.
link |
Dark triad guys, in part, maybe they feel entitled to it.
link |
And in part, they do.
link |
I mean, in some cases that I report in the book,
link |
there are like literal descriptions
link |
where the guys are writing in these journals,
link |
oh, I knew she was attracted to me.
link |
That's why she met me in the Xerox room
link |
just when I was there
link |
because she wanted to admire my bulging biceps or whatever.
link |
It's all about them.
link |
Yeah, and this gets into a bias that I talk about,
link |
which is the male sexual misperception bias,
link |
where a woman smiles at a man.
link |
Man thinks, oh, she wants my body.
link |
She's attracted to me.
link |
And women are thinking, oh, I'm just being friendly.
link |
I'm being polite or professional.
link |
But these guys, high dark triad guys,
link |
are more susceptible to the sexual overperception bias.
link |
And they literally believe
link |
that the woman is attracted to them
link |
and sending them signals, green lights,
link |
to sexually approach.
link |
And so if you combine dark triad traits
link |
with the dispositional pursuit
link |
of a short-term mating strategy,
link |
that's an especially deadly combination.
link |
That's when you get sexual harassment, sexual coercion.
link |
So these are very bad dudes,
link |
also predictors of intimate partner violence.
link |
What approximate frequency in the male population
link |
or these have all three of the dark triad traits?
link |
And I realize that they're on a continuum,
link |
sociopath, narcissist.
link |
That's why you can't say,
link |
because they are on a continuum
link |
and it's sort of arbitrary where you draw the line.
link |
But I think it's a minority of men.
link |
It's a subset of men who commit the vast majority
link |
of these acts of sexual violence.
link |
And that's why it's not like,
link |
if you look at victims of sexual violence,
link |
they're more numerous
link |
than the perpetrators of sexual violence
link |
because the perpetrators tend to be serial offenders,
link |
One guy in the workplace harassing 15 different women,
link |
one guy sexually coercing multiple women.
link |
So that's why you have like in well-known cases in the news,
link |
like Harvey Weinstein,
link |
probably over a hundred different women.
link |
Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein,
link |
some of these more famous cases.
link |
These are a large number of victims,
link |
but pretty much sole perpetrators.
link |
And there's no question that these guys,
link |
like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein
link |
were definitely high on dark triad traits.
link |
You mentioned stalking briefly.
link |
Maybe we could just talk about
link |
some of the less known features about stalking.
link |
I think I once heard you give a lecture
link |
where you said that one of the scariest things
link |
about stalking is that sometimes it works.
link |
So, well, stalking has multiple motivations,
link |
but one of the most frequent motivations
link |
is a mating motivation
link |
where either there's a breakup
link |
and the woman dumps the guy
link |
and the guy doesn't want to get dumped.
link |
He wants to maintain a relationship with her.
link |
And I should say that when it comes to criminal stalking,
link |
there's a huge sex difference.
link |
About 80% of the stalkers tend to be men,
link |
So there are women stalkers,
link |
but they're about a fourth the number compared to men.
link |
So the motivation of the guys
link |
tends to be either an attempt
link |
to get back together with the woman,
link |
either sexually or in a relationship,
link |
or and or to interfere with her future mating prospects.
link |
And it works in some of the time in two senses.
link |
One is it does interfere with her attempts to remade.
link |
So in fact, it scares off some guys.
link |
So like you show up and pick up a woman at her apartment
link |
for a date and her ex is sitting out there glaring at you.
link |
Or, and I'm actually familiar with the circumstance
link |
where early in a relationship,
link |
somebody mentions that an ex has made veiled threats
link |
about surveillance, for instance.
link |
I've actually had that happen several times
link |
in my dating history where someone would say,
link |
you started opening up about previous relationships
link |
a little bit as it's appropriate.
link |
And someone says, yeah,
link |
he mentioned that he was going to send someone around
link |
to surveil me, that kind of thing,
link |
which is a very interesting factoid to pick up.
link |
But I heard it enough times
link |
and people I know have reported hearing this enough times
link |
that I'm guessing that that's probably more frequent
link |
than people actually trailing people in cars
link |
and things of that sort.
link |
But planting that it's like the psychological
link |
sea of surveillance is a form of harassment in some sense.
link |
I think you're right.
link |
I mean, there's that planting the psychological seeds,
link |
but then also with surveillance,
link |
some surveillance remain hidden so you don't know
link |
Yeah, I confess in this case,
link |
it did not act as a deterrent for continuing
link |
the relationship, but that's another story.
link |
So how often do women respond,
link |
I have to put this in quotes,
link |
for those that are listening,
link |
air quotes, end quotes,
link |
positively to stalking mean how often does it work
link |
to re-secure the partner after they've been broken up?
link |
So in our studies, it's a minority of cases
link |
that it works to re-establish.
link |
I think something like 15% of the time
link |
that it works either to temporarily re-establish
link |
a sexual relationship or lure the woman back in
link |
for a more permanent relationship.
link |
So most of the time it doesn't work.
link |
But one woman in our study said,
link |
the guy, every time she went out with another guy,
link |
he would threaten the other guy.
link |
And she said, after about six months,
link |
there were no other guys.
link |
He basically scared off all the other guys.
link |
And so she went back to him
link |
because there were no other guys around.
link |
Yeah, I experienced this when I was in college.
link |
I lived in a small town, very population dense,
link |
Isla Vista, UC Santa Barbara.
link |
And there was a couple where every time
link |
this woman would date someone,
link |
he'd basically beat up whoever the new suitor was.
link |
And pretty soon no one would go near them.
link |
They got a reputation as the kind of Sid and Nancy couple.
link |
And indeed it worked.
link |
It worked in the sense that no one dare go near her
link |
and they ended up together.
link |
So I've seen real life examples of this.
link |
Yeah, so it happens.
link |
But it is in general, not a successful strategy.
link |
Oh no, and it's not what I'm suggesting.
link |
I was just shocked to learn that,
link |
because we hear stalking and we have this,
link |
there's one very extreme image of it,
link |
but the underlying motivations I think
link |
are reveal something about mating dynamics.
link |
Yeah, and I think that the circumstances
link |
are often a mate value discrepancy
link |
where the guy realizes correctly
link |
that he will be unable to replace her
link |
with a mate of equivalent mate value,
link |
or in some cases, any mate.
link |
It's like, well, she was with me once,
link |
maybe I can get her back with me again.
link |
So the psychology is very understandable,
link |
but it tends not to work,
link |
because the other thing we found,
link |
we did a study of 2,500 victims of stalking.
link |
This is with Josh Duntley, a former student of mine,
link |
who's now a professor in a criminology department.
link |
And what we found is there were large differences
link |
between the stalker and the victim of the stalker
link |
where the stalker tends to be much lower in mate value
link |
And so basically it's typically the woman
link |
who realizes she can do a lot better on the mating market,
link |
and the guy realizes I am never going to be able
link |
to replace her with a woman of equivalent mate value,
link |
and so I'm going to use this last-ditch desperate measure
link |
to try to get her back, and occasionally it works.
link |
I'm thinking more about this mate value thing,
link |
this number, this metric, the eight, 10, six,
link |
whatever it is, and mate value discrepancy
link |
playing such a strong role in all these dynamics.
link |
I should have asked this earlier,
link |
but what is the impact on mate value,
link |
perceived or real, of a woman having already had children?
link |
You know, for instance, there are friends of mine
link |
who are married and divorced who have children
link |
who will often post pictures of themselves
link |
with their children in their online profiles
link |
because it shows a strong sense of paternal instinct.
link |
You know, there's the puppy thing,
link |
people with dogs or puppies demonstrating a capacity
link |
to care and for caretaking.
link |
In women, the opposite is also true.
link |
Women with children show capacity,
link |
the capacity demonstrates fertility, at least at one point,
link |
perhaps still fertility that's still present.
link |
Does it positively, negatively, or neutrally impact
link |
a woman to already have children when seeking another mate,
link |
regardless of whether or not she was married
link |
or had the children out of wedlock?
link |
Yeah, as a general rule, it decreases her mate value
link |
because kids with another mate are viewed as a cost,
link |
not a benefit, and they're a cost
link |
on multiple dimensions, one of which,
link |
they're gonna be a cost to the guy
link |
because he's gonna have to invest resources,
link |
time, attention, and so forth,
link |
but also a portion of her effort and resources
link |
are gonna be devoted toward kids
link |
who are not genetically related to him,
link |
and which is one reason why stepfamilies,
link |
there's often a lot of conflict within stepfamilies,
link |
very explicable from an evolutionary perspective.
link |
So in general, it's a cost, not a benefit.
link |
Sometimes it can be a benefit, though.
link |
So I know of one case where a woman got divorced,
link |
she had two kids, and she ended up successfully mating
link |
with a guy who was also divorced
link |
and had primary custody of his two kids,
link |
and so there was a compatibility there.
link |
But as a general rule, it will decrease a woman's
link |
and a man's mate value to have kids,
link |
especially kids who are young and financially dependent,
link |
but what happens is, let's say the woman
link |
would be an eight without kids.
link |
A guy who's a six might be able to attract her
link |
and might feel lucky to attract her
link |
because there's no way he would have been able
link |
to attract her under other conditions,
link |
but that's why the display of effort investing in her kids
link |
is often a mating tactic.
link |
He's showing, okay, I'm willing to invest in kids,
link |
I'm willing to sacrifice, and so they, in essence,
link |
become equivalent in mate value as a result of that.
link |
But will she be able to attract, on average, other eights?
link |
Less likely, but the same is true of guys,
link |
and this is why the reason that it affects women
link |
more than men is because more custody tends to go with women.
link |
That is, the kids, women tend to have greater custody,
link |
and women tend to invest more in the kids
link |
throughout their lives.
link |
Now, there are other things like alimony
link |
and child support payments and so forth,
link |
but all the women I've talked to,
link |
I've talked to one-on-one with many women about this,
link |
they view a guy with kids as a cost, not a benefit,
link |
unless the kids are old enough and they've left home
link |
and are no longer financially dependent.
link |
And everything you just described is consistent
link |
with what you said earlier,
link |
which is that with subsequent marriages,
link |
or as men get older, the tendency is to seek mates
link |
that are progressively younger, right?
link |
Because there's a higher, lower probability
link |
they'll already have children if they're much younger.
link |
Right, right, and if the guy's successful,
link |
if he has status and resources and has other qualities
link |
associated with higher mate value,
link |
then he will remain attractive to younger women.
link |
I realize it's not your specific area of expertise,
link |
but these days, there's a lot of discussion
link |
about how early childhood attachment to parents
link |
influences mate choice later on,
link |
this kind of general categorization of avoidant
link |
and anxious and anxious avoidant and all this kind of thing.
link |
And again, putting my hat on as a neuroscientist,
link |
I think it makes sense that the neural circuits
link |
for attachment in childhood would be somehow,
link |
partially or in whole,
link |
repurposed for other forms of attachment.
link |
We don't just tend to say, okay, that brain circuitry
link |
was from when I was a kid and now I'm an adult,
link |
and so I'll develop this new attachment circuitry.
link |
I'm guessing it evolves and whatnot.
link |
But is there anything interesting
link |
about childhood attachment strategies
link |
vis-a-vis stability of long-term partner choice,
link |
or is that too big of a leap for us to make here?
link |
Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer
link |
some sort of informed speculation about it.
link |
And as you pointed out, it's not my area of expertise,
link |
but I know a little bit about it.
link |
And I mean, I think that a secure attachment style,
link |
if both partners have a secure attachment style,
link |
that's conducive to a long-term mateship.
link |
Avoidant attachment styles,
link |
avoidant people tend to have more difficulty with intimacy
link |
and also higher probability of infidelity.
link |
And anxious attachment style, I don't know,
link |
can create problems of its own in the overly clingy,
link |
dependent, absorbing, what I call high relationship load.
link |
So there's like mutation load,
link |
which we all have a certain number of mutations.
link |
There's parasite load.
link |
There's also what I call relationship load.
link |
So what is the baggage that someone brings
link |
to the relationship?
link |
Probably correlated with the frequency of demand
link |
of immediate text message responses.
link |
Well, I think the frequency of demand,
link |
like the the latent,
link |
the expected low latency of text message responses
link |
plays out consistently in relationships.
link |
Early on, there's a very low expectation of response.
link |
And then as people get attached,
link |
depending on their level of anxiety,
link |
if they don't hear back from somebody really quickly,
link |
where the mind goes is a very interesting aspect.
link |
Do you become suspicious? Do you become anxious?
link |
Can you stabilize your own internal milieu?
link |
Or do you need to see the dot dot dot that's coming back?
link |
I'd love to see a study on that at some point.
link |
No, that's a good one.
link |
And my intuition suggests that your prediction
link |
about that would pan out.
link |
It would be the insecure that would really be,
link |
you know, getting upset if there were not
link |
that immediate response to the text.
link |
Yeah, I have a friend, a female friend
link |
who deliberately quote unquote using her language
link |
trains her potential partners to be comfortable
link |
with a variable response latency.
link |
But then I asked her if she's comfortable
link |
with a variable response latency,
link |
and she said, absolutely not.
link |
So there's an asymmetry, at least in that case.
link |
This is almost certainly a more rare circumstance,
link |
but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask
link |
about unconventional relationships.
link |
These days, I don't think it's just by virtue
link |
of living in California.
link |
You hear more and more about monogamish
link |
as opposed to monogamous.
link |
And various forms of polyamory
link |
that may or may not include the amory part.
link |
You know, passes and permission
link |
based on seasons, circumstance, and prior infidelities.
link |
Like, okay, somebody had a mishap early on,
link |
you know, you have one pass, so to speak.
link |
And you hear this kind of language getting thrown around.
link |
And it's intriguing to me because it seems like
link |
an effort to bypass some of the more,
link |
if you will, hardwired,
link |
or at least culturally hardwired aspects
link |
of mate choice and sexual partner choice.
link |
You know, acknowledging jealousy,
link |
but confronting it by allowing your partner
link |
to be with somebody else, for instance.
link |
I confess I have friends
link |
who have unconventional relationships.
link |
I have friends with conventional relationships.
link |
Any thoughts on polyamory?
link |
Yeah, I do have a couple of thoughts on it.
link |
I haven't studied it extensively,
link |
but I think that the way I would phrase it
link |
is that there's an attempt to
link |
overcome certain evolved
link |
features of our mating psychology,
link |
but often in the service of other aspects
link |
of our mating psychology.
link |
So what I mean by that is this.
link |
So talk about polyamory.
link |
First of all, there's a sex difference on average.
link |
That is, men are more likely to want to initiate
link |
a polyamorous relationship than women.
link |
There are lots of exceptions,
link |
and I actually know of at least one exception personally,
link |
friends of mine who are in a polyamorous relationship.
link |
But the motivation for men
link |
is that evolved desire for sexual variety.
link |
So it gives him access to a wider variety of sex partners,
link |
which is part of our evolved sexual psychology,
link |
especially for men.
link |
Women, one motivation,
link |
now women also have a desire for sexual variety,
link |
on average tends not to be as great as that of men,
link |
But some women agree to a polyamorous relationship
link |
as a mate retention tactic.
link |
That is, this guy, in order to keep him,
link |
she has to agree to the relationship.
link |
And so the motivations for engaging in polyamory
link |
are somewhat sex differentiated.
link |
On average, on average, there's lots of exceptions.
link |
So now when it comes to sexual jealousy,
link |
there is this recognition that there,
link |
and the way that I would frame it,
link |
there's this evolved emotion,
link |
where it triggers sexual jealousy,
link |
seeing your partner having sex
link |
or imagining your partner having sex
link |
or falling in love with someone else.
link |
But interestingly, and there haven't been studies on this,
link |
but I know of this one polyamorous couple
link |
where they reported to me,
link |
both of them reported to me,
link |
she said it doesn't bother her at all
link |
if her husband, they're married,
link |
has sex with other women.
link |
I think it's like every Thursday night or whatever,
link |
they have the different couples have different rules.
link |
But one time she saw him walking down the street
link |
hand in hand affectionately with a former girlfriend,
link |
and she got extremely jealous.
link |
So because it signaled an emotional connection.
link |
So the sexual didn't bother her,
link |
the emotional did.
link |
She happens to be bisexual.
link |
And she and her partner said that it really upset him
link |
when she slept with other men,
link |
but it was fine if she slept with other women.
link |
I think that's a fairly common thing
link |
that among the men that I know
link |
that are in polyamorous relationships,
link |
that that's a fairly common statement.
link |
Yeah, so he kept trying to,
link |
in these internecine manipulations,
link |
trying to encourage her to sleep with other women,
link |
encouraging him not to get emotionally involved
link |
with other women, but the sex was okay.
link |
So I think that, you know,
link |
I think that in the modern environment,
link |
you know, we have a very rich
link |
and complicated evolved mating psychology.
link |
And what we're doing in these novel forms are semi-novel,
link |
because these things have a pretty deep history themselves,
link |
that we're attempting to maximize
link |
some of our evolved desires
link |
while keeping quiescent other evolved aspects
link |
of our sexual psychology, like jealousy.
link |
So satisfying our desire for sexual variety,
link |
but keeping jealousy at bay.
link |
And different couples do it in different ways.
link |
So as you alluded to,
link |
so I know one couple where live in Los Angeles
link |
and the woman from the woman said,
link |
she gives her husband permission to have an affair,
link |
sleep with other women,
link |
as long as it's outside of the city limits of LA.
link |
You know, and this other couple,
link |
it has to be Thursday night, you know?
link |
And so different, people have different arrangements.
link |
So there are constraints on,
link |
but the constraints are specific
link |
and somewhat arbitrary to the relationship.
link |
They're specific and often in polyamorous relationships,
link |
people talk it out and come to an agreement
link |
on what is acceptable and what's out of bounds.
link |
So, but in a way, I mean, in a way it's just,
link |
you know, we can't change our evolved sexual psychology,
link |
What we can do is we can activate certain elements of it
link |
and keep others quiescent.
link |
And that's all good.
link |
In a way we do in the modern environment.
link |
So even to take it outside of polyamory, pornography.
link |
Okay, widely consumed internet pornography.
link |
What does that do?
link |
Well, there's a big sex difference there.
link |
Men tend to consume it a lot more than women.
link |
The forms of the pornography are different,
link |
but in a way, the pornography, what it does is it
link |
parasitize men's evolved desire for sexual variety
link |
so they can, in some sense,
link |
psychologically experience sexual variety
link |
of different women sexually without actually doing it
link |
by just looking at their computer screen.
link |
And so in a way, another way of phrasing that
link |
is that we create modern novel cultural inventions
link |
in ways that satisfy our evolved desires
link |
and our evolved sexual desires.
link |
Yeah, it's interesting with the kind of explosion
link |
of online pornography.
link |
I have a colleague at Stanford in psychiatry,
link |
Anna Lemke, who studies the dopamine system.
link |
And she mentioned two things of interest.
link |
One is that not only is there a tremendous variety
link |
of experiences that are available to people to view
link |
in pornography, but the intensity is also quite high.
link |
So much so that at least for young people
link |
who are observing a lot of pornography, it's possible,
link |
and there are studies looking at this now,
link |
that their brain circuits become wired
link |
to observing sexual acts as opposed to being engaged
link |
in them, which can be extremely problematic.
link |
So it's a sharp blade, so to speak.
link |
This pornography thing isn't what it once was
link |
and it's evolving quickly.
link |
Very interesting, so how should one frame all this?
link |
So I imagine a number of people listening
link |
are in relationships or would hope to be in a relationship.
link |
You know, in terms of understanding what we are selecting
link |
for consciously or subconsciously,
link |
it seems like there are common themes.
link |
It's people want to feel attractive and attracted.
link |
People want to make sure that there's stability
link |
of the relationship.
link |
So when we hear about security, oftentimes I think
link |
of this kind of warm oxytocin, serotonin-like thing,
link |
but this mate value seems so powerful in all this,
link |
assessing mate value.
link |
So how objective are people about assessing their own value
link |
in terms of finding, securing,
link |
and over time maintaining a relationship?
link |
Securing is dynamic because people age at different rates.
link |
Is there an objective metric of this stuff?
link |
I guess you get a lot of statistics about somebody's image
link |
and you find, come up with an average value
link |
based on the population,
link |
but how should people assess themselves?
link |
Because it seems like one of the features
link |
that would be very powerful for leading to happiness,
link |
of good partner selection, that's stable,
link |
where one doesn't have to resort to these Machiavellian
link |
or diabolical or any of these other strategies
link |
would be to be very honest with oneself.
link |
And how does one do that?
link |
Yeah, great questions.
link |
And I don't think that the science has all the answers.
link |
So a couple of things.
link |
So one is that I think people are generally pretty good
link |
at self-assessing mate value
link |
and even self-esteem has been hypothesized
link |
to be one internal monitoring device
link |
that tracks mate value.
link |
So when we get a promotion at work
link |
or we get a rise in status,
link |
we feel an elevated sense of self-esteem.
link |
We get fired, we get rejected,
link |
we get ostracized, our self-esteem plummets.
link |
So our self-evaluation, I think,
link |
does track mate value to some extent.
link |
There are people who overestimate their mate value,
link |
people high on narcissism in particular,
link |
and some people underestimate their mate value.
link |
Another important element
link |
is that there's consensual mate value.
link |
So that is, if you asked a group of 100 people,
link |
there's a fair amount of consensus
link |
that this person's an eight, that person's a six.
link |
But there are also individual differences in mate value.
link |
So one example is I know a woman who's a professor
link |
and she places a high premium on guys
link |
who are deeply steeped in Russian literature,
link |
which she is, so that she can have in-depth conversations
link |
about Russian literature.
link |
Note to young men, learn Russian literature.
link |
Well, but this is high
link |
and it's a dimension of mate value that's important for her,
link |
but probably not important for a lot of other people.
link |
And so, whereas other people, let's say, might be,
link |
let's say you're into football or some sport,
link |
then, and the other partner thinks sports are stupid,
link |
then that's, someone who's also into sports
link |
is gonna be higher in mate value for you.
link |
So there are these individual differences
link |
in components of mate value, which is good,
link |
because that means if everyone
link |
were going after the same people
link |
and there was total consensus on mate value,
link |
then there would be a lot of mate-less people
link |
and a lot of problems in the world
link |
and a lot of dissatisfied people.
link |
So both are important, the consensual aspects
link |
and the individually differentiated components of mate value.
link |
But in terms of accuracy of assessment,
link |
it's, there are no good measures scientifically to do this
link |
because it's sufficiently complicated.
link |
So I mentioned, we've mentioned maybe
link |
a dozen different components of mate value,
link |
physical attractiveness, kindness, emotional stability,
link |
health status, et cetera, and these aren't the only ones.
link |
So I teach a course on psychology of human mating
link |
and I ask the people, it's a large course,
link |
couple hundred people, tell me,
link |
what do women want in a mate?
link |
And so I started with the blackboard.
link |
This is back in the old days
link |
when there was a blackboard, a piece of chalk.
link |
They say, oh, I want a mate who has a good sense of humor,
link |
sorry, sense of humor, intelligent, right, kind.
link |
And so I go through this and I go through five blackboards
link |
and then I run out of space over what women want.
link |
Now I do the same for men
link |
and men kind of run out of space
link |
after about a blackboard and a half.
link |
But what that tells me is that these qualities
link |
are large in number and complicated in nature.
link |
So you say you want a guy who's nice and generous.
link |
And they say, yeah, so like a guy
link |
who at the end of every month takes his whole paycheck
link |
and gives it to the wino, a homeless person.
link |
Well, no, not that generous, generous toward me,
link |
but not toward everyone else.
link |
Nice in general, but not so nice
link |
that they're getting exploited.
link |
So, or even, there's something, you can't be too healthy.
link |
So people, that's unidimensional, but you want a guy,
link |
women want a guy who's confident, but not too confident.
link |
Because too confident will mean he's either arrogant,
link |
narcissistic, or not sufficiently manipulable.
link |
So anyway, so my point is that
link |
because there's so many different components of mate value
link |
and that they vary in amount,
link |
so it's not just listing the qualities and summing them up,
link |
they vary in amount,
link |
it's a very complicated endeavor to assess accurately.
link |
But I think people have a good intuitive sense
link |
of people's relative mate value,
link |
especially if you're in a group
link |
and you've been able to interact with them for a long time.
link |
And one indication is, again, that attention structure,
link |
how many other people really want to mate with this person,
link |
that's a good cue that they're high in mate value.
link |
Nobody wants to mate with you,
link |
then cue that you're low in mate value.
link |
Reminds me of the time when one is trying to decide
link |
who to ask to the prom.
link |
You know, there's a complicated assessment
link |
based on who one would like to go with,
link |
whether or not you're already partnered,
link |
who would say yes, who would say no,
link |
because there's a risk in rejection too,
link |
because that, if I'm guessing correctly,
link |
could lower one's own perceived mate value.
link |
Yeah, it's getting rejected.
link |
Right, frequency of rejections
link |
probably doesn't lend itself well
link |
to increasing one's own view of their mate value.
link |
Right, which is why many guys have
link |
what I call mating anxiety.
link |
That is, they don't approach them
link |
because they risk getting shot down.
link |
They're trying to maintain that number
link |
by reducing the amount of data.
link |
But it backfires in the modern environment.
link |
So there's a famous psychologist, Albert Ellis,
link |
who had mating anxiety and he assigned himself
link |
the task of approaching, asking,
link |
like I can't remember what the number was,
link |
but let's say 50 women out on dates.
link |
He lived in New York City,
link |
so it was either a lot of women.
link |
He could just stand still and they would stream past.
link |
Yeah, and he assigned himself,
link |
like ask 50 women on a date, you know, every week.
link |
And he said, after two weeks,
link |
his mating anxiety disappeared,
link |
because most of them said, buzz off, creep.
link |
But he decided, well, he's actually getting rejected,
link |
didn't cause my world to collapse,
link |
and it actually was okay.
link |
And so he kind of inured himself to this rejection.
link |
And so it ended up,
link |
he ended up doing quite well on his mating life.
link |
Another point for cognitive behavioral desensitization.
link |
He ran the experiment.
link |
Just a couple more questions.
link |
Earlier, you mentioned self-deception based deception,
link |
or something of that sort, self-deception,
link |
that people aren't always trying to convince somebody else
link |
of something that secretly they know isn't true,
link |
but that they deceive themselves.
link |
Could you embellish on that a little bit?
link |
So, well, this is actually,
link |
this hypothesis is the famous evolutionary biologist,
link |
Robert Trivers, first advanced this hypothesis
link |
in the preface in 1976 to Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene.
link |
And he subsequently written more about it,
link |
both in scientific article and in a more popular book.
link |
But the idea is that if,
link |
the core idea is that successful deception
link |
is facilitated by self-deception.
link |
So if you really believe that in X,
link |
then you're gonna be a more successful salesman
link |
to convince other people of X.
link |
So if you believe you're, let's say, a 10 and mate value,
link |
you truly believe it, even if you're not,
link |
I'm gonna have a more successful time convincing you
link |
that I am as well.
link |
And so the hypothesis is basically
link |
that people self-deceive in order
link |
to increase the effectiveness of actual deception.
link |
But I think that there are people who are,
link |
so in one other dimension I'll mention too
link |
is that animals often take each other
link |
at our own word for things.
link |
So if we're self-confident,
link |
people assume that we must have the goods
link |
to back up that self-confidence.
link |
If we're a quivering mass of insecurity,
link |
people believe, well,
link |
we don't have the goods to back up anything.
link |
And so people use other people's displays
link |
of their self-confidence as a cue to their goods.
link |
And it's in general, a pretty reliable cue,
link |
but then there are overestimates and underestimates
link |
as we've talked about, like with narcissism.
link |
Yeah, we see this with the job candidates.
link |
You are taught to look very carefully at the application
link |
and consider all aspects,
link |
but ultimately you consider that also in light of
link |
how firmly someone believes in the vision
link |
of what they're trying to bring to the profession.
link |
And that's, I think, largely a subconscious process
link |
and that being aware of it can be helpful.
link |
But yeah, when somebody is confident,
link |
you tend to think that they're going to get
link |
where they say they're going to go.
link |
And it acts as a bit of a heuristic for not needing,
link |
the impulse is that one then doesn't need
link |
to go vet all the information quite as carefully,
link |
but I guess if one is aware of it,
link |
then to dig deeper in,
link |
because it seems like there's a lot of deception going on.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
Well, and something we talked about earlier,
link |
people high on psychopathy are very good at deception.
link |
I don't know whether they are good at self-deception
link |
or whether they're just really good deceivers,
link |
but they can be very effective.
link |
And out in California, you live out in California,
link |
I'm sure you've seen your fair share of cases like that.
link |
Oh yeah, I think across today's discussion
link |
and various examples popped to mind
link |
of seeing these features in humans, it's so interesting.
link |
I find the work that you do incredibly interesting.
link |
I think this field of evolutionary psychology
link |
is fascinating and I hope, I said it before,
link |
but I'll say it again,
link |
I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology
link |
are nudging towards one another.
link |
And it's only a matter of time
link |
before they merge in some formal way.
link |
I mean, there is the work, for instance,
link |
on polygamous versus monogamous prairie voles
link |
and levels of vasopressin,
link |
but it's a big leap to go from vasopressin in a prairie vole,
link |
no disrespect to that beautiful work,
link |
but to humans and say, oh, vasopressin inhalers
link |
are going to make you monogamous or something.
link |
I think that's, I probably got the direction
link |
of the effect wrong, but you get the point.
link |
Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.
link |
And I think it will happen.
link |
I think it's starting to happen and it will happen
link |
because getting at the neuroscience
link |
is getting at the underlying mechanisms
link |
that are driving the process.
link |
So what an evolutionary perspective brings to bear
link |
is evolved function and ultimate explanation,
link |
the selective forces that created adaptations,
link |
the functions of those adaptations
link |
and the neuroscience brings,
link |
well, what is the underlying machinery
link |
that these mechanisms are instantiated in?
link |
Yeah, it would be wonderful to collaborate someday.
link |
Maybe we'll do a brain imaging study
link |
on jealousy or something in, I don't know,
link |
and throw it, you're the psychologist.
link |
You would come up with a beautiful experimental design.
link |
I'm certain that people are going to want
link |
to learn more about your work.
link |
Certainly we will give them links
link |
to your social media and other sites.
link |
You've written a tremendous number
link |
of really interesting books.
link |
Tell us about your most recent book
link |
and maybe some of the others that,
link |
if people are interested in these topics
link |
and they want to learn more, that they could explore.
link |
Okay, so, well, my most recent book
link |
is called When Men Behave Badly,
link |
The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,
link |
Harassment, and Assault.
link |
And that book deals with conflict between the sexes,
link |
And so it deals with them both in what I call
link |
mating market conflicts,
link |
some of the topics we've been talking about,
link |
deception in internet dating and things like that.
link |
Second is conflict that occurs within mating relationships
link |
of the sort that we've been talking about as well.
link |
Financial infidelity, emotional infidelity,
link |
sexual infidelity, coping with conflict
link |
within a relationship.
link |
And I actually have some suggestions for strategies
link |
for coping with conflict within a relationship.
link |
Coping in the after, dealing with the aftermath of breakups.
link |
So often there's an asymmetry.
link |
One person wants to break up, the other doesn't.
link |
So I talk about coping in the aftermath.
link |
And then I also talk in this book,
link |
When Men Behave Badly,
link |
about some of the darker sides of human mating,
link |
like intimate partner violence,
link |
stalking, sexual harassment, sexual coercion.
link |
So that's what that book's about.
link |
And I think it's gotten well-reviewed
link |
and people find it very useful in understanding
link |
what is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena.
link |
Why do men and women seem at odds with each other
link |
in so many domains?
link |
Why do some of these recurrent forms
link |
of sexual conflict occur?
link |
So that's what that book's about.
link |
My previous book, so my first book,
link |
which I've had the good fortune
link |
to be able to revise a couple of times,
link |
deals more broadly with human mating strategies.
link |
It's called The Evolution of Desire,
link |
Strategies of Human Mating,
link |
and gives people a broad overview
link |
of what people want in a mate,
link |
tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention,
link |
and so forth throughout the whole mating process,
link |
serial mating, causes of divorce, and so forth.
link |
And then even more broadly,
link |
I have a textbook called Evolutionary Psychology,
link |
The New Science of the Mind,
link |
which is in its sixth edition right now.
link |
And it's the most widely used textbook
link |
in evolutionary psychology around North America
link |
and Europe, and actually it's been translated
link |
even into Arabic and other countries.
link |
So that deals somewhat with mating,
link |
but also deals with survival problems
link |
or evolved fears and phobias,
link |
issues about kin and family, extended family,
link |
friendships, social hierarchies, status hierarchies,
link |
warfare, and other topics.
link |
So The Evolutionary Psychology textbook
link |
is the broadest book,
link |
and then maybe the second broadest is
link |
The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating.
link |
And then for those interested in conflict between the sexes,
link |
the latest book, When Men Behave Badly.
link |
I'm so grateful for the clarity and depth and rigor
link |
with which you do it and you convey it to us.
link |
I know I speak for many people
link |
when I just want to say thank you.
link |
This is a tremendously informative conversation.
link |
Well, it's been a delight to talk with you
link |
and I hope we do engage in that research collaboration
link |
of merging neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
link |
Great. Thank you, David.
link |
Thank you for joining me for my conversation
link |
with Dr. David Buss.
link |
Be sure to check out the link to his website
link |
in the show caption,
link |
and be sure to check out his new book,
link |
When Men Behave Badly,
link |
The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,
link |
Harassment and Assault.
link |
If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast,
link |
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In addition, please put any questions you have
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In many episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
we discuss supplements.
link |
While supplements might not be for everybody,
link |
many people derive tremendous benefit from them
link |
for things like sleep and focus
link |
and other aspects of human performance and daily life.
link |
One issue with supplements is that many
link |
of the supplement companies out there
link |
are subpar with respect to quality,
link |
and they are not precise about the specific amounts
link |
of the various supplement contents that they include.
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For that reason, we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,
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because Thorne supplements are known to have
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the highest levels of stringency
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in terms of the quality of the ingredients
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and the precision of the amounts of the ingredients.
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In other words, what's listed on the label
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is what's actually in the bottle.
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If you want to see what supplements I take,
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you can go to thorne.com slash the letter U slash Huberman.
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There, you can see the supplements I take.
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You can get 20% off any of those supplements.
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And if you navigate further into the Thorne site
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through that portal, thorne.com slash U slash Huberman,
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you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements
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that Thorne makes.
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Thank you once again for joining me for my discussion
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with Dr. David Buss about human mate selection and strategy
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and many other extremely interesting topics today.
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And last but not least, thank you for your interest
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I'm Dr. David Buss and I'll see you next time.