Taken from JRE #1959 w/David Buss:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aYGkvFj8PZTzfHvGuYCTw?si=626161d6a8af4954

The Jerogen Experience And there have been, you know, maybe 4 or 5 leading hypotheses about why women do it.

And this is 1 area where I've changed my mind on pretty dramatically.

So early on, a former student of mine, Marty Hazelton, who's now a professor at UCLA and other friends and colleagues like Steve Gangestad and Randy Thornhill, put forward this idea that the reason that women do it is that they're pursuing a dual mating strategy.

That is, they're trying to get investment from 1 guy, like the good dads, but good genes from another guy.

any research done on what type of mate a woman is likely to cheat on?

So there's been some and it's not conclusive.

But basically the only way this could work, and I have to back up just a second on that, we know that affairs are very costly for women.

So if discovered, they result in infidels, result in violence, sometimes they result in killing, you know, getting to the killing, I don't know if we wanna get into that maybe later in our conversation.

If an infidelity is discovered, they suffer reputational damage.

In fact, it's 1 of the leading causes of divorce worldwide across cultures is if there's a female infidelity.

And so the issue is what benefit could be so great to a woman that she's willing to risk all these costs if it's discovered?

And so the good genes dual mating strategy argument could work in principle, and it could work if there were no costs.

And this is 1 of the reasons why men and women commit infidelities in secret.

People don't go on Twitter and say, hey, I just had an affair on my partner.

People try to keep it under wraps so they don't experience the cost.

And of course, there are costs to men as well by being discovered.

They're just not as cataclysmic as they are for women.

So the only way it would work though, is if the, getting back to your original question, is if there's a large discrepancy between the woman's regular partner and her affair partner in terms of the quality of his genes.

And so what these good genes dual mating strategy theorists propose is that there are certain markers of good genetic quality.

They hypothesized masculine features, and there's a logic behind that.

They hypothesize symmetrical features, so we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, so normal development, you know, our hands, our arms, our legs grow, you know, more or less symmetrically, but there are things that cause deviations from symmetry.

So mutations, so genetic mutations can cause deviations.

Diseases can cause asymmetries and environmental insults in a variety of ways.

And so what the good genes theorists argue is that if someone is, if the male is very symmetrical, then that's a marker that he's not experienced a history of disease or environmental insults or a high mutation load, or has a, what they call a developmental system that's very kind of impervious to these insults.

So even though they've suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they still maintain that symmetry.

Well, I think there are problems with that.

But anyway, back to backtrack a second why I changed my mind.

So I used to advocate this, well it seems It's logically plausible, but I started to doubt it.

1 is some replication, some larger scale replications of the work started to fail to replicate the original finding.

So what they did is, how did they test this?

What they looked at is, do women change their preferences when they're ovulating?

So because it's only in that narrow window of ovulation that she's gonna be getting the good genes.

So what they looked at is women's normal mate preferences and they tracked them over the ovulation cycle and do they change to prefer more masculine, more symmetrical features when they're ovulating and then go back to their normal preferences.

And the initial study suggested, yes, they do.

Initial study suggested that when women have affairs, it tends to coincide with when they're ovulating and some other things like that.

Well, it's very difficult and time-consuming data, but it started out with crude methods such as estimating the woman's time of ovulation through a backward counting method.

But I mean, how do they get people to even become a part of a study where they admit that they have cheated on their husbands?

Oh, well, so that's a different question.

These studies just looked at changes in mate preferences.

It's not just changes in mate preferences.

It's a decision to have intercourse Right someone other than your husband, right?

right and they haven't much studies like that.

They don't it's just do the mate preferences change at ovulation in the predicted, in the ways predicted by the theory?

How would they find out if a woman's mate strategies changed and if her preferences changed based on ovulation?

So they basically get women, and then they track them throughout the cycle And so that and they can do this now they can do it through hormonal assays So there are you know ovulation kits that they can assess

so what do they have like a Survey they fill out like who you attracted to today Harry Styles.

right right or basically they show Photographic images and so they women just rate.

And so what they, and then independently, they can assess masculinity like Jason, how do you pronounce his name?

I remember him, I don't think I saw Aquaman, but I remember him from Game of Thrones yeah and yeah when Tony and the Barbarian too yeah so yeah he would be a perfect example.

Highly masculine features, you know, the square jaw, heavy brow ridges, you know, a good shoulder to hip ratio.

So, you know, typically masculine features.

And so they would look at, do women rate the photos of these masculine and symmetrical guys more attractive when they're ovulating than when they're not ovulating?

And the bottom line, so there's some conceptual problems with that of, you know, does symmetry and masculinity, why are these the sole features that mark good genes?

Because there are also a lot of things that have moderate heritability.

It's 1 of the things we know from the heritability studies.

A zillion things show moderate heritability.

So 1 is the failures to replicate those studies.

So the larger scale studies failed to find those preference shifts at ovulation.

But when I started to look at the literature about women who were having affairs and the reasons that they're having affairs, and the nature of the affairs, there are things that cropped up like this.

79%, 1 study found 79% of women fell in love with or became emotionally involved with her affair partner.

And to me, this is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you're trying to pursue that dual mating strategy idea.

You want to get the good genes and then forget about the guy.

So as not to jeopardize your investment from the regular partner.

And so it's really a design feature that's counter to that notion.

But it seems to me that you're pursuing this like as if it's a logical endeavor That's based on trying to achieve an outcome and I think it's far more likely you're dealing with mental illness alcohol you know emotional imbalance extreme desire for attention Narcissism which leads people to seek out exorbitant amounts of attention from other people like you have to take that into account Don't you?

Okay, so It's a fair point and those things Aren't necessarily inconsistent if you ask like what who has affairs and what are their personality?

Okay, but affairs happen in all cultures or virtually all cultures unless the women are extremely cloistered as they are in some cultures where they're like, they cannot leave the home without a male bodyguard.

And so a competing hypothesis about why, and this is the 1 I'm currently putting my money on, if there's a horse race, is what I call the mate switching hypothesis and and this is the notion that women who are in relationships who are Where the relationship is going south Perhaps the partner starts out looking promising, but has failed to live up to his promise.

Perhaps he becomes an alcoholic or a drug addict or loses his job or starts abusing her, starts beating her up.

That women use affairs as a mate switching device either to divest herself of her regular partner or and or to trade up in the mating market to someone who's more desirable, or to make it easier to transition back into the mating market on the notion, on the assumption that she'll be able to find someone more desirable out there.

And so there's at least a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that supports the mate switching hypothesis, like the 1 I just mentioned.

With 79% of women becoming emotionally involved or falling in love with their partner, this suggests, you know, it's not just, oh, I'm seeking transient attention, as you mentioned.

Some women might do it for that, of course.

But it suggests that they're forming a long-term attachment to this other guy rather than their regular partner.

And this may seem like super, super obvious.

Is that women who are unhappy with their regular relationship, either sexually unhappy or generally unhappy with their overall relationship, they're more likely to have affairs.

Now this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, right?

Yeah, sure, tell me something your grandmother couldn't tell you.

You're unhappy in the relationship, you're more likely to have an affair.

But it turns out the same is not true for men.

That is, there are at least some studies that show that if you compare men who have affairs with men who don't, there's no difference in how happy they are with the relationship.

And that's why you can have men, and just to bring up, I don't know, movie star examples, like this is an older 1, but Hugh Grant was involved with Elizabeth Hurley.

And he's like having sex with a prostitute in LA.

Why is he cheating with Elizabeth Hurley?

Now in his case, in that case, the male motivation for affairs differs on average substantially from the female motivation.

And that is that men have this tremendous desire for sexual variety, meaning a variety of sex partners.

Men tend to have a higher sex drive in general, on average, and so they try to satisfy.

So even men who are involved with or married to Classically beautiful, beautiful women sometimes have affairs, and people are very puzzled by this, but that desire for sexual variety is what drives most men into affairs.

And so there's a dramatic sex difference in why men have affairs with desire for sexual variety pushing most men into it.

It's like, I think it was Chris Rock said, men are only as faithful as their opportunity.

You get a low-cost opportunity, a lot of men act on it.

If you're like an academic, you're away at a conference, you're in a different town, you know, some fall into bed with someone else, 1 night stand a brief affair and that's that.

Of course, some women do it just for sexual variety too, but that's a minority.


Speaker 0: The Jerogen Experience And there have been, you know, maybe 4 or 5 leading hypotheses about why women do it. And this is 1 area where I've changed my mind on pretty dramatically. So early on, a former student of mine, Marty Hazelton, who's now a professor at UCLA and other friends and colleagues like Steve Gangestad and Randy Thornhill, put forward this idea that the reason that women do it is that they're pursuing a dual mating strategy. That is, they're trying to get investment from 1 guy, like the good dads, but good genes from another guy. And so it's...

Is there

Speaker 1: any research done on what type of mate a woman is likely to cheat on?

Speaker 0: Well, that's a good question. So there's been some and it's not conclusive. But basically the only way this could work, and I have to back up just a second on that, we know that affairs are very costly for women. So if discovered, they result in infidels, result in violence, sometimes they result in killing, you know, getting to the killing, I don't know if we wanna get into that maybe later in our conversation.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you wrote a whole book on murder.

Speaker 0: I wrote a whole book on murder, yeah. You know, Yeah, the murder next door. But also, women suffer more than men. If an infidelity is discovered, they suffer reputational damage. They suffer sometimes social ostracism.

It's cataclysmic for their relationship. In fact, it's 1 of the leading causes of divorce worldwide across cultures is if there's a female infidelity. And so the issue is what benefit could be so great to a woman that she's willing to risk all these costs if it's discovered? And so the good genes dual mating strategy argument could work in principle, and it could work if there were no costs. And this is 1 of the reasons why men and women commit infidelities in secret.

It's been driven underground. People don't go on Twitter and say, hey, I just had an affair on my partner. It's driven underground. People try to keep it under wraps so they don't experience the cost. And of course, there are costs to men as well by being discovered.

They're just not as cataclysmic as they are for women. So the only way it would work though, is if the, getting back to your original question, is if there's a large discrepancy between the woman's regular partner and her affair partner in terms of the quality of his genes. And so what these good genes dual mating strategy theorists propose is that there are certain markers of good genetic quality. They hypothesized masculine features, and there's a logic behind that. They hypothesize symmetrical features, so we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, so normal development, you know, our hands, our arms, our legs grow, you know, more or less symmetrically, but there are things that cause deviations from symmetry.

So mutations, so genetic mutations can cause deviations. Diseases can cause asymmetries and environmental insults in a variety of ways. And so what the good genes theorists argue is that if someone is, if the male is very symmetrical, then that's a marker that he's not experienced a history of disease or environmental insults or a high mutation load, or has a, what they call a developmental system that's very kind of impervious to these insults. So even though they've suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they still maintain that symmetry. Well, I think there are problems with that.

But anyway, back to backtrack a second why I changed my mind. So I used to advocate this, well it seems It's logically plausible, but I started to doubt it. And I started to doubt it for 2 reasons. 1 is some replication, some larger scale replications of the work started to fail to replicate the original finding. So what they did is, how did they test this?

What they looked at is, do women change their preferences when they're ovulating? So because it's only in that narrow window of ovulation that she's gonna be getting the good genes. So what they looked at is women's normal mate preferences and they tracked them over the ovulation cycle and do they change to prefer more masculine, more symmetrical features when they're ovulating and then go back to their normal preferences. And the initial study suggested, yes, they do. Initial study suggested that when women have affairs, it tends to coincide with when they're ovulating and some other things like that.

Speaker 1: How do they gather this data?

Speaker 0: Well, it's very difficult and time-consuming data, but it started out with crude methods such as estimating the woman's time of ovulation through a backward counting method.

Speaker 1: But I mean, how do they get people to even become a part of a study where they admit that they have cheated on their husbands?

Speaker 0: Oh, well, so that's a different question. These studies just looked at changes in mate preferences. So- Right, but

Speaker 1: you're talking about affairs. It's not just changes in mate preferences. It's a decision to have intercourse Right someone other than your husband, right? How do you write? How do you want to study

Speaker 0: right and they haven't much studies like that. So they haven't said

Speaker 1: they haven't

Speaker 0: yeah No, no, so

Speaker 1: how do they know?

Speaker 0: They don't it's just do the mate preferences change at ovulation in the predicted, in the ways predicted by the theory?

Speaker 1: OK, so how would they find that out? How would they find out if a woman's mate strategies changed and if her preferences changed based on ovulation?

Speaker 0: So they basically get women, and then they track them throughout the cycle And so that and they can do this now they can do it through hormonal assays So there are you know ovulation kits that they can assess

Speaker 1: so what do they have like a Survey they fill out like who you attracted to today Harry Styles. What about tomorrow?

Speaker 0: Something like

Speaker 1: that Jason Momoa. I must be ovulating

Speaker 0: right right or basically they show Photographic images and so they women just rate. Oh, how attractive is this guy? And so what they, and then independently, they can assess masculinity like Jason, how do you pronounce his name? Momoa. Momoa.

Aquaman. Yeah, he's like super masculine. I remember him, I don't think I saw Aquaman, but I remember him from Game of Thrones yeah and yeah when Tony and the Barbarian too yeah so yeah he would be a perfect example. Highly masculine features, you know, the square jaw, heavy brow ridges, you know, a good shoulder to hip ratio. So, you know, typically masculine features.

And so they would look at, do women rate the photos of these masculine and symmetrical guys more attractive when they're ovulating than when they're not ovulating? That's basically what they did. And the bottom line, so there's some conceptual problems with that of, you know, does symmetry and masculinity, why are these the sole features that mark good genes? Because there are also a lot of things that have moderate heritability. It's 1 of the things we know from the heritability studies.

A zillion things show moderate heritability. But here's what really convinced me. So 1 is the failures to replicate those studies. So the larger scale studies failed to find those preference shifts at ovulation. But when I started to look at the literature about women who were having affairs and the reasons that they're having affairs, and the nature of the affairs, there are things that cropped up like this.

79%, 1 study found 79% of women fell in love with or became emotionally involved with her affair partner. And to me, this is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you're trying to pursue that dual mating strategy idea. You want to get the good genes and then forget about the guy. So as not to jeopardize your investment from the regular partner. And so it's really a design feature that's counter to that notion.

Speaker 1: Can I stop you here? But it seems to me that you're pursuing this like as if it's a logical endeavor That's based on trying to achieve an outcome and I think it's far more likely you're dealing with mental illness alcohol you know emotional imbalance extreme desire for attention Narcissism which leads people to seek out exorbitant amounts of attention from other people like you have to take that into account Don't you?

Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so It's a fair point and those things Aren't necessarily inconsistent if you ask like what who has affairs and what are their personality? Characteristics. Okay, but affairs happen in all cultures or virtually all cultures unless the women are extremely cloistered as they are in some cultures where they're like, they cannot leave the home without a male bodyguard.

But affairs happen in all cultures. Would you like

Speaker 1: some coffee?

Speaker 0: Sure, I'd love some. Thank you.

Speaker 1: So affairs happen in all cultures.

Speaker 0: Yeah, affairs happen in all cultures. And so a competing hypothesis about why, and this is the 1 I'm currently putting my money on, if there's a horse race, is what I call the mate switching hypothesis and and this is the notion that women who are in relationships who are Where the relationship is going south Perhaps the partner starts out looking promising, but has failed to live up to his promise. Perhaps he becomes an alcoholic or a drug addict or loses his job or starts abusing her, starts beating her up. That women use affairs as a mate switching device either to divest herself of her regular partner or and or to trade up in the mating market to someone who's more desirable, or to make it easier to transition back into the mating market on the notion, on the assumption that she'll be able to find someone more desirable out there. And so there's at least a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that supports the mate switching hypothesis, like the 1 I just mentioned.

With 79% of women becoming emotionally involved or falling in love with their partner, this suggests, you know, it's not just, oh, I'm seeking transient attention, as you mentioned. Some women might do it for that, of course. But it suggests that they're forming a long-term attachment to this other guy rather than their regular partner. So here's another 1. And this may seem like super, super obvious.

Is that women who are unhappy with their regular relationship, either sexually unhappy or generally unhappy with their overall relationship, they're more likely to have affairs. Now this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, right? Yeah, sure, tell me something your grandmother couldn't tell you. You're unhappy in the relationship, you're more likely to have an affair. But it turns out the same is not true for men.

That is, there are at least some studies that show that if you compare men who have affairs with men who don't, there's no difference in how happy they are with the relationship. And that's why you can have men, and just to bring up, I don't know, movie star examples, like this is an older 1, but Hugh Grant was involved with Elizabeth Hurley. I don't know if you remember that 1. And he's like having sex with a prostitute in LA. Why is he cheating with Elizabeth Hurley?

Kind of crazy. Now in his case, in that case, the male motivation for affairs differs on average substantially from the female motivation. And that is that men have this tremendous desire for sexual variety, meaning a variety of sex partners. Men tend to have a higher sex drive in general, on average, and so they try to satisfy. So even men who are involved with or married to Classically beautiful, beautiful women sometimes have affairs, and people are very puzzled by this, but that desire for sexual variety is what drives most men into affairs.

And so there's a dramatic sex difference in why men have affairs with desire for sexual variety pushing most men into it. It's like, I think it was Chris Rock said, men are only as faithful as their opportunity. You get a low-cost opportunity, a lot of men act on it. If you're like an academic, you're away at a conference, you're in a different town, you know, some fall into bed with someone else, 1 night stand a brief affair and that's that. But women, It's really different.

Of course, some women do it just for sexual variety too, but that's a minority. If you

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The Reasons for Female vs. Male Infidelity Explained by Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss