David Buss is an evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin. He is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His current research is on sex differences in mate selection, mate attraction, infidelity, and the emotions of jealousy, lust, and love. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:19 - Sex vs Violence
9:04 - Mating strategies
21:00 - Social construct of beauty
24:54 - Evolution of mating evaluation
28:56 - Mating selection desires
34:08 - Difficulties of monogamy
40:32 - Importance of male appearance
43:08 - Importance of wealth
46:23 - Penis and breasts
50:15 - Fashion
53:14 - Body objectification
1:00:49 - Wear sunscreen
1:07:45 - Gender
1:24:54 - What motivates humans
1:26:44 - Dominance and submissiveness
1:34:49 - Johnny Depp defamation trial
1:44:40 - Jealousy
1:53:00 - Mate poaching
1:57:13 - Polyamory
2:08:29 - Female vs Male sexuality
2:17:27 - Pornography
2:24:01 - Sex and Violence continued
2:33:10 - Cancel culture
2:44:54 - Elon Musk and Twitter
2:53:18 - Serial killers
2:59:11 - Advice for young people
3:11:12 - Love
3:17:13 - Mortality
3:21:56 - Meaning of life

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Tell me all the things women want in a long-term mate.

And so I would start at 1 end of the blackboard, there were like 5 blackboards, and I'd say, well, I want a mate who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values, and I just go and I fill out 5 blackboards and then run out of space.

So then when I turn to the men and I say, well, what do men want?

And then I run out of space after about a blackboard and a half, because they can't think of anything else.

I think there's a lot of explanations for that.

The following is a conversation with David Buss, evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin, researching human sex differences in mate selection.

He's considered 1 of the founders of evolutionary psychology and has authored many exciting and challenging books including The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating, Bad Men, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault, and the murderer next door, why the mind is designed to kill.

We talk a lot about sex, dating, relationships, and love.

I take these at times controversial topics very seriously, but I also try to inject humor and ridiculousness throughout this conversation and all conversations I do.

Please do not mistake my silliness for a lack of seriousness and my seriousness for a lack of silliness.

And above all, do not mistake my suit and tie or my PhD as a sign of intelligence or wisdom.

I barely know what I'm talking about on most days.

I'm simply curious and hoping to understand the way a child does, what the heck is going on in this weird and wonderful civilization of ours.

If I say something stupid, as I often do, I promise to learn and to improve.

As Mark Twain said, I do not want my schooling to interfere with my education.

Open-minded curiosity, I think, is the best guide for a proper and fun, lifelong education.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's David Buss.

What is more important in the history of the development of human civilization, sex or violence?

So mating strategies or military strategies?

I mean, first of all, humans are a sexually reproducing species, and so everything has to go through sex.

So our mating psychology has to be very rich and complex because to succeed, for us to be here now, All of our ancestors in an unbroken chain have had to succeed in selecting a fertile mate, attracting that mate, be mutually chosen by that mate, stay together long enough, do all the sexual things you need to do to reproduce, have the kids survive, et cetera.

And in that sense, I think it's, I mean, survival is really only a means to an end, if you will.

So sex has got to be important, and humans have a very rich, evolved sexual psychology, or evolved mating psychology.

Okay, but I wouldn't minimize the importance of violence either.

There's a ton of evidence that humans evolved in the context of small groups and with a fair amount of small group warfare, so intertribal warfare, where, and this is a harsh realization, but there historically, this is part of our bad evolutionary history, it has been advantageous from a purely reproductive standpoint to conquer a neighboring group, kill the males, and get whatever resources they have, including females and sexual resources, as well as tools, weapons, territory, and so forth.

And of course, it's typically males who do that.

I mean, yes, some females have participated in warfare, but as far as I know, there's never been a single case in all of human recorded history of women forming a war tribe with other women to attack another group of women and kill them and capture the men as husbands.

But this phenomenon is common in the ethnographic record and small group studies.

So just 1 concrete example, unfortunately he's dead now, he passed away.

Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Yanomamo for many, many years.

When he first started interviewing them, he asked them, you know, why do you go to war?

And they said, well, to capture women, of course, but it's the only sensible reason.

And they said, why does your culture go to war?

And he said, well, we go to war to spread democracy and ideas and everything.

They basically fell off their logs laughing at such a stupid reason, because why risk your life for anything other than women?

Of course, it's more complex than that because some go to war for reputational reasons.

They say if we don't retaliate, because we've been attacked and they've stolen 3 of our women.

If we don't retaliate, then we will get a reputation as exploitable, and then other groups will start to attack us as well.

And so they get into these cycles of, You know, like the Hatfields and McCoys of attacks, counterattacks, retribution, and part of it is reputation management.

So that's between groups, and I think that's been the primary source of violence, but not the only source.

And so many ethnographies, many traditional societies have things, some of them are ritualized like wrestling matches or in the Anamama, they have these, or used to these chest-pounding duels where, so if we're in this match, you challenge me and I have to of course

Yeah, so they get 20 paces away and they run up and you punch the other guy in the chest and he has to basically stand there.

And then it's basically last man standing.

That's, well, I suppose that's better than the face.

That's an interesting decision with the chest.

I mean, I'm sure if you get good at that kind of thing, you could start breaking ribs.

And you can get loose about the rules of where exactly in the chest you can hit.

And there's that guy who's always known for hitting not exactly in the chest, accidentally missing.

Right, right, the Mike Tyson of- Exactly,

So there's like ritualized conflict to sort of purify the competition that resolves some kind of issue.

Well, yeah, it's in part to establish status hierarchies.

But also, and here's just another, 1 more concrete point on that.

The yanomamo, we don't have this in our language.

We just have 1 word for kill or murder, but Yanomamo have, you're either an, if you're a male, you're an unokai or a non-unokai.

The non-unokai are men who have not killed.

If you're an unokai, that means you have killed someone.

And the unokai among the Anomamo historically had higher status and more wives.

So they're a polygynous society, which has been true of something like 83 to 85% of traditional societies were actually, I was just corrected by an anthropologist.

She said, we no longer call them traditional societies.

Yeah, I think it's just 1 of these things, the language, the words that are deemed appropriate to use to describe things change over time.

Yeah, so words can hurt people, they can inspire people.

You authored a textbook titled Evolutionary Psychology, The New Science of Mind in its sixth edition.

What is the magic ingredient that gave birth to Homo sapiens, do you think?

Is it fire, cooking, ability to collaborate, share ideas, ability to contemplate our own mortality, all that kind of stuff?

Yeah, well, I think it's hard to isolate 1 factor.

I know you've had Richard Wrangham on this podcast.

He used to be a colleague of mine when I was a professor at Michigan, and I've stayed in touch with him.

And he thinks fire and cooking have been 1 of the key Things but I think it's hard to isolate.

I would trace at least part of our uniqueness to The uniqueness of our mating system.

So we have in in mating Unlike chimpanzees who are our closest primate relative and of which Richard Wrangham is a world's expert, but they have basically no long-term pair-bonded mating.

The female comes into estrus, all the mating, all the sex happens, most of the sex happens during that window.

But humans have evolved long-term pair-bonded mating.

And it's only 1 mating strategy, but it's a really important 1.

And then you have with that male parental care.

So basically again, you go back to chimps and chimps with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA, males don't do anything.

So they inseminate the females, but then when the kids are born, they basically don't do much of anything in terms of provisioning and so forth.

We invest in the modern environment, could be decades, you know, especially with the Boomerang kids and everything, but we're, not all males do, but compared to the vast majority of mammals, we are a very heavy male parental investment species.

Could you, if it's okay, and I'll ask you a bunch of dumb basic questions, because those are fun.

Is mating referred to the series of sexual acts that lead to reproduction?

Does it include dating and love and camaraderie,

I, you know, when I first started studying it, yeah, I don't, when I first started studying it, I looked for the right term, and obviously it's much broader than sex.

So by mating I include things like mate selection, mate preferences, mate attraction, mate retention, mate poaching, mate expulsion.

So the early, the game theoretic strategy of mate selection is primary what mating is about, or do you include the long-term, once you agree that you're gonna stick this out for a while and have multiple children, is that also mating?

And absolutely includes the emotion of love.

And of course there are many different types of love, brotherly love, love of parents for children.

But love I think, and this is 1 of the shifts in the social sciences.

So when I was an undergraduate, for example, I was taught that love is this invention by some Caucasian European poets a couple hundred years ago.

So there's been extensive cross-cultural evidence now that people, not every person in all cultures, of course, but some people in all cultures experience this emotion that we call love.

in this conversation, try to stick to sort of romantic love for the meaning of the word love?

Well, that's a great question, but I mean, it's pretty well established that there are these different phases of love.

So there's this infatuation phase where Our psychology, we get obsessional thoughts.

It's hard to focus on work when we're not with the person we're thinking about, the other person constantly.

So there's kind of like ideational intrusion into our psychology, but you can't sustain that.

I mean, it'd be, and then of course, there's a, pardon the phrase, but what I describe as the fucking like bunnies phase of this intense sexuality, but People have other adaptive problems they have to solve.

And so you can't stay in that state for too long.

And so that subsides over time and develops into, at least in many cases, this warm attachment.

Cuddling bunnies, long-term cuddling bunnies.

Phase of the relationship, but still romantic, not like brotherly love or, you know, because I talk about love a lot, and for me, you know, love is a broader experience of just experiencing the joy and the beauty of life.

That's a kind of love, like whatever the chemicals that lead to a feeling that at least echoes the same kind of feeling that you get with romantic love.

You can experience that with even inanimate objects.

That sounds weird to say, but just a gratitude and appreciation, not in some kind of weird zen way, but just in a very human way.

I guess I would, I mean, that's an interesting thought.

I guess I would use other terms to describe that.

So like the term awe, for example, when you see a beautiful sunset.

That's why I kind of started out by saying I think there are different types of love, and I'm focusing on the mating type.

And we'll talk about that, but so yeah, there is a sense of beauty, and there's a sense of sexual appeal, maybe that's a good, and those intersect in fascinating ways.

But you're saying mating strategies, not that we've kind of placed ourself, what we mean by mating.

Mating strategies is 1 of the cool features that made humans what they are.

1 of the initial inventions is the weird and wonderful ways that we mate.

Yeah, and I mean if you go to even things like how we compete for mates, and this is another kind of strange, for some people, angle on it, but mating is inherently a competitive process in that desirable mates are in scarce supply relative to the numbers of people who want them.

And so even post-mating, that is after mate selection, mate attraction, and mutual mate choice, desirable mate, That's why there's mate poaching.

Mate poaching is 1 of the strategies that we in my lab with David Schmidt have studied.

And so, okay, but 1 of the unique aspects of humans is that we compete using language.

And that is, we have reputations, and humans devote a lot of effort to maintaining the reputations, to building the reputations, to trying to recover reputations after a loss of reputation for various reasons.

But we compete for mates using language and that includes sending signals to the person that we're trying to attract using language, verbal fluency and obviously some more recent things like poetry.

But also we use language to derogate our competitors.

So 1 of the papers I published very early on was a research project on derogation of competitors, the ways in which people impugn the status, character, and reputations of their rivals with the goal of making them less desirable to other people.

And humans do that, and women and men both do that.

So it's an interesting thing that we're male competition.

We were talking about the Yanomamo earlier and some of these overt physical or what animal biologists call contest competition, where there's a physical battle.

Males do that, and so a lot of the early attention on mate competition was focused on these sort of ostentatious, overt battles in contest competition.

But we compete through language, And so there's this big overlooked domain of women, the ways in which women compete with each other using language.

And 1 of the things that astonished me is how observant women are about the subtle imperfections in their rivals and take pains to point them out.

So just as a random example, I went to a party, this is back in my youth, but went to a party with my girlfriend at the time, and I got into this conversation with another woman who happened to be very attractive.

But then we leave the party and she said something just casually offhanded, like she said, did you notice that her thighs were heavy?

And I hadn't, but next time I saw this other woman, I found my attention being drawn to check out her thigh.

Well, and originally it puzzled me why women would derogate other women on appearance.

Well, they do it of course because men prioritize appearance but I thought, well, the man can see the woman directly with his own eyes, why would verbal input alter his perceptions of how attractive he was?

And I think that part of it is, I think there are actually 2 quick answers to that.

So our attentional field, when they draw attention to it, those what could be very small deviations from perfect symmetry or whatever they are become magnified in our attentional field.

But the other is that who we have as a mate is also a reflection of our own status.

And you saw this in a kind of overt and way in the earlier, the last presidential, not the last, the 2016 presidential election where Donald Trump was saying, this was when he was in competition with Ted Cruz, I think, in the primary, he said, Look at my wife, look at Ted Cruz's wife, and he really impugned the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife.

So using language, you can alter the dynamics of the social hierarchy, the status hierarchy, sorry.

So like you can change the values subtly or if you have a large platform in big ways, you can move things around just with your words.

Yeah, because it's all socially constructed anyway.

So this, I mean, the question I have is, you said there's the interesting thing about mating strategies is there's a small pool of desirable mates.

And what the word desirable means is socially defined almost by on purpose to make sure the pool always stays small.

Now it's an interesting issue, set of issues you raise.

Okay, 1 is that I think we have evolved adaptations, part of our psychology is to detect differences.

And so this is why, like a, I don't know, a Martian or an alien coming down, they might look at humans and say, boy, they all look alike.

Just like we look at, I don't know, zebras or whatever,

But what's important in decision-making, especially in the mating domain or even friendship domain or coalitional selection domain, is the differences.

And so I noticed this just a concrete example of this.

I was sitting around, this is again, ages ago, watching a something like a Miss America beauty contest, and people in there with a bunch of other people, and they were saying, boy, did you see Miss North Carolina?

So, here are like 50 contestants who were selected as the most attractive in their state, presumably, although they claim it's based on talent.

And this is why I would push back a little bit on the term socially constructed because I think it's, there are many different meanings of that phrase and 1 meaning that some people have, 1 connotation is that it's arbitrary and I don't think it's arbitrary.

So this has been another shift in understanding standards of beauty where it used to be believed in the social sciences.

You know, don't judge people on the superficial characteristics.

But in fact, physical appearance provides a wealth of information about the health status of someone, they're, in the case of males, they're physical formidability, and we have formidability assessment adaptations, and then fertility as well.

So there are a very predictable set of cues to fertility that have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness, and they're not arbitrary.

There are some culturally arbitrary ones.

So like you go to the Maori in New Zealand, for example, and they find tattoos on their lips to be very attractive.

So there are some culturally arbitrary things, but standards of beauty like cues to youth, cues to health in women, clear skin, full lips, clear eyes, lustrous hair, a small waist-hip ratio, that is circumference of the waist relative to the hips, is acute to youth and fertility, and acute to health.

Symmetrical features, so we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, but we all have deviations from perfect symmetry that are due to different things, so mutation, load, environmental insults, diseases during development, and so forth.

All right, but that's kind of deeply biological.

Like there's cues that indicate something that is biologically true about a particular human.

So if we will talk about both men and women.

So we're not talking about what men want in the mating strategies when they look at women.

So you're saying small waist to hip ratio.

How much of that is our deep biological past on top of which we can build all kinds of different standards of beauty.

So, you know, we have many things going on in our brain.

Our value of other humans in selecting a mate might incorporate a lot more variables as we get into the 21st century.

So how quickly does our valuation of a mate evolve relative to the evolution of the human species?

They're using evolve in the sense of culturally evolved?

and then relative to biologically evolved.

Yeah, well, I think that there are some things that are biologically evolved, some standards of attractiveness.

And there are some of the things that I mentioned.

So in male evaluation of females, let me back up and just say, what is the underlying logic?

Why would we have standards of attractiveness?

So here's the interesting thing, and this gets back to your earlier question about what is unique to humans or what distinguishes us or what set us off on the path that we did, is chimpanzee males do not have any difficulty figuring out when a female is fertile.

She signals that like crazy with the bright red genital swelling, olfactory cues, she goes into estrus.

In humans, we have, and this was actually a third thing that I wanted to add earlier, we have concealed ovulation, okay, relatively concealed ovulation, which is remarkable given how close we are primatologically to chimpanzees.

And so there's a little bit of evidence that there are subtle changes that occur when women ovulate, non-women not on hormonal contraceptives.

Is that a powerful invention for the human species?

I think it's an adaptation in women, that women have evolved concealed ovulation.

It gives more, would it give more power for women to select a mate?

There are a couple different hypotheses about it, but the 1 that I think is most plausible is that, again, comparing it to chimps, female goes into estrus, the male just has to try to monopolize her while she's in that estrous phase, and then they basically ignore the females after that.

If you can't know when a woman is fertile, then you have to stick around a lot longer.

And so I think long-term pair bonding co-evolved with concealed ovulation.

And with that, also, a very different form of sexuality, which is that we have sex throughout the ovulatory cycle.

There's a little bit of mating, a little bit of sex toward the edges of the estrous cycle, but very little.

So that actually makes mating a more fundamental part of interaction between humans than it does for chimps.

So meaning like year round, every day, constantly selecting mates in terms of biologically speaking.

Today in the 21st century versus in the caveman days?

though, I have to distinguish between long-term mating and short-term mating.

And in long-term mating, it gets very complicated.

Well, so I teach a course in human sexuality at University of Texas at Austin.

And 1 of the things, this is back in the days when there were chalkboards and you taught with a piece of chalk and wrote things on the board.

And what I would do is I would ask the class, I'd teach this large class, 1 to 200, I'd say, what do women want?

And so I would start at 1 end of the blackboard, and there were like 5 blackboards, and I'd say, well, I want a mate who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values, and I'd fill up 5 blackboards and then run out of space.

And so, first, this large number of characteristics that people want, and then specific magnitudes of those characteristics or amounts.

So I say, you want a maid who's, say, generous with their resources, and they say, yes, I want a maid who's generous with her resources.

So I said, so like a guy who, this is in women's maid selection, a guy who, at the end of every month, gets his paycheck and gives it to the local wino on the drag, And I said, well, no, not that generous.

Generous toward me, not indiscriminately generous.

And so you want a mate who's ambitious, who's a hard worker, yes, but not a workaholic, you know?

And so then you get to interactions among different characteristics.

lot of characteristics, a lot of variables in this very complex optimization problem for women.

Yes, that's right, And more so for women than for men.

So then I turn to the men and I say, well what do men want?

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David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast #282