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

00:00:00.320 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology

00:00:12.160 | and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.280 | My guest today is Dr. David Buss.

00:00:17.740 | Dr. Buss is a professor of psychology

00:00:19.800 | at the University of Texas, Austin,

00:00:21.760 | and he is one of the founding members and luminaries

00:00:24.080 | in the field of evolutionary psychology.

00:00:26.800 | Dr. Buss's laboratory is responsible

00:00:29.160 | for understanding the strategies that humans use

00:00:32.400 | to select mates in the short and long term.

00:00:35.480 | And he is an expert in sex differences in mating strategy.

00:00:39.520 | His laboratory has explored, for instance,

00:00:41.600 | why women cheat on their spouses or their long-term partners

00:00:45.780 | as well as why men tend to cheat on their spouses

00:00:48.360 | and long-term partners.

00:00:50.160 | He's also explored a number of things related

00:00:52.720 | to the courtship dance that we call dating

00:00:55.440 | and securing a mate,

00:00:57.260 | including the use of deception related

00:00:59.600 | to proclamations of love or promises of finances

00:01:03.080 | or sexual activity.

00:01:04.360 | Dr. Buss's laboratory has also evaluated

00:01:06.720 | how status is assessed,

00:01:08.560 | meaning how we evaluate our own worth

00:01:11.540 | and our potential as a mate,

00:01:13.480 | and who is, let's just say, within range

00:01:16.800 | of a potential mate, both in the short and long term.

00:01:20.000 | For instance, today we talk about

00:01:21.880 | how people don't just make direct assessments

00:01:24.840 | of their own and other people's value

00:01:26.840 | as a potential mate,

00:01:27.980 | but also using the assessments of others

00:01:30.260 | to indirectly determine whether or not

00:01:32.260 | they stand a chance or not in securing somebody

00:01:35.180 | as a short or long-term mate.

00:01:37.160 | His laboratory has also focused on some of the complicated

00:01:40.520 | and varied emotions related to mating love

00:01:43.000 | in relationships such as lust and jealousy.

00:01:46.540 | And he's extensively explored something

00:01:48.680 | called mate poaching or the various strategies

00:01:51.480 | that men and women use to make sure

00:01:53.180 | that the person that they want to be with

00:01:54.900 | or the person they are with is not with anyone else

00:01:57.800 | or seeking anyone else,

00:01:59.540 | and indeed that other people don't seek their mate.

00:02:03.360 | Dr. Buss's work also relates to how biological influences,

00:02:07.140 | such as ovulation or time within the menstrual cycle,

00:02:10.420 | influences mate selection or tendency to have sex or not

00:02:14.940 | with a potential short or long-term mate.

00:02:17.700 | And more recent work from Dr. Buss's laboratory

00:02:20.660 | focuses on the darker aspects of mating

00:02:23.180 | and sexual behavior in humans,

00:02:24.620 | including stalking and sexual violence.

00:02:27.460 | Today, we discuss all those topics.

00:02:30.060 | We also discuss some of the strategies that humans can use

00:02:33.340 | to make healthy mate selection choices

00:02:35.860 | and for those that are already in committed relationships

00:02:38.540 | to ensure healthy progression

00:02:40.180 | of those committed relationships.

00:02:41.900 | In addition to publishing dozens

00:02:43.460 | of landmark scientific studies,

00:02:45.780 | Dr. Buss has authored many important books.

00:02:48.760 | A few of those include "The Evolution of Desire"

00:02:51.380 | and "Why Women Have Sex."

00:02:53.500 | And his most recent book is the one that I'm reading now,

00:02:56.520 | which is called "When Men Behave Badly,

00:02:59.260 | The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,

00:03:01.100 | Harassment, and Assault."

00:03:02.580 | And it's an absolutely fascinating read.

00:03:04.940 | It has endorsements from Dr. Robert Sapolsky,

00:03:08.060 | professor at Stanford,

00:03:08.980 | who's been on this podcast as a guest before,

00:03:11.520 | as well as Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt,

00:03:15.740 | who wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind."

00:03:18.220 | It's a really important book, I believe,

00:03:20.380 | and one that doesn't just get into the darker aspects

00:03:22.820 | of human mating behavior and violence,

00:03:24.840 | but also strategies that people can take

00:03:26.800 | to ensure healthy mating behavior and relationships.

00:03:30.680 | There's so much rumor, speculation,

00:03:32.660 | and outright fabrication of ideas

00:03:36.180 | about why humans select particular mates

00:03:38.640 | in the short and long term,

00:03:40.240 | what men and women do differently, and so on.

00:03:42.820 | What I love about Dr. Buss's work

00:03:44.500 | is that it's grounded in laboratory studies

00:03:47.380 | that are highly quantitative using rigorous statistics.

00:03:50.680 | And so throughout today's discussion,

00:03:52.220 | you'll notice that I'm wrapped with attention,

00:03:54.220 | trying to extract as much information as I can

00:03:56.420 | from Dr. Buss about the real science

00:03:59.260 | of human mate selection and mating strategy.

00:04:02.060 | I'm certain that everyone will take away

00:04:03.680 | extremely valuable knowledge

00:04:05.200 | that they can use in existing or future relationships

00:04:08.020 | from this discussion with Dr. Buss.

00:04:10.260 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:13.060 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:16.100 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:18.240 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:04:20.180 | about science and science-related tools

00:04:22.320 | to the general public.

00:04:23.700 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:08:29.840 | And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss.

00:08:33.920 | Well, David, delighted to be here.

00:08:35.880 | I've followed your work for a number of years,

00:08:38.220 | and I'm excited to ask you a number of questions

00:08:40.280 | about these super interesting topics

00:08:42.560 | about how people select mates,

00:08:45.520 | how they lie, cheat, but also behave well

00:08:50.520 | in this dance that we call mate choice.

00:08:53.320 | - Yes, yeah.

00:08:54.160 | Fortunately, there are well-behaving humans in the mix here.

00:08:58.840 | - Good to know.

00:08:59.680 | Just to start off,

00:09:02.460 | perhaps you could just orient us a little bit

00:09:05.480 | about mate choice.

00:09:07.080 | You know, some of the primary criteria

00:09:10.500 | that studies show men and women use

00:09:14.400 | in order to select mates,

00:09:16.120 | both, shall we call them transient mates,

00:09:20.200 | as well as lifetime mates.

00:09:22.260 | - Right, well, that's a critical distinction

00:09:23.960 | because what people look for

00:09:25.680 | in a long-term committed mateship,

00:09:27.980 | like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship

00:09:31.200 | is different from what people look for

00:09:33.360 | in a hookup or casual sex or one-night stand

00:09:36.520 | or even a brief affair.

00:09:38.800 | So that's actually critical.

00:09:41.300 | I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second

00:09:43.900 | and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework

00:09:47.100 | for understanding mate choice.

00:09:49.060 | So it basically stems from Darwin's theory

00:09:51.820 | of sexual selection.

00:09:53.480 | And most people, when they think about evolution,

00:09:55.540 | they think about cliches like survival of the fittest

00:09:59.380 | or nature, red in tooth and claw.

00:10:02.160 | And Darwin noticed that there were phenomena

00:10:05.100 | that couldn't be explained

00:10:06.420 | by this so-called survival selection,

00:10:08.980 | things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks,

00:10:11.900 | sex differences, like stags, for example,

00:10:15.480 | have these massive antlers

00:10:17.260 | and the females of the species do not.

00:10:20.260 | And so he came up with the theory of sexual selection,

00:10:23.100 | which deals not with the evolution of characteristics

00:10:25.820 | due to their survival advantage,

00:10:27.940 | but rather due to their mating advantage.

00:10:30.380 | And he identified two causal processes

00:10:33.320 | by which mating advantage could occur.

00:10:35.940 | One is intrasexual competition

00:10:38.900 | with the stereotyping two stags locking horns in combat

00:10:43.300 | with the victor gaining sexual access

00:10:45.460 | to the female loser ambling off with a broken antler

00:10:49.100 | and dejected and low self-esteem

00:10:51.180 | and needing psychotherapy perhaps

00:10:53.060 | or mate value improvement therapy.

00:10:57.760 | And the logic was whatever qualities led to success

00:11:01.660 | in these same-sex battles,

00:11:03.100 | those qualities get passed on in greater numbers.

00:11:05.820 | And so you see evolution, which has changed over time

00:11:08.900 | and increase in frequency of the characteristics

00:11:11.980 | associated with winning these,

00:11:13.940 | what Darwin called contest competition.

00:11:16.420 | And we know that the logic of that is more general now

00:11:18.980 | and involves things like in our species competing

00:11:21.540 | for position and status hierarchies.

00:11:24.260 | So anyway, so intrasexual competition is one,

00:11:27.420 | but the second most relevant to your question

00:11:30.960 | about mate choice is preferential mate choice.

00:11:33.980 | That was the second causal pathway.

00:11:36.400 | And the logic there is that if members of one sex

00:11:40.180 | agree with one another, if there's some consensus

00:11:43.120 | about the qualities that are desired,

00:11:45.440 | then those of the opposite sex

00:11:47.060 | who possess the desired qualities

00:11:48.840 | or embody those desired qualities,

00:11:51.020 | they have a mating advantage.

00:11:52.780 | They get chosen, they get preferred,

00:11:55.340 | those lacking desired qualities get banished, shunned,

00:11:58.340 | ignored, or in the modern environment become incels.

00:12:02.420 | And so the logic there is very simple,

00:12:05.240 | but also very powerful.

00:12:06.940 | And that is that whatever qualities are desired,

00:12:10.940 | consensually desired,

00:12:12.100 | if there's some heritable basis to those,

00:12:14.220 | then those increase in frequency over time.

00:12:17.260 | And so, and in the human case,

00:12:19.780 | these two causal processes of sexual selection

00:12:24.500 | are related to each other in that the preferences of,

00:12:27.840 | the mate preferences of one sex

00:12:29.660 | basically set the ground rules for competition

00:12:33.160 | in the opposite sex.

00:12:34.280 | So if, for example, hypothetically,

00:12:36.860 | women preferred to mate with men

00:12:39.500 | who were able and willing to devote resources to them,

00:12:43.160 | then that would create competition among men

00:12:46.120 | to claw their way and beat out other men

00:12:50.460 | in resource acquisition and then displaying

00:12:53.040 | that their willingness to commit that to a particular woman.

00:12:56.180 | And same with women though.

00:12:57.340 | And this is one of the interesting things about humans

00:13:00.740 | is that we have mutual mate choice,

00:13:03.140 | which is not true in all species.

00:13:05.260 | So, and that is that it's not just a matter of,

00:13:08.540 | you know, you selecting someone to be your mate,

00:13:11.680 | they have to reciprocally select you.

00:13:13.920 | And so with mutual mate choice,

00:13:16.600 | we have both preferences,

00:13:19.220 | mate preferences that women have

00:13:22.020 | and mate preferences that men have,

00:13:24.160 | and consequently competition among men

00:13:27.020 | for access to the most desirable women

00:13:29.620 | and competition among women

00:13:31.140 | for access to the most desirable men.

00:13:33.820 | So that's sort of a little bit of theoretical backdrop.

00:13:37.380 | So you asked, well, what are the qualities

00:13:40.440 | that men and women desire?

00:13:42.300 | And maybe we'll start with long-term mating

00:13:45.300 | and then shift to short-term mating.

00:13:48.140 | And long-term mating is interesting in and of itself

00:13:52.260 | in that it's very rare in the mammalian world.

00:13:56.240 | So there are more than 5,000 species of primates

00:13:59.400 | of which, I'm sorry, more than 5,000 species of mammals

00:14:02.620 | of which we are one.

00:14:03.980 | But the percentage of mammals

00:14:07.180 | that have anything resembling

00:14:09.100 | like a pair-bonded long-term mating strategy,

00:14:11.660 | it's about three to 5%.

00:14:13.600 | It's extremely rare.

00:14:14.580 | And even our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees,

00:14:19.060 | they don't have a long-term mating strategy.

00:14:22.460 | They don't have anything resembling pair-bonded mating.

00:14:25.260 | In the chimps, the females come into estrus.

00:14:28.000 | Almost all the sexual activity occurs

00:14:29.940 | during the estrus phase.

00:14:31.820 | After that, males and females basically ignore each other

00:14:35.380 | for the most part, with some exceptions.

00:14:37.680 | But with humans, you have the evolution

00:14:40.400 | of long-term pair-bonding, attachment,

00:14:44.360 | heavy male investment in offspring,

00:14:47.860 | relatively concealed ovulation.

00:14:51.520 | And so these are kind of unique aspects

00:14:53.900 | of the human mating system.

00:14:55.880 | So to get to your question,

00:14:59.060 | so well, what are the qualities?

00:15:00.300 | So the best, the most large-scale study

00:15:04.520 | that's been done on this is a study that I did a while back

00:15:07.500 | of 37 different cultures.

00:15:09.500 | And it's now been replicated by other researchers.

00:15:11.920 | But basically what we found is three clusters of things.

00:15:15.780 | We found qualities that both men and women wanted

00:15:20.100 | in a long-term mate.

00:15:21.900 | We found some qualities that were sex-differentiated,

00:15:25.460 | where women preferred them more than men

00:15:27.540 | or men preferred them more than women.

00:15:29.500 | And then we found some attributes

00:15:31.380 | that were highly variable across cultures

00:15:34.260 | in whether people found these as desirable

00:15:37.340 | or indispensable or irrelevant in a mate.

00:15:40.020 | And so I could give examples of each of these, if that.

00:15:44.060 | - Yeah, that would be great.

00:15:45.300 | I'd love to know what some of the common themes were

00:15:48.100 | across these cultures in terms of what's being,

00:15:51.860 | made and sexually selected for.

00:15:53.980 | - Yeah, so some of the things that were,

00:15:57.720 | so if you talk about universal desire,

00:15:59.700 | so things that men and women share,

00:16:01.580 | there are things like intelligence, kindness,

00:16:06.740 | mutual attraction and love,

00:16:09.420 | which is really kind of heartwarming

00:16:11.140 | 'cause some people think that love

00:16:13.620 | is a recent Western invention by some European poets,

00:16:18.340 | but it turns out it's not true.

00:16:19.580 | You go to the klungsan in Botswana

00:16:22.460 | and they describe pretty much the same experience

00:16:26.420 | as a falling in love as we do,

00:16:29.180 | and even describe the distinction

00:16:31.180 | between this kind of infatuation stage of love

00:16:33.740 | and the attachment phase where you can't maintain

00:16:38.420 | this frenzy of infatuation and obsession for very long,

00:16:43.340 | six weeks, maybe six months at most.

00:16:47.500 | Otherwise you can get nothing else done in your life.

00:16:50.140 | - Yeah, those are those dopamine circuits

00:16:51.560 | firing at high frequency.

00:16:53.340 | - Yeah, so mutual attraction, love,

00:16:58.340 | good health, dependability, emotional stability,

00:17:04.660 | although there's a bit of a sex difference there

00:17:07.680 | with women preferring it a bit more than men.

00:17:09.900 | And so basically, and these may seem obvious,

00:17:14.260 | so no one wants a stupid, mean, ugly, disease-ridden mate.

00:17:19.260 | And so perhaps obvious, but no one knew this

00:17:24.060 | in advance of the 37 culture study.

00:17:26.660 | So these were some universal preferences.

00:17:29.500 | So you go to the Zulu tribe in South Africa

00:17:32.620 | or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil or Portugal or Oslo

00:17:42.220 | or anywhere in the world, and these are qualities

00:17:45.100 | that people universally desire in long-term mates.

00:17:49.420 | Sex differences.

00:17:50.360 | So sex differences basically fell into two clusters.

00:17:53.540 | So women more than men prioritized good earning capacity,

00:17:58.540 | slightly older age, and the qualities associated

00:18:06.540 | with resource acquisition.

00:18:08.320 | So these are things like a man's social status.

00:18:11.860 | Does he have a drive?

00:18:13.020 | Is he ambitious?

00:18:14.380 | Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory

00:18:18.260 | is one way that I like to phrase it,

00:18:19.780 | because women often, they don't look at necessarily

00:18:23.460 | the resources that a guy possesses at this moment,

00:18:28.760 | but what is his trajectory?

00:18:30.460 | And so-

00:18:31.300 | - Just sorry to interrupt, but may I ask,

00:18:33.300 | is there anything known about the commonalities

00:18:36.100 | of how that is assessed?

00:18:38.980 | Is it, you know, he's rolling out of bed early

00:18:42.060 | and running eight miles, he's showing proficiency in school,

00:18:47.060 | he handles himself well socially at parties,

00:18:50.560 | isn't drinking too much, but knows when, you know,

00:18:53.580 | I mean, obviously they're integrating multiple cues.

00:18:56.060 | The brain is a complex place, but is there any information

00:18:59.860 | about what those variables are across cultures?

00:19:03.940 | - Yeah, well, I think that there's been less attention

00:19:08.580 | to that, so that's a great question.

00:19:10.980 | One of the things that we do know across cultures

00:19:13.780 | is that women attend to the attention structure.

00:19:18.020 | So the attention structure is a key determinant of status.

00:19:22.140 | So there's people who are high in status

00:19:23.680 | are those to whom the most people pay the most attention.

00:19:26.820 | - Ah, so the attention of others to them,

00:19:28.420 | not how well a given potential mate can focus

00:19:31.840 | and pay attention necessarily.

00:19:33.260 | - Yes, yeah, exactly.

00:19:35.260 | But women, look, I mean, you know,

00:19:38.880 | is the guy, even in the modern environment,

00:19:41.140 | is the guy spending eight hours a day playing video games,

00:19:45.340 | eating Cheetos and drinking beer,

00:19:47.040 | or is he devoting effort to his professional development?

00:19:51.200 | So hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals,

00:19:56.300 | or is he in an existential crisis,

00:19:59.040 | not knowing what he's gonna do with his life?

00:20:02.460 | So those are some of the qualities that people look for.

00:20:05.460 | And also, women use what's called in the literature

00:20:10.460 | mate choice copying, and this is related in part

00:20:14.100 | to the attention structure, that is,

00:20:16.420 | guys who have passed the filters of multiple women,

00:20:21.420 | those are like pre-approved men.

00:20:28.940 | So we've done studies where you just take a guy,

00:20:31.620 | photograph him alone, versus take the same guy,

00:20:35.580 | put an attractive woman next to him,

00:20:37.140 | or put two women next to him,

00:20:38.940 | and women judge exactly the same guy

00:20:41.080 | to be much more attractive if he's paired with women

00:20:45.860 | than if he's not.

00:20:47.820 | And some guys exploit this in the modern world

00:20:50.780 | by hiring wing women to go with them on dates and so forth.

00:20:54.300 | This is my sister, former girlfriend, or whatever.

00:21:00.260 | So, but you're correct in that women use multiple cues

00:21:05.260 | to assess these things, and they change over time.

00:21:12.500 | So in the modern environment,

00:21:15.620 | even things like the attention structure,

00:21:17.780 | does this guy have a million Twitter followers

00:21:20.460 | or three Twitter followers?

00:21:23.180 | So that is an index of the attention structure,

00:21:26.740 | and hence the status of the guy within the broader community.

00:21:30.700 | So, and from an evolutionary perspective,

00:21:34.360 | it's reasonable that women would prioritize these qualities

00:21:38.620 | because of the tremendous asymmetry

00:21:41.540 | in our reproductive biology,

00:21:43.540 | namely that fertilization occurs internally within women,

00:21:47.020 | not within men.

00:21:47.980 | Women bear the burdens of the nine-month pregnancy,

00:21:51.500 | which is metabolically expensive,

00:21:53.640 | as well as creating opportunity costs

00:21:56.420 | in terms of mobility and solving other tasks

00:22:00.300 | that people need to solve in the course of their lives.

00:22:02.660 | And so one way to phrase that is that the costs

00:22:07.260 | of making a bad mate choice are much heavier for women

00:22:11.120 | when it comes to sexual behavior, certainly,

00:22:14.380 | because, and the benefits correspondingly

00:22:18.340 | of making a wise mate choice are higher for women

00:22:22.020 | in the sexual context.

00:22:24.380 | But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species,

00:22:28.300 | and so what do men value more than women?

00:22:32.340 | Physical attractiveness.

00:22:33.820 | - They rank that as a more important criteria

00:22:38.380 | than do women about men?

00:22:39.740 | - Yes, yeah, exactly.

00:22:41.100 | - Consistently across cultures.

00:22:42.140 | - Consistently, and it's not that women

00:22:43.640 | are indifferent to it.

00:22:46.460 | So women do pay attention to a guy's physical appearance,

00:22:50.020 | his fitness and so forth,

00:22:52.320 | and guys are actually off base in thinking

00:22:56.760 | that women prefer more muscular men than they actually do.

00:23:00.820 | So like in muscle magazines,

00:23:02.320 | these men with bulging biceps and so forth,

00:23:05.380 | women don't find that especially,

00:23:07.680 | but they do prioritize fit men,

00:23:10.080 | a good shoulder to hip ratio

00:23:11.800 | and other qualities of physical appearance,

00:23:14.160 | as well as things like cues to health.

00:23:17.620 | So physical appearance provides a wealth of information

00:23:22.460 | about a person's health status,

00:23:24.740 | but also provides for men a wealth of information

00:23:28.360 | about a woman's fertility, her reproductive value.

00:23:32.100 | Now, not that men think about that consciously.

00:23:34.060 | I mean, you men don't walk down the street

00:23:36.200 | and see a woman and say, oh, I find her attractive

00:23:38.820 | because I think she must be very fertile.

00:23:41.740 | Maybe a few weird people do that,

00:23:43.300 | but most men just, it's like they just find those cues attractive

00:23:47.940 | and the cues are cues associated with youth and health,

00:23:51.600 | because we know that youth is a very powerful cue

00:23:54.620 | to fertility and reproductive value.

00:23:57.320 | So men prioritize physical appearance

00:23:59.100 | and in the field of psychology,

00:24:01.860 | it used to, what I was taught when I was an undergraduate,

00:24:04.900 | that you can't judge a book by its cover,

00:24:07.180 | that physical attractiveness was infinitely arbitrary,

00:24:10.940 | infinitely culturally variable,

00:24:12.980 | and it's simply not true.

00:24:14.700 | We know now based on the last 20 years of scientific studies

00:24:19.700 | that the cues that men find attractive women

00:24:24.640 | are not at all arbitrary.

00:24:26.600 | There is some variation across cultures,

00:24:29.080 | like in relative plumpness versus thinness,

00:24:31.820 | but things like clear skin, clear eyes,

00:24:36.940 | symmetrical features, a low waist to hip ratio,

00:24:42.400 | full lips, lustrous hair,

00:24:46.480 | all these are qualities that are associated

00:24:49.200 | with youth and health and hence have evolved

00:24:52.540 | to be part of our standards of attractiveness.

00:24:54.920 | And so it's not just that men are these superficial creatures

00:24:59.300 | who evaluate women on the basis of appearance,

00:25:02.920 | there's an underlying logic to why they do so.

00:25:05.580 | And as I said, relative youth,

00:25:08.640 | this age thing is one of the largest sex differences

00:25:11.600 | you find in long-term age selection

00:25:13.820 | with women preferring somewhat older men

00:25:16.600 | and men preferring somewhat younger women.

00:25:19.200 | - Is there a consistent age gap

00:25:20.680 | to relate to that statement?

00:25:24.440 | - Yes, there is.

00:25:25.600 | So the age gap though depends on the age of the man.

00:25:30.600 | So we can document this.

00:25:34.760 | So in my studies, what we found is that men preferred women

00:25:38.340 | who were about three to four years younger than they were

00:25:42.300 | on average, and I'll qualify this in a second,

00:25:44.900 | women preferred guys who were about three and a half

00:25:47.080 | to four and a half years older than they were.

00:25:49.980 | So there was a sex difference

00:25:51.080 | going in the opposite direction.

00:25:52.820 | But as men get older, they prefer women

00:25:56.560 | who are increasingly younger than they are.

00:25:59.380 | So one way to gauge this,

00:26:01.740 | so there are actual marriage statistics

00:26:05.780 | and then there are expressed preferences

00:26:08.840 | and both sexes kind of converge.

00:26:11.000 | So if you look at first marriage, second marriage,

00:26:16.000 | third marriage, as if people get divorced and remarried,

00:26:19.180 | average age gap is, in America anyway,

00:26:21.920 | is three years at first marriage with the guys being older,

00:26:25.080 | five years at second marriage

00:26:28.120 | and eight years at third marriage.

00:26:30.080 | So that is as men are getting older

00:26:34.000 | and getting divorced and remarrying,

00:26:35.640 | they are marrying women

00:26:36.600 | who are increasingly younger than they are.

00:26:39.100 | In terms of preferences, it's also expressed in preferences.

00:26:42.980 | So it doesn't go down, so like say a 25-year-old man

00:26:47.980 | would say prefer a woman who's 20 or in her early 20s.

00:26:53.220 | 35-year-old man might prefer a woman

00:26:55.440 | who's in her late 20s or early 30s.

00:26:58.960 | 50-year-old man might prefer a woman who's say 35 to 38.

00:27:04.780 | So the preferences do go up,

00:27:09.080 | but the gap gets increasingly larger.

00:27:11.960 | And the reason that you don't see things like

00:27:15.460 | why aren't men preferring women?

00:27:17.180 | So peak fertility in humans is around age 24, 25.

00:27:20.940 | And so you say, well, why aren't the 60-year-old men

00:27:26.160 | prioritizing 25-year-old women?

00:27:28.520 | Well, as I mentioned, it's a reciprocal,

00:27:33.000 | mutual mate choice phenomenon.

00:27:34.980 | - She constrains the equation as you.

00:27:36.740 | - Well, she constrains it,

00:27:37.920 | but also marriage and long-term mating

00:27:41.020 | are things other than reproductive unions

00:27:44.780 | in the modern environment.

00:27:45.940 | That is, you're supposed to do things as a couple.

00:27:50.940 | And if you get too large an age gap,

00:27:53.100 | then essentially you're in different cultures.

00:27:55.500 | You know, you grow up with different songs

00:27:58.880 | and if the cultural gap gets too large,

00:28:02.820 | you don't understand each other.

00:28:05.120 | So there are constraints on that.

00:28:07.760 | But if you look at contexts

00:28:10.160 | where there are no constraints of that sort,

00:28:12.600 | so historically kings, emperors, despots, et cetera,

00:28:17.600 | and I'll give one more modern example,

00:28:21.360 | they basically prefer young, fertile, attractive females.

00:28:27.520 | And if they have harems, they stock the harems with those

00:28:31.400 | and then circulate them out when they're 30 and so forth.

00:28:33.820 | And so if you look at marriage systems

00:28:36.560 | that are unconstrained,

00:28:38.100 | then the preferences are more likely to be revealed

00:28:42.220 | or within cultures.

00:28:44.180 | That is, if you look at men who are in a position

00:28:46.580 | to get what they want.

00:28:48.020 | So as Mick Jagger noted, you can't always get what you want,

00:28:50.980 | but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

00:28:54.100 | - I hear that most of the time he got what he needed.

00:28:56.500 | - Right, right, he got what he wanted.

00:28:59.140 | Yeah, and maybe what he needed.

00:29:01.220 | If he was in a position, I don't know if he still is,

00:29:04.320 | he's in his 70s now, but he was in a position as was,

00:29:09.180 | let's say Rod Stewart, to take another example,

00:29:11.300 | or Leonardo DiCaprio.

00:29:13.980 | If you were a male who's in a position

00:29:16.600 | where there are thousands of women

00:29:18.720 | potentially available to you and you can have your pick,

00:29:21.960 | then you see that clearer expression for younger females.

00:29:26.060 | There was a chart that was floating around the internet

00:29:29.880 | of the girlfriends of Leonardo DiCaprio.

00:29:33.580 | As he got older, so he's getting older and older,

00:29:36.700 | and the graph of the age of his girlfriends,

00:29:39.120 | it basically stayed the same.

00:29:40.440 | It was in the early 20s or so.

00:29:42.820 | - He values consistency.

00:29:44.420 | - He values consistency.

00:29:46.020 | But so anyway, the data converge on that.

00:29:51.360 | So these are universal sex differences

00:29:54.260 | in long-term mate selection.

00:29:57.420 | So now when we shift to, oh, and I should mention

00:30:00.580 | cultural variability, because that's a critical thing.

00:30:03.560 | 'Cause there is, in my 37 culture study,

00:30:06.660 | what I found was the preference for virginity,

00:30:10.100 | that is no prior sexual experience,

00:30:13.380 | that was the most variable desire across cultures.

00:30:18.340 | So you had cultures like, at the time of the study, China,

00:30:24.320 | it was basically indispensable that a partner be a virgin.

00:30:28.960 | And then at the other end, you have Sweden,

00:30:31.560 | where Sweden and Swedes typically place

00:30:34.220 | close to zero value on it,

00:30:35.580 | and some even find it undesirable.

00:30:37.680 | Like you're weird if you're a virgin.

00:30:40.300 | And so you have this whole spectrum.

00:30:42.440 | - This is virginity in the female, or is this also,

00:30:45.920 | this is not, in China, was it preference

00:30:48.300 | that the male and the female be a virgin?

00:30:50.040 | So mutual mate selection.

00:30:51.580 | - Yeah, it was a preference for both sexes.

00:30:54.880 | But it's a good question,

00:30:56.560 | because where there was a sex difference,

00:30:58.720 | it was always in the direction of males

00:31:01.320 | preferring virginity more than females.

00:31:03.760 | And we've gone back to China.

00:31:05.600 | So I still do research in China, among other places.

00:31:09.160 | And we've gone back and retested modern urban populations.

00:31:13.480 | And the importance of virginity has gone down in China,

00:31:17.820 | especially in the urban areas.

00:31:19.660 | And the sex difference that didn't exist before

00:31:22.640 | has now emerged, where males value it more than females.

00:31:25.880 | And I think part of it was, in previous times,

00:31:29.720 | you hit ceiling effects, where both sexes say,

00:31:33.360 | "Yeah, it's absolutely important to be a virgin."

00:31:36.800 | So there's cultural variation and cultural change over time

00:31:42.320 | in some of these qualities.

00:31:44.020 | But the sex differences that I described

00:31:48.180 | have remained invariant over the years.

00:31:50.520 | So since my 37 culture study, this has been replicated

00:31:54.840 | in at least a couple dozen different cultures.

00:31:58.040 | And we've gone back to some of the cultures.

00:32:01.040 | So I mentioned we've gone back to China, Brazil, and India

00:32:06.040 | to look at cultural changes over time.

00:32:08.560 | And there have been, in some cases,

00:32:11.720 | dramatic cultural changes over time.

00:32:14.060 | But the sex differences that I described are invariant.

00:32:17.120 | They haven't changed a bit.

00:32:19.160 | - I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about truth-telling

00:32:22.840 | and deception, because some of the measures

00:32:24.720 | that you're describing, age, for instance,

00:32:27.920 | one can potentially lie about, right?

00:32:31.420 | I'm guessing that there are people who do that

00:32:32.980 | on online profiles and whatnot.

00:32:35.200 | From what I understand, people also lie about height

00:32:40.020 | and other features on online profiles.

00:32:43.080 | But some of them are much harder to hide, right?

00:32:45.720 | Eventually, the truth comes out about some,

00:32:49.160 | if not all of these things.

00:32:50.640 | So if you would, could you tell us about how men and women

00:32:55.640 | leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating

00:33:00.600 | some of the things around mate choice selection?

00:33:03.920 | - Yeah, well, so basically, both men and women do deceive.

00:33:08.920 | So we have the modern cultural invention of online dating,

00:33:13.800 | which was little used 10 years ago

00:33:17.960 | and virtually absent 20 years ago.

00:33:20.480 | And people do lie, but they lie in predictable ways.

00:33:25.180 | They lie in ways that attempt to embody

00:33:28.660 | the mate preferences of the person they're trying to attract.

00:33:32.040 | And so men do lie.

00:33:34.000 | They deceive about their income, their status.

00:33:37.560 | So they exaggerate their income by about 20%.

00:33:41.200 | They tack on about two inches to their height.

00:33:45.600 | So if they're 5'10", they round up to six feet.

00:33:48.160 | So they don't, like if they're 5'10",

00:33:51.160 | they don't say that they're gigantic,

00:33:53.160 | but they kind of round it up

00:33:55.140 | in the more desirable direction.

00:33:57.380 | Women tend to deceive about weight.

00:34:00.960 | So they tend to shave about 15 pounds

00:34:03.320 | off of their reported weight.

00:34:05.320 | And both sexes post photos that are not truly representative

00:34:10.560 | of what they actually look like.

00:34:12.000 | So they might post photos of themselves when they were younger

00:34:16.320 | or they're even advice tips on how to create the best selfie

00:34:21.320 | of the best angle that will maximally enhance

00:34:28.480 | what you look like.

00:34:29.400 | - Or just doctoring of photos, I'm guessing.

00:34:32.080 | - Yeah, yeah, photoshopping, absolutely.

00:34:34.460 | And one of the things about it,

00:34:38.160 | now you say like, well, do people find out?

00:34:40.320 | Of course, people do find out.

00:34:42.160 | I mean, I'll just give you one story

00:34:43.960 | about a colleague of mine who was doing,

00:34:46.200 | is a male who's doing internet dating.

00:34:48.120 | And he picked only women who self-described as sevens

00:34:52.960 | on the one to seven on attractiveness.

00:34:54.800 | So the most attractive as self-reported.

00:34:58.120 | And so, and he went out with this one woman

00:35:00.560 | and she was missing her front teeth.

00:35:03.480 | And he said, well, call me picky,

00:35:06.440 | but I'm missing her front teeth.

00:35:08.480 | And she thinks she's like the top of her drag.

00:35:11.040 | He was a little disappointed about that.

00:35:13.800 | And women of course are disappointed.

00:35:15.480 | They meet a guy who they think is this physically fit,

00:35:19.320 | you know, athletic guy.

00:35:20.960 | And he comes up, he's 300 pounds and overweight.

00:35:25.320 | So people do find out.

00:35:27.560 | And so, and there are some internet dating sites

00:35:30.840 | have kind of a vetting of the accuracy of something.

00:35:36.680 | So some things you can look up through public records

00:35:39.080 | and does this guy have a criminal record for example?

00:35:42.600 | Is he on a sexual offenders website?

00:35:47.600 | So there's some things you can verify,

00:35:51.680 | but what I tell people is you really have to meet the person

00:35:56.000 | and interact, you know, in part because of the deception,

00:36:00.000 | but also because what happens with internet dating

00:36:04.000 | is that the photograph tends to overwhelm

00:36:07.920 | all the other cues and all the other cues

00:36:11.040 | are written statements.

00:36:12.600 | And we weren't really evolved to process written statements,

00:36:17.200 | but we were evolved to respond to physical cues.

00:36:21.000 | But, and men tend to attend to the visual cues

00:36:26.000 | much more than women.

00:36:28.600 | So women in their mate selection,

00:36:30.480 | they have olfactory cues to what does the guy sound like?

00:36:33.880 | Is it vocal qualities?

00:36:35.300 | That's auditory cues, but olfactory cues,

00:36:41.000 | what does he smell like?

00:36:42.320 | And so women have a more acute sense of smell than men do.

00:36:47.080 | And so if the guy doesn't smell right,

00:36:49.680 | even if he embodies all the other qualities women want,

00:36:52.960 | that's a deal breaker.

00:36:54.120 | And so I encourage people just, you know,

00:36:58.720 | stop with the hundred texts back and forth or messaging

00:37:02.320 | and meet a person for a cup of coffee and interact.

00:37:05.360 | And then you'll, you know,

00:37:06.640 | you'll get a more accurate beat on the person.

00:37:09.760 | And then of course, some qualities you can't assess

00:37:11.880 | even with a half hour interaction, you can tell a lot,

00:37:16.120 | but things like emotional stability

00:37:19.040 | are things that have to be assessed over time.

00:37:22.840 | And so one of the things that I advise people to do,

00:37:26.560 | and I'm not in the advice giving business,

00:37:28.180 | but people ask me all the time,

00:37:29.520 | once they find out what I studied,

00:37:31.000 | they say, well, Tom, I got this problem,

00:37:33.880 | can you give me advice?

00:37:35.240 | But one of the things to assess things

00:37:36.780 | like emotional stability,

00:37:38.480 | which is absolutely critical in long-term mating,

00:37:41.000 | is to do something like go on a trip together,

00:37:45.200 | take a vacation where you're even in an unfamiliar

00:37:49.780 | environment where you have to cope with things

00:37:52.720 | that you're not familiar with,

00:37:53.920 | and as opposed to an environment where it's very predictable

00:37:58.800 | and so you get a greater exposure

00:38:01.280 | because one of the hallmarks of emotional instability

00:38:06.280 | is how they respond to stress.

00:38:10.560 | So emotionally unstable people tend to have a long latency

00:38:14.860 | to return to baseline after a stressful event.

00:38:18.480 | And so this is the sort of information

00:38:20.480 | you can't get on a coffee date.

00:38:23.440 | You know, you can only get by assessing it over time.

00:38:26.360 | - So somebody who's laboratory studies stress and tools

00:38:29.040 | to combat stress, that's great.

00:38:31.440 | It's yet more incentive for people to develop

00:38:33.920 | self-regulatory mechanisms for themselves.

00:38:36.880 | I'm guessing many of the features of deception

00:38:42.200 | in this context were present long before internet dating.

00:38:45.560 | And so is it, it's somewhat dark to think about,

00:38:49.720 | but is deception built into this dance

00:38:54.600 | that we call mate selection and has it been built in

00:38:56.920 | for a long time or is this something that you think

00:39:00.560 | has emerged more as people are approaching each other

00:39:04.800 | through these electronic web-based mediums?

00:39:07.840 | - Yeah, I mean, some forms of deception have been there

00:39:11.500 | for a long time over human evolutionary history.

00:39:13.880 | So one form of deception which we haven't mentioned

00:39:16.200 | is deception about whether you're interested

00:39:19.040 | in a long-term committed relationship

00:39:21.800 | or a short-term hookup.

00:39:24.120 | And so there's deception about that,

00:39:26.600 | especially on the part of men.

00:39:29.040 | So men who are interested, like on Tinder,

00:39:32.200 | it has been reported, although Tinder denies this,

00:39:35.180 | there's been reported that something like 30% of the men

00:39:37.840 | on Tinder are either married

00:39:39.720 | or in long-term committed relationships

00:39:41.560 | and they're looking for something on the side.

00:39:44.080 | But in terms of successfully attracting a mate,

00:39:49.080 | the over-display that, hey, I'm interested

00:39:53.080 | in just a short-term hookup, I'm interested in sex,

00:39:55.400 | so I wanna have sex right now,

00:39:57.560 | let's just go back to my apartment,

00:39:59.680 | these are very ineffective tactics.

00:40:02.080 | And so effective tactics for men

00:40:04.840 | are often displaying cues to long-term interest.

00:40:08.200 | And so, and of course that's effective for a woman

00:40:12.040 | who's seeking a long-term interest.

00:40:14.500 | And so that's a deception.

00:40:16.200 | So we find in our studies of deception

00:40:18.380 | that men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings

00:40:22.560 | for a woman, exaggerate how similar they are

00:40:27.180 | and how aligned they are in their values

00:40:29.280 | and religious orientations and political values

00:40:32.400 | and so forth.

00:40:33.240 | And so I think there's deception around that.

00:40:37.280 | And I think that's probably

00:40:38.520 | an evolutionarily recurrent form of deception

00:40:42.160 | that women have defenses against, by the way.

00:40:45.320 | But I think that modern internet dating

00:40:48.880 | opens the door for certain types of deception

00:40:51.620 | that were, at a minimum,

00:40:53.920 | were difficult to accomplish ancestrally.

00:40:56.680 | So things like Photoshopping wasn't available back then.

00:41:01.680 | Plus, we evolved in the context of small group living

00:41:07.240 | where you not only had your own personal observations

00:41:11.660 | of someone's qualities, you had also your relatives,

00:41:15.640 | your friends, allies,

00:41:17.660 | the social reputation that someone had.

00:41:21.160 | And these are all critical sources of information

00:41:24.380 | that are less available in modern environments

00:41:28.140 | because people migrate, they move from place to place,

00:41:32.320 | they can close down one internet profile and put up another,

00:41:38.460 | or they could have six going simultaneously.

00:41:41.400 | So the modern environment opens up the door

00:41:45.320 | for forms of deception that weren't available

00:41:48.500 | or weren't available to the same degree ancestrally.

00:41:52.480 | - I see. Very interesting.

00:41:55.120 | Would you mind touching on some of the features

00:42:00.340 | that are selected for in terms of sexual partner choice?

00:42:05.340 | We talked a little bit about mate choice,

00:42:09.480 | but in terms of sexual partner choice,

00:42:12.140 | are there any good studies exploring

00:42:14.600 | what people are selecting for?

00:42:16.300 | Or is it that they are both just in a state

00:42:19.140 | of pure hypothalamic drive, I'm a neuroscientist after all,

00:42:24.140 | and therefore it's hard to recreate in the laboratory?

00:42:27.380 | - Well, no, we do know something about that,

00:42:30.060 | and we know something about how the preferences

00:42:33.740 | for a sex partner differ from preference for a long-term mate.

00:42:37.940 | There is overlap, of course,

00:42:40.020 | but one thing is physical appearance.

00:42:43.700 | So physical appearance for women is important

00:42:46.900 | in long-term mating, not as important as it is for men,

00:42:50.220 | but it becomes more important in short-term mating.

00:42:54.240 | And so is the guy good-looking?

00:42:57.780 | So those physical attributes are more important for women.

00:43:01.360 | They remain important for men,

00:43:05.940 | physical appearance in short-term mating,

00:43:08.120 | but with the footnote that men are willing

00:43:11.940 | to drop their standards in short-term mating,

00:43:15.260 | if it's low commitment, low risk, just sex,

00:43:20.260 | without entangling commitments.

00:43:24.100 | Women are more likely to prioritize

00:43:30.160 | what I call bad boy qualities,

00:43:33.020 | so guys who are very self-confident,

00:43:37.020 | guys who are strut, guys who are a little arrogant,

00:43:41.960 | guys who are risk-taking, guys who defy conventions,

00:43:46.580 | women are more attracted to those guys

00:43:48.980 | in short-term mating than long-term mating,

00:43:52.000 | and whereas in long-term mating,

00:43:54.800 | they go more for the good dad qualities.

00:43:57.100 | Is this guy dependable?

00:43:58.500 | Is he gonna be a good father to my children?

00:44:00.760 | And then also, in short-term mating,

00:44:05.520 | women use that mate-copying heuristic.

00:44:10.520 | That is, if there are thousands of other women

00:44:13.980 | who find him attractive, women find him attractive.

00:44:17.020 | And so that's why you have the groupie phenomenon.

00:44:19.380 | So with the rock stars, for example,

00:44:21.420 | there are thousands of screaming women,

00:44:23.460 | all of whom wanna sleep with this famous rock star,

00:44:27.560 | and they use that as information.

00:44:29.100 | They find, if you took like a still photo

00:44:32.060 | of some of these rock stars

00:44:33.500 | and asked women how attractive the guy is

00:44:35.940 | versus tell 'em he's a famous rock star

00:44:38.520 | and show the thousands of women screaming at him,

00:44:42.060 | they judge him entirely differently

00:44:44.820 | in terms of his attractiveness.

00:44:47.720 | So even, and this is an important point

00:44:52.880 | that women's attraction to men is more context-specific

00:44:57.980 | and varies more across contexts

00:45:00.740 | than men's attraction to women.

00:45:03.460 | And so I'll give you just an example of that.

00:45:05.340 | This is a female colleague of mine went to a conference,

00:45:09.020 | an academic conference,

00:45:10.220 | and she found the organizer of this conference

00:45:13.020 | to be really attractive and then saw him six months later

00:45:17.600 | and wondered, well, what was I thinking?

00:45:19.660 | He doesn't seem very attractive at all.

00:45:21.460 | And what it was is, when he was the organizer,

00:45:23.540 | he was at the center of the attention structure.

00:45:26.860 | He was the guy up on stage directing everybody

00:45:30.060 | and everyone was attending to him.

00:45:31.900 | And then when he was just a normal presenter at a conference,

00:45:35.220 | he didn't command the attention structure

00:45:38.580 | like he did in that when he was the organizer.

00:45:40.800 | And so this is just an illustration

00:45:43.060 | of how circumstance-dependent

00:45:46.300 | women's made attraction is for guys.

00:45:49.780 | It depends on his status,

00:45:54.000 | the number of women that are attracted to him,

00:45:57.300 | the attention structure is how he interacts

00:46:00.460 | with a puppy or a baby.

00:46:02.740 | If he's ignoring a baby in distress

00:46:04.820 | or positively interacting with a young child.

00:46:07.880 | All these things, whereas for men, it almost doesn't matter.

00:46:13.660 | Context is more irrelevant.

00:46:15.300 | They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues

00:46:19.220 | that the woman is displaying in context be damned.

00:46:23.180 | - Very interesting.

00:46:26.780 | Let's talk about infidelity in committed relationships.

00:46:31.780 | What are some of the consistent findings around reasons for

00:46:36.860 | and maybe even long-term consequences

00:46:41.140 | of infidelity for men and women?

00:46:43.740 | And this could be marriage or long-term partnership

00:46:46.860 | or infidelity of any kind, I suppose.

00:46:49.380 | - Yeah, so well--

00:46:50.220 | - I'm guessing it does happen.

00:46:51.420 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, well that's--

00:46:53.180 | - How frequent is it?

00:46:54.140 | - Yeah, that's the interesting thing.

00:46:55.820 | - Well, how frequent it is is difficult to gauge

00:46:58.860 | because it's one of the forms of human conduct

00:47:03.860 | that people like to keep secret.

00:47:07.140 | So if you go back now, let's say 70 years

00:47:11.300 | to the classic Kinsey studies,

00:47:13.700 | the questions about infidelity were the questions

00:47:17.100 | that most people refused to answer

00:47:19.780 | and when the question was brought up

00:47:21.820 | caused more people to drop out of the study.

00:47:24.020 | And so that kind of tells you something

00:47:25.580 | that I mean, what do people conceal?

00:47:28.860 | Infidelity, incest, murder, there is a small handful

00:47:33.420 | of things that people universally wanna conceal

00:47:35.740 | and infidelity is one of them.

00:47:37.380 | But people do it and so Kinsey estimated 26%

00:47:42.140 | of married women committed an infidelity

00:47:45.020 | at some point during their marriage and about 50% of men.

00:47:48.380 | Other studies have given lower figures

00:47:51.140 | and so the exact figures bounce around depending

00:47:54.500 | on anonymity provided and how comfortable they are

00:47:58.980 | with the interviewer and so forth.

00:48:01.100 | - And by infidelity, does that mean intercourse

00:48:03.340 | with somebody else?

00:48:04.540 | So we're not talking about quote unquote emotional affairs.

00:48:07.660 | We're talking about sex with somebody other

00:48:11.180 | than their committed partner with unbeknownst

00:48:13.060 | to their partner.

00:48:13.900 | - Right, right and there are other forms of infidelity

00:48:15.740 | which we could get into including emotional infidelity

00:48:18.580 | and financial infidelity.

00:48:20.300 | But here we're just talking about for the moment,

00:48:22.660 | sexual infidelity and the interesting thing

00:48:25.580 | about sexual infidelity is that the sexes really differ

00:48:30.580 | fundamentally in the motives for committing infidelity.

00:48:36.460 | So for men, the primary motive and these are

00:48:41.380 | on average sex differences.

00:48:43.140 | So whenever I talk about sex differences,

00:48:44.820 | I'm talking about on average sex differences

00:48:47.340 | 'cause there's overlap in the distributions

00:48:49.860 | and but so these are generalizations

00:48:53.100 | of which there are exceptions.

00:48:54.580 | So for men, it's mainly a matter of sexual variety.

00:48:59.580 | So about 70% of the men, the opportunity presented itself.

00:49:05.700 | I was out of town and I had this opportunity.

00:49:08.500 | So low risk, low cost pursuit of sexual variety,

00:49:13.180 | sexual novelty is a key motivation for men.

00:49:16.420 | - Sorry to interrupt.

00:49:17.260 | So 70% of men that cheat, that's the primary cause

00:49:22.260 | or is it that 70% of men do cheat?

00:49:26.060 | - No, no, no, of the men who cheat 70%,

00:49:29.820 | thank you for that clarification,

00:49:31.380 | of the men who do cheat 70%, cite that as the key motive,

00:49:36.380 | the key reason why they committed an infidelity.

00:49:39.100 | - Sort of like why mountain climbers climb mountains

00:49:41.020 | 'cause they're there.

00:49:42.060 | - Right, right, because they're there.

00:49:43.940 | Well, the comedian, I think it was Chris Rock said,

00:49:46.980 | "Men are only as faithful as their opportunity."

00:49:50.140 | - Or how available their password on their phone is

00:49:54.020 | to their partner.

00:49:55.020 | - Right, right, yeah.

00:49:56.500 | So but, and that's an exaggeration but if you look at women,

00:50:01.500 | this just desire for pure novelty, sexual variety

00:50:06.700 | is much less of a motive

00:50:08.620 | but women who have affairs cite that they're unhappy

00:50:15.380 | with their primary relationship, emotionally unhappy

00:50:19.820 | or sexually unhappy and typically both.

00:50:22.700 | And this may seem like totally obvious that,

00:50:25.500 | well, of course, people if they're unhappy

00:50:27.340 | in the relationship are more likely to stray

00:50:29.860 | but in fact, it's not true for men.

00:50:32.380 | So if you compare men who are happy with their marriage

00:50:35.740 | and men who are not happy with their marriage,

00:50:37.580 | there's no difference in their infidelity rates.

00:50:40.060 | And I think it goes down to that issue of motive

00:50:44.940 | or seeking variety.

00:50:46.620 | So now, why do women do it?

00:50:49.460 | Because it's a risky endeavor.

00:50:52.740 | She risks her long-term mate or losing long-term mate.

00:50:56.900 | It's risky in terms of reputational damage for both sexes.

00:51:00.420 | So it's a risky thing.

00:51:02.220 | Why do women do it?

00:51:03.620 | And there are two competing hypotheses, at least two

00:51:09.620 | but there are two primary competing hypotheses

00:51:12.020 | in the evolutionary literature.

00:51:13.820 | One is called the dual mating strategy hypothesis

00:51:16.700 | where women are seeking to get resources and investment

00:51:20.580 | from one guy and good genes from another guy.

00:51:24.580 | So and in principle, that can work.

00:51:28.580 | And I initially, this wasn't a hypothesis original with me.

00:51:32.460 | This is Steve Gangestad, Randy Thornhill

00:51:35.260 | and some others of Marty Hazleton, a former student of mine

00:51:38.420 | have advocated this dual mating strategy hypothesis.

00:51:41.860 | And originally, I was endorsed it

00:51:45.700 | because the data seemed to support it.

00:51:48.140 | We can get into which data seemed to support it.

00:51:50.740 | But over time, I became more and more dubious

00:51:53.820 | about this hypothesis and instead have advocated

00:51:57.860 | what I call the mate switching hypothesis.

00:52:00.660 | And so if you look at a whole host of information

00:52:05.660 | around why women have affairs, it's not compatible

00:52:09.660 | with the dual mating strategy hypothesis.

00:52:11.820 | So and is compatible with the mate switching

00:52:14.300 | that is women who are looking to either divest themselves

00:52:19.300 | from an existing mateship or trade up in the mating market

00:52:25.580 | to a mate who's more compatible with them

00:52:28.780 | or higher in mate value, or simply see

00:52:32.100 | whether they're sufficiently desirable

00:52:34.540 | so that it eases the transition into the mating pool

00:52:38.460 | or keeping a mate as a potential backup mate,

00:52:41.900 | what I call mate insurance.

00:52:44.220 | So you have car insurance if something bad happens

00:52:46.300 | to your car, house insurance.

00:52:49.180 | We also have mate insurance, you know, keeping someone.

00:52:52.060 | One woman said, men are like soup.

00:52:54.860 | You always want to have one on the back burner.

00:52:57.700 | So whether that's the best analogy or not, I'm not sure,

00:53:02.700 | but it kind of captures something about why.

00:53:08.060 | So, well, what evidence am I talking about?

00:53:11.540 | Well, for one thing, women who have affairs,

00:53:13.460 | and this is about 70% of them, they-

00:53:17.060 | - Again, sorry, just I want to make sure people,

00:53:18.860 | of women who have affairs.

00:53:20.420 | - Of the women who have affairs.

00:53:21.380 | So let's say ballpark Kinsey was, let's say roughly right,

00:53:26.100 | 25, 26% of women will have affairs.

00:53:28.700 | Let's just assume that he's right.

00:53:30.300 | And we don't know exactly, but of the women

00:53:34.340 | who do have affairs, about 70% say they have fallen

00:53:38.660 | in love with their affair partner.

00:53:41.020 | They become deeply emotionally involved

00:53:43.060 | with their affair partner.

00:53:44.620 | And to me, if you're just trying to get good genes

00:53:49.380 | from a guy, that is the last thing you want to do

00:53:52.260 | is fall in love with them or get emotionally involved.

00:53:55.740 | But it's very compatible if you want to switch mates.

00:53:58.780 | And so that's sort of, that's one piece of evidence

00:54:04.140 | that suggests that women, the mate switching function

00:54:08.820 | of infidelity is a more likely explanation.

00:54:12.220 | Now these two are not inherently incompatible hypotheses.

00:54:15.140 | In other words, it's possible that some women

00:54:18.500 | do pursue a dual mating strategy hypothesis,

00:54:22.140 | but there's other evidence that suggests,

00:54:24.660 | so for example, what are the actual rates

00:54:27.540 | of genetic cuckoldry?

00:54:29.180 | Well, in the modern environment anyway, they're pretty low.

00:54:32.620 | It turns out they're like two to 3%.

00:54:34.740 | - Could you just explain for the audience

00:54:36.060 | what genetic cuckoldry is?

00:54:37.340 | - So this is where the woman, where the man believes

00:54:42.020 | he is the genetic father of a child,

00:54:43.980 | but it turns out he's not, might be the mailman

00:54:46.500 | or the next door neighbor or the guy

00:54:48.340 | she's having an affair with.

00:54:49.900 | So mistaken paternity and genetic cuckoldry

00:54:54.900 | is just one way to capture.

00:54:59.420 | - Named after the cuckoo bird, right?

00:55:01.220 | - Named after the cuckoo bird, yes.

00:55:02.820 | - Who sneaks its eggs into the nest of the other,

00:55:05.140 | rolls, destroys the future offspring of the bird

00:55:09.060 | and then basically offloads all the work

00:55:11.780 | onto another father.

00:55:13.660 | - Parasitizes, yeah, the parental investment

00:55:16.860 | of a different bird species.

00:55:19.940 | So anyway, so I think that, and there's other sources

00:55:24.940 | of evidence that I think point,

00:55:27.140 | so one of the sources of evidence that initially

00:55:30.100 | seemed to support the dual mating strategy hypothesis

00:55:34.060 | was ovulation shifts.

00:55:36.340 | So in other words, it looked like from the early studies

00:55:40.740 | that when women are ovulating,

00:55:42.220 | these are among non pill-taking women,

00:55:45.100 | women not on hormonal contraceptives,

00:55:47.540 | that they experienced a preference shift toward more men

00:55:50.460 | who were masculine and symmetrical,

00:55:53.780 | which were hypothesized markers for good genes.

00:55:57.460 | And there's an explanation for that.

00:56:00.540 | But it turns out the effects of ovulation

00:56:03.260 | on women's mate preferences are far weaker

00:56:05.700 | than the initial studies looked like.

00:56:08.860 | And in fact, some larger scale studies have failed

00:56:11.220 | to replicate them entirely.

00:56:13.220 | And so that was one of the key sources of evidence,

00:56:18.100 | these ovulation shifts that women were going after good genes

00:56:21.140 | because it's only when she's ovulating

00:56:24.260 | and she can get pregnant by having sex with another man,

00:56:28.860 | that it would make sense for her

00:56:30.100 | to have sex with another man.

00:56:31.980 | And there was even some early evidence

00:56:33.940 | that women were timing their affairs,

00:56:37.260 | timing sex with their affair partners

00:56:39.180 | to coincide with when they were ovulating.

00:56:42.180 | But as I said, some of these subsequent studies

00:56:44.540 | have failed to replicate these early findings

00:56:47.340 | calling into question the dual mating strategy notion.

00:56:51.180 | And so I think I've shifted my views on this

00:56:54.460 | and now endorse the mate switching hypothesis

00:56:59.500 | as a more likely explanation for why most women have affairs.

00:57:03.980 | - Well, the way you describe this makes me wonder

00:57:06.700 | if of the women that have affairs,

00:57:10.500 | do those affairs tend to be more long lasting

00:57:13.020 | than the affairs that men have?

00:57:14.420 | Because the way you describe it is

00:57:15.780 | men are seizing an opportunity

00:57:17.860 | to sort of a carpe diem type approach to infidelity.

00:57:20.900 | And women potentially on average

00:57:24.140 | are capitalizing on something that is longer term.

00:57:27.860 | Now, of course, if they're doing this around ovulation,

00:57:30.860 | then it would constrain the amount of times

00:57:32.580 | they would need to see or have sex

00:57:34.380 | with this other person that they're not married to.

00:57:38.100 | But is there any evidence

00:57:39.660 | that women have more ongoing affairs

00:57:41.380 | and men have more transient affairs?

00:57:43.780 | - Yes, yeah, there is.

00:57:45.020 | And so if you look at people who have affairs,

00:57:49.100 | there's a sex difference there.

00:57:50.780 | So that women tend to have affairs with one person

00:57:54.860 | and become emotionally involved

00:57:56.260 | with that one person over time.

00:57:58.380 | Men who have affairs tend to have affairs

00:58:01.380 | with a larger number of affair partners.

00:58:04.100 | And so, which then by definition can't be long lasting.

00:58:07.660 | You can't have long-term affairs

00:58:09.340 | with six different partners.

00:58:10.700 | - Yeah, unless he's juggling multiple phone accounts

00:58:14.780 | or something of that sort. - Right, right, right.

00:58:15.620 | And some men try to do that,

00:58:17.100 | but I think it could be very taxing.

00:58:21.260 | - Yeah, well, and in this day and age,

00:58:22.940 | it's easier to meet more people

00:58:26.500 | by virtue of online communications,

00:58:28.540 | but it's also easier to get caught,

00:58:30.460 | meaning it's harder to conceal interactions.

00:58:33.700 | Everything's in the cloud anyway.

00:58:35.060 | A good friend of mine who's a former very high level

00:58:37.700 | in special operations said,

00:58:39.980 | "Anything that's not in your head and only in your head

00:58:43.020 | "is available for others to find should they want it."

00:58:46.540 | - Yeah.

00:58:47.380 | - And I think that's largely true.

00:58:48.900 | - Yeah, and yeah, so fun information, text messages,

00:58:53.900 | and people are very good at hacking into their partners'

00:58:57.860 | phones, computers.

00:58:59.180 | And then also there are video cameras everywhere.

00:59:01.060 | So sneaking off to this, a quiet restaurant,

00:59:05.380 | I mean, there are probably eight video cameras

00:59:07.580 | that can record you walking in and out of that restaurant.

00:59:11.500 | - Everything can be found.

00:59:12.980 | - Yes.

00:59:13.820 | - I'm certain of that.

00:59:14.980 | - You mentioned emotional affairs

00:59:17.060 | and financial infidelity as well.

00:59:19.300 | - Yes.

00:59:20.260 | - I had a girlfriend once who as a early date discussion

00:59:25.140 | said, "Not that I get the impression that you are,

00:59:29.100 | "but I want to be very clear."

00:59:30.500 | She said, "That you are not emotionally, physically,

00:59:33.940 | "or financially tied to any other women."

00:59:36.380 | And I thought it was very interesting

00:59:37.540 | that now you bring up financial infidelity.

00:59:39.660 | She's quite happily partnered now and not with me,

00:59:43.660 | but it's interesting, it's the first time I heard anyone

00:59:46.860 | spell it out that way as a list,

00:59:48.380 | almost like specific aims in a grant.

00:59:50.220 | What is emotional infidelity?

00:59:53.660 | What is financial infidelity?

00:59:55.580 | - Yeah, yeah, well, this is a very smart woman.

00:59:57.860 | - Indeed she is.

00:59:58.700 | - To tap into all three.

00:59:59.540 | - Yeah, indeed she is.

01:00:00.380 | - So, and I assumed you gave honest responses

01:00:03.940 | to all of those three questions.

01:00:05.660 | - As I recall, I did, but as we now know that they're,

01:00:09.260 | well, you can ask her at some point.

01:00:10.700 | - Right, right, okay.

01:00:12.540 | - And there is self-deception and the service of deception

01:00:15.940 | that is another issue.

01:00:16.980 | So emotional infidelity is basically

01:00:20.380 | exactly what it sounds like.

01:00:21.700 | It's falling in love with someone else,

01:00:23.780 | becoming psychologically close to someone else,

01:00:27.220 | sharing intimate or private information with someone else.

01:00:32.220 | That's what I mean by emotional infidelity.

01:00:34.780 | And one of the hallmarks of this,

01:00:36.860 | a study done by a former student of mine, Barry Cooley,

01:00:41.420 | was very clever, I thought.

01:00:42.740 | He analyzed, there used to be this reality TV show

01:00:45.900 | called Cheaters, where they would hire detectives

01:00:49.820 | and they would, when the detective would like say,

01:00:52.420 | follow someone to a hotel room, they'd call up the partner

01:00:55.820 | and say, your husband just walked into the hotel room

01:01:00.180 | with someone else, would you like to come down

01:01:02.660 | to the hotel and confront him?

01:01:04.340 | And a certain percentage of people would confront.

01:01:07.380 | And what he analyzed, so he analyzed all these episodes

01:01:10.500 | of this show called Cheaters,

01:01:12.740 | and what he examined was the verbal interrogations

01:01:16.180 | when people confronted their partners.

01:01:18.340 | And when men confronted their partners,

01:01:20.860 | the first question they wanted to know is, did you fuck him?

01:01:24.300 | Women, their first question was, do you love her?

01:01:29.500 | And so this kind of captures that difference

01:01:32.420 | between a sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity,

01:01:35.020 | and also kind of captures another sex difference

01:01:38.340 | when it comes to sexual jealousy,

01:01:40.540 | where men tend to be more focused on the sexual components

01:01:44.780 | of the infidelity, because those are what compromise

01:01:49.780 | his paternity certainty, his certainty that he's actual,

01:01:53.780 | actually the genetic father of whatever offspring ensue.

01:01:58.780 | Whereas love is a cue to, do you love her?

01:02:03.140 | That's a cue that he's gonna leave you, the woman,

01:02:06.180 | for another woman is a cue to the long-term loss

01:02:11.180 | of that investment and commitment from that partner.

01:02:15.500 | And so the sexes seem to differ in which aspects

01:02:20.500 | of the infidelity with women were attuned to more upset

01:02:25.060 | by the emotional infidelity,

01:02:26.660 | men more by the sexual infidelity.

01:02:29.420 | Now, financial infidelity has been explored much less,

01:02:31.880 | but in my new book, When Men Behave Badly,

01:02:35.900 | I have a section on financial infidelity,

01:02:38.780 | where I summarize all the research that has been done.

01:02:41.340 | And I was kind of flabbergasted by the percentage of people

01:02:45.060 | who do things like have credit cards

01:02:47.620 | that their spouse doesn't know about,

01:02:49.500 | keep secret bank accounts,

01:02:51.540 | have the credit card bills mailed to their office

01:02:53.840 | rather than their home,

01:02:55.920 | have basically resources and expenditures of pooled resources

01:03:00.920 | that they keep from their partner.

01:03:04.540 | And both sexes do it.

01:03:06.660 | And the percentages vary from study to study,

01:03:10.060 | but they range from like 30 to 60% of all people

01:03:13.520 | who are keeping financial information from their spouse

01:03:18.300 | in one way or another.

01:03:19.140 | It could be the woman's out buying designer purses

01:03:22.260 | or designer handbags.

01:03:23.780 | It could be the guy's out going to strip clubs

01:03:28.260 | or taking his affair partner to restaurants

01:03:31.960 | and doesn't want those charges to show up on,

01:03:34.620 | you know, a jointly held credit card.

01:03:37.540 | So financial infidelity is critical.

01:03:40.600 | And then even things like diverting pooled resources

01:03:44.340 | to one set of genetic relatives versus another set

01:03:48.260 | is another thing that people tend to keep secret.

01:03:52.000 | So there are forms of financial infidelity as well.

01:03:56.360 | So yeah, infidelity, you're absolutely,

01:03:58.440 | it's a great question because it shouldn't be confined

01:04:01.540 | to sexual infidelity, which is what most people think about,

01:04:05.060 | but also emotional and financial.

01:04:07.660 | Interestingly, if you ask people, what do you mean,

01:04:11.820 | what is infidelity in a marriage?

01:04:15.060 | Men tend to say, well, it's obvious

01:04:17.160 | that she has sex with someone else.

01:04:20.040 | That's infidelity.

01:04:22.760 | Whereas women are more likely to have a broader definition

01:04:26.300 | of infidelity, they will cite things

01:04:28.320 | like emotional infidelity, financial infidelity

01:04:31.180 | as part of the definition.

01:04:32.580 | Whereas men have that more narrow definition.

01:04:35.420 | - Interesting.

01:04:36.260 | I have a good friend who's a couples counselor,

01:04:39.820 | a clinical psychologist.

01:04:41.460 | And she told me something interesting that relates to this,

01:04:44.300 | which is that in cases of infidelity,

01:04:46.840 | oftentimes some of the arguments between couples

01:04:51.120 | boil down to whether or not contraception was used or not.

01:04:53.980 | That becomes a key feature.

01:04:56.220 | And she always thought that that was, you know,

01:04:59.580 | homing in on a detail, which of course is an important detail

01:05:02.540 | as it relates to both paternity issues and pregnancy,

01:05:05.720 | but also disease, right?

01:05:07.940 | But as we're talking about all this,

01:05:10.020 | it makes me think that this may have deeper

01:05:14.460 | evolutionary roots in our, further down in the brain,

01:05:18.660 | as we say, in neuroscience literature.

01:05:20.980 | - And yeah, and I mean, using a condom versus

01:05:25.580 | not using a condom, not using as a more intimate act

01:05:29.220 | in a way you were literally physically more intimate

01:05:32.820 | with someone else than if you do use a condom.

01:05:35.740 | So, you know, but whether evolutionary roots to this,

01:05:40.740 | I don't know.

01:05:41.940 | I mean, condoms are probably relatively recent

01:05:45.060 | or at least a widespread use of them

01:05:47.340 | are relatively recent in evolutionary times.

01:05:50.620 | So I doubt we have adaptations specifically for them.

01:05:53.440 | - No, and presumably before condoms,

01:05:55.420 | and one can only speculate because as we say,

01:05:57.800 | when it comes to behavior, there's rarely a fossil record,

01:06:02.080 | but sometimes there is,

01:06:04.120 | it would be the withdrawal method of contraception,

01:06:07.140 | which a good friend of mine who studies,

01:06:09.220 | whose laboratory works on reproductive biology says,

01:06:11.520 | the reason that's a poor choice of contraception

01:06:14.240 | is because it was designed not to work.

01:06:16.220 | [laughing]

01:06:17.060 | - Yes.

01:06:17.900 | - So note to those of trying to avoid unwanted pregnancy.

01:06:21.520 | So we talked a little bit about status

01:06:24.140 | in terms of what men and women are selecting

01:06:26.340 | for different types of relationships.

01:06:29.660 | Is there anything else about status

01:06:32.260 | that you find particularly interesting

01:06:34.440 | and, you know, what men are finding attractive

01:06:37.780 | besides these, you know, waist to hip ratios

01:06:39.900 | and quality of potential mothers and so forth?

01:06:44.900 | Are there any kind of hidden gems in the literature

01:06:49.280 | around this that I might not have heard of?

01:06:52.300 | - Well, yeah, so you mean among, you know,

01:06:56.320 | things like sex differences and what leads to high status or-

01:07:00.540 | - For instance, or what, or perhaps things that are surprising

01:07:05.540 | in terms of what people are selecting for.

01:07:09.180 | Do people even know what they're selecting for?

01:07:11.020 | This is, or is this all subconscious?

01:07:12.780 | Any and all of those topics are of interest to me.

01:07:15.380 | - Yeah, so well, to take them in reverse order,

01:07:18.380 | you know, I think a lot of it is conscious,

01:07:21.180 | but some of it is certainly unconscious.

01:07:23.660 | Or there are elements which are totally unconscious.

01:07:27.260 | So I mentioned one earlier where a man looks at a woman,

01:07:31.100 | he's not, he's aware that he's attracted to her

01:07:34.480 | and attracted to her physical appearance,

01:07:36.160 | but he might not be aware of why.

01:07:38.380 | You know, we didn't evolve to be aware of why.

01:07:40.580 | Just like with food preferences,

01:07:42.420 | we find certain things delectable

01:07:44.780 | and other things nauseating.

01:07:47.860 | We don't understand the adaptive logic

01:07:51.740 | of why our food preferences exist and why we have them.

01:07:55.620 | And the same is true of mating, you know?

01:07:57.220 | And so men find women with a low waist tip ratio attractive,

01:08:02.220 | but they might not, they almost rarely,

01:08:07.860 | rarely will they know, oh, low waist waist tip ratio

01:08:11.060 | is actually associated with higher fertility,

01:08:13.860 | lower endocrinological problems,

01:08:16.020 | lower age, et cetera.

01:08:20.020 | So we're sometimes aware of what we want,

01:08:23.980 | but we are unaware of why we want it.

01:08:26.700 | So I think there are unconscious elements

01:08:30.240 | that the whole topic of status

01:08:32.860 | and what leads to high status and low status,

01:08:35.460 | it's a topic I'm currently investigating.

01:08:37.620 | Published a couple scientific articles on it.

01:08:40.220 | And so, but maybe we'll hold off on that

01:08:43.460 | for a future discussion.

01:08:45.500 | But it intersects, I'll mention one,

01:08:48.460 | it intersects with mating in interesting ways

01:08:51.700 | in that higher status gives people the ability

01:08:56.700 | to choose from a wider pool of potential mates

01:09:02.340 | than they would if they have low status.

01:09:04.340 | And so one of the reasons that people strive for status

01:09:08.740 | is because they have access to more desirable mates.

01:09:12.220 | Conversely, having desirable mates

01:09:17.220 | endows you with higher status.

01:09:19.500 | And so if you have, if you're a male,

01:09:21.380 | you have a very attractive woman on your arm

01:09:25.180 | that leads to high status.

01:09:27.020 | And so there's a reciprocal link between status

01:09:29.260 | and mating in that way.

01:09:30.220 | And there've been studies where you say they pose

01:09:33.580 | a kind of an unattractive guy, older unattractive guy

01:09:39.420 | and a stunningly beautiful woman as a girlfriend.

01:09:42.780 | And they say, well, what's this guy all about?

01:09:46.580 | And they say, oh, he must be very high in status.

01:09:49.300 | He must be very wealthy.

01:09:50.420 | He must have a lot going for him.

01:09:52.940 | You know, whereas the reverse,

01:09:55.820 | people don't make the same attributions.

01:09:58.940 | And so there is an interesting reciprocal link

01:10:02.380 | between status and mating success

01:10:04.700 | where mating success leads to high status

01:10:07.580 | and high status leads to more mating success.

01:10:10.580 | - So over and over again,

01:10:11.780 | there are these instances that you described

01:10:13.540 | where the assessment of potential mate sexual

01:10:16.900 | or long-term partnership are being made

01:10:20.460 | in the contents of good statistical practices,

01:10:23.020 | looking at the choices of others

01:10:24.700 | as a readout of your own choices.

01:10:27.260 | I keep, this seems to be a theme that this is not being made

01:10:30.460 | in a very narrow context, but paying attention

01:10:32.420 | to what other people are paying attention to

01:10:34.060 | seems to come up again and again.

01:10:36.700 | Slightly off center from that,

01:10:39.140 | but still paying attention to what other people

01:10:40.820 | are paying attention to.

01:10:42.020 | What's known about jealousy in men versus women

01:10:46.100 | and how frequent it is, how intense it is,

01:10:50.380 | and what people do with that jealousy.

01:10:52.460 | I mean, we hear, or I've heard at some point

01:10:55.220 | that a large fraction of homicides

01:10:57.420 | are the consequence of jealous lovers.

01:11:00.020 | That's the darkest angle of all this,

01:11:03.580 | but in evolutionary psychology context, what is jealousy?

01:11:08.580 | Does it relate to paternity issues only?

01:11:13.140 | What can you tell us about that?

01:11:14.020 | - Yeah, so, well, it's a great set of questions.

01:11:17.940 | And when I first started studying jealousy,

01:11:20.860 | I reviewed all the prior publications on jealousy.

01:11:24.100 | And at that time, jealousy was regarded

01:11:27.500 | as a sign of immaturity,

01:11:31.580 | a sign of insecurity,

01:11:34.220 | a sign of neurosis or pathology,

01:11:38.300 | or in some cases, delusion.

01:11:40.740 | And what I argued is, and do argue,

01:11:46.180 | is that jealousy is an evolved emotion

01:11:49.180 | that serves several adaptive functions, okay?

01:11:52.540 | One of which you mentioned is a paternity certainty function.

01:11:56.220 | But to back up a second,

01:12:00.420 | basically, once you have the evolution of long-term mating,

01:12:03.540 | long-term pair bonds, you're talking about,

01:12:05.580 | from a male perspective,

01:12:07.220 | investing a tremendous amount of resources

01:12:09.620 | in a woman and her children over years or decades,

01:12:13.780 | even with boomerang kids now,

01:12:15.220 | it may go more than two decades.

01:12:17.780 | - Boomerang kids?

01:12:18.740 | - Yeah, kids who leave home

01:12:20.820 | and then come back and live at home.

01:12:23.260 | - That happens?

01:12:24.100 | - 'Cause they, oh yeah, that happens.

01:12:25.500 | - I don't have children, so I--

01:12:26.620 | - Okay, yeah, no, that's a big thing.

01:12:29.140 | But if I do, I'll just expect

01:12:30.380 | that they'll come back at some point.

01:12:32.020 | - They'll come back 'cause they can't find a job

01:12:34.100 | or they find it cheaper to live at the parents' house

01:12:36.940 | or whatever.

01:12:37.780 | - Oh goodness, I can't think of anything worse.

01:12:39.060 | I mean, I love my parents, but.

01:12:41.300 | - I know, I know, I can't imagine, but it happens.

01:12:45.180 | And it's happening more and more

01:12:47.060 | given the current economic situation.

01:12:49.340 | Okay, but, so once you have long-term mating,

01:12:52.740 | you need a defense to prevent

01:12:57.620 | or preserve the investment that you've made

01:13:00.420 | and are making in long-term mateship.

01:13:02.500 | And so jealousy serves this mate guarding function,

01:13:06.620 | if you will, or mate retention function.

01:13:08.940 | So in other words, one way of phrasing this

01:13:11.940 | is that we know that there are affairs,

01:13:14.900 | we know that people break up, they get divorced,

01:13:17.260 | but people have adaptations

01:13:20.700 | to wanna hold on to their mates, okay?

01:13:23.860 | And that's what jealousy is in part about.

01:13:25.780 | And so jealousy gets activated

01:13:27.620 | when there are threats to that romantic relationship.

01:13:32.260 | And there are other forms of jealousy

01:13:33.420 | like sibling jealousy and so forth,

01:13:35.020 | but we're focusing on mating jealousy in this context.

01:13:38.420 | So now what's interesting is that the threats

01:13:42.780 | to an ongoing valued romantic relationship

01:13:46.380 | come from many sources.

01:13:48.100 | So they could be you detect cues

01:13:49.980 | to your partner's infidelity

01:13:53.740 | or cues of a lack of an emotional distance

01:13:58.740 | between you and your partner.

01:14:00.460 | You say, "I love you" to your partner

01:14:03.020 | and your partner says,

01:14:04.700 | "Oh, I wonder how the Knicks are doing

01:14:06.580 | "this scoring season," or whatever.

01:14:08.420 | If you get an unreciprocated "I love you" is a bad cue.

01:14:11.540 | - Or some people are so tuned to this,

01:14:13.820 | if there's a half millisecond delay,

01:14:16.180 | they can detect delays in responses.

01:14:18.260 | - Yes, yeah, delays in responses.

01:14:20.820 | But even things like, so that's one set of cues,

01:14:25.180 | but then there's another set of interested mate poachers.

01:14:28.420 | So if you're mated to someone who's desirable,

01:14:32.300 | which many people are, other people still desire them.

01:14:35.340 | And so sometimes try to poach them

01:14:37.660 | or lure them away from you

01:14:39.540 | for a short-term sexual encounter

01:14:42.100 | or for a longer-term relationship.

01:14:44.700 | And so we have to be,

01:14:45.900 | so jealousy motivates people to be attentive

01:14:48.180 | to potential mate poachers in their environment.

01:14:51.780 | But even more subtle things like mate value discrepancies

01:14:56.700 | can trigger jealousy.

01:14:58.340 | So even if there are no mate poachers

01:15:00.260 | and no cues to infidelity,

01:15:02.340 | if a mate value discrepancy opens up in a relationship,

01:15:06.660 | so in the American system,

01:15:08.460 | like you're a six or an eight or a 10,

01:15:11.660 | and people generally pair off

01:15:13.780 | based on similarity and mate value.

01:15:15.680 | - So that tends to happen.

01:15:16.740 | - Sixes end up with sixes, sevens end up with sixes,

01:15:19.300 | plus or minus one.

01:15:20.300 | - Yeah, yeah, so yeah.

01:15:21.660 | - These are somewhat subjective scare.

01:15:23.300 | - Okay, it's somewhat subjective,

01:15:24.580 | but there's still some consensus about these things.

01:15:27.420 | So even colloquially, people say things like,

01:15:32.180 | he's not good enough for you.

01:15:35.500 | Or I think you could do better to people

01:15:38.420 | and implicitly have a notion of relative mate value

01:15:41.500 | and discrepancies therein.

01:15:43.180 | Okay, but discrepancies can open up

01:15:45.700 | where none previously existed.

01:15:47.780 | So you get fired from a job, all of a sudden,

01:15:51.540 | and most people are very understanding and forgiving

01:15:54.820 | about that if it's not too long.

01:15:57.460 | But you go six months, eight months,

01:15:59.220 | people start having problems.

01:16:01.940 | Or someone's career takes off.

01:16:03.900 | Let's say a woman becomes a famous singer

01:16:06.820 | or actress or a man does, career takes off.

01:16:10.820 | All of a sudden, there's a mate value discrepancy

01:16:13.220 | where you have access to a larger pool of potential mates

01:16:16.340 | and higher mate value potential mates.

01:16:18.540 | So people are attentive to mate value discrepancies.

01:16:22.180 | And so jealousy can get activated,

01:16:24.660 | even if there are no immediate threats to a relationship,

01:16:28.700 | but that the mate value discrepancy is a threat

01:16:31.980 | that looms on the horizon of the relationship

01:16:34.820 | because we know statistically the higher mate value person

01:16:38.780 | is more likely to have an affair

01:16:41.300 | and is more likely to dump the other person

01:16:44.220 | and trade up in the mating market.

01:16:46.100 | - And when people find new partners

01:16:49.380 | for long-term relationships, do they tend to trade up?

01:16:52.900 | - On average, yes, if the discrepancy

01:16:56.180 | is sufficiently large.

01:16:57.340 | So there are costs associated with breaking up,

01:17:01.020 | divorcing, for example.

01:17:03.660 | I mean, it's emotionally, financially, it's a costly thing.

01:17:08.260 | And so if you have like a half a point mate value discrepancy

01:17:12.660 | you're not gonna see a lot of breakups,

01:17:14.140 | but if you have larger mate value discrepancies

01:17:17.300 | that's gonna augur more for trading up

01:17:20.300 | in the mating market.

01:17:21.340 | So then you get into, so what jealousy is,

01:17:27.860 | it's an emotion that gets activated by these circumstances.

01:17:31.700 | And then what people do about it

01:17:33.300 | depends on what their options are.

01:17:36.020 | And people do things that in my published scientific work

01:17:40.380 | I say range from vigilance to violence.

01:17:43.540 | So there's a whole spectrum of things.

01:17:45.380 | In fact, I've identified 19 different tactics

01:17:48.060 | that people use to deal with problems once they get jealous.

01:17:53.060 | And one is increased vigilance and the other is-

01:17:56.300 | - Vigilance for the behavior of the mate.

01:17:59.100 | - Yeah, vigilance for the behavior of the mate.

01:18:00.860 | And that can include stalking, following,

01:18:05.180 | hacking into iPhones or computers,

01:18:08.060 | monitoring the behavior of mate poachers,

01:18:13.660 | looking at eye contact between other men and your partner.

01:18:18.140 | There's a whole suite of things

01:18:19.380 | that is involved in vigilance.

01:18:22.660 | And then at the other extreme,

01:18:25.580 | and we can talk about things in between,

01:18:27.140 | but the other extreme is violence.

01:18:29.260 | And so in my new book, "When Men Behave Badly"

01:18:32.660 | I have a whole chapter on intimate partner violence.

01:18:35.580 | And this is what I argue, and this is really unfortunate

01:18:39.700 | and I'm not endorsing, it's illegal, it's bad, don't do it,

01:18:44.700 | but people engage in intimate partner violence.

01:18:47.980 | In America, something like 28 to 30% of all people

01:18:51.700 | who are married will experience intimate partner violence

01:18:55.340 | in their relationship.

01:18:57.300 | So it's not a trivial percentage.

01:18:59.260 | - And that violence is between the two partners.

01:19:01.220 | - Between the two partners, yes.

01:19:03.540 | There's also violence that gets directed

01:19:05.180 | to our potential mate poachers,

01:19:06.620 | but that's a somewhat separate issue.

01:19:10.060 | But one of the things that is functional about the violence

01:19:15.060 | is that it tends to reduce perceived

01:19:18.660 | mate value discrepancies.

01:19:20.780 | So in other words, let's say guys tend to engage

01:19:24.420 | in the violence more than women do,

01:19:26.060 | although some argue that there's more equality

01:19:28.940 | in the violence, but at a minimum,

01:19:31.940 | men tend to do more damage when they do the violence.

01:19:35.060 | - And when you're talking about violence,

01:19:36.420 | is this ever emotional violence?

01:19:37.940 | I mean-- - Yeah, there's that as well.

01:19:39.780 | And in fact, the two tend to be correlated.

01:19:41.940 | So in my studies of married couples,

01:19:44.240 | verbal violence is a good predictor

01:19:48.260 | of physical violence happening as well.

01:19:50.220 | So one thing that'll happen just to give a concrete example,

01:19:54.320 | guys will start insulting their partner's appearance.

01:19:57.420 | You're really looking ugly today.

01:19:59.220 | Your thighs are heavy, you're not looking very good.

01:20:04.220 | So they try to denigrate the woman's appearance,

01:20:06.540 | which is a key component of woman's mate value.

01:20:08.940 | - So they're trying to adjust more closely

01:20:11.020 | the mate value discrepancy.

01:20:12.020 | - Yeah, they're trying to reduce

01:20:13.500 | her perceived, self-perceived mate value.

01:20:17.460 | So if let's say he's a six, she's an eight,

01:20:20.660 | and he can convince her that she's actually only a six,

01:20:25.580 | then she's gonna be more likely to stay with him.

01:20:28.380 | - Very diabolical.

01:20:29.420 | - It's terribly diabolical.

01:20:31.180 | But the fact is, women don't feel good about themselves

01:20:36.180 | when they get beaten up by their partner.

01:20:39.700 | In fact, in the cases where it leaves physical evidence,

01:20:43.980 | women wear sunglasses or hot turtlenecks

01:20:46.580 | or cover up the bruises, it literally does lower

01:20:51.220 | the mate value of the woman

01:20:52.700 | by injuring her physical appearance.

01:20:55.580 | - And getting her to conceal herself, stay home.

01:20:58.020 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:20:58.860 | - Yeah, she's taking her out of the,

01:21:01.700 | literally reducing her visibility.

01:21:03.720 | - Right, and that's actually one of the predictors

01:21:06.420 | of violence is if he starts doing things

01:21:09.200 | other than violence like cutting off her relationships

01:21:12.820 | with her friends and her family,

01:21:14.660 | trying to sequester her and prevent her

01:21:17.660 | from getting exposed to potential other partners.

01:21:21.980 | And so it is very diabolical,

01:21:24.820 | but I think important to understand

01:21:27.640 | the potential functionality of intimate partner violence.

01:21:32.640 | - What about, sorry to interrupt again,

01:21:34.740 | but I'm just so curious.

01:21:35.900 | So oftentimes my audience will say, yeah,

01:21:38.540 | interrupt too often, but I wanna make sure

01:21:39.940 | that I don't miss an opportunity to ask you

01:21:41.820 | about the intimate partner violence in the other direction,

01:21:44.260 | female to male, where stereotypically speaking,

01:21:48.760 | the opportunity for physical violence is still there,

01:21:51.300 | but the idea in mind is that

01:21:53.980 | it would be more of a psychological nature.

01:21:55.780 | Although I think there is evidence

01:21:57.020 | that some women beat their husbands,

01:21:59.900 | but I'm guessing it's not as frequent or am I off?

01:22:03.380 | - Well, different studies.

01:22:04.800 | So it depends on whether you just simply count up acts

01:22:08.820 | or whether you look at the damage that's done, okay?

01:22:11.860 | And as I mentioned, men tend to do more physical damage.

01:22:15.200 | So there are shelters for battered women

01:22:17.900 | all over the country.

01:22:19.380 | As far as I know, there's one for battered men.

01:22:22.260 | Now it may be, and this is partly true,

01:22:24.460 | that men are more ashamed if they get beaten up

01:22:28.160 | by their partner or clocked with a frying pan

01:22:31.220 | and it's possible and there's evidence

01:22:33.940 | that police don't take it as seriously.

01:22:36.340 | So there's one case that I report in my book

01:22:38.420 | where a guy called the police

01:22:41.300 | and his wife had clocked him with something

01:22:44.600 | and police shows up and he says,

01:22:47.660 | if she so much as broke a fingernail in this altercation,

01:22:51.820 | they'll charge you and not her.

01:22:53.580 | And so there is a police bias,

01:22:58.540 | a potential police bias in this.

01:23:01.700 | And so there may be under-reporting of women

01:23:04.660 | beating up men as a consequence, okay?

01:23:08.540 | But the motivations are often different.

01:23:11.480 | So one is that male sexual jealousy will trigger him

01:23:17.460 | to attack his partner and then she will use

01:23:20.980 | physical violence to defend herself.

01:23:23.180 | So she might pick up a frying pan

01:23:26.580 | or a weapon of some sort to defend herself.

01:23:30.380 | And so the motivation is his sexual jealousy on his part,

01:23:35.380 | but self-defense on her part.

01:23:37.860 | And so that accounts for some unknown percentage

01:23:40.340 | of the cases.

01:23:41.460 | And in some cases, it is women who were outraged

01:23:44.740 | when they discover their partner's been having sex

01:23:46.880 | with someone else, an infidelity of a sexual, financial,

01:23:51.180 | or emotional nature.

01:23:53.220 | And so there is some female to male violence

01:23:55.700 | that absolutely occurs.

01:23:57.360 | But the reduction of a perceived mate value discrepancy

01:24:03.220 | is a key function from male perspective.

01:24:06.620 | Now, again, not that he thinks about this,

01:24:08.740 | he's just angry and wants to hurt her, okay?

01:24:12.500 | Okay, but here's one other thing

01:24:15.300 | that is really interesting.

01:24:16.620 | And about the intimate partner violence,

01:24:19.000 | and that's the specificity of it depending on circumstances.

01:24:23.100 | And namely, when the woman gets pregnant,

01:24:26.680 | she's more vulnerable to physical violence.

01:24:30.120 | And when the man suspects that he's not the father

01:24:33.320 | of that pregnancy, he's more likely to direct the violence

01:24:36.820 | toward blows to her abdomen, okay?

01:24:39.800 | That's specific.

01:24:42.200 | And so in that case, the hypothesized function

01:24:47.200 | is to terminate the pregnancy by a rival male

01:24:50.800 | as opposed to deterring the woman

01:24:54.340 | from committing an infidelity

01:24:55.920 | or from leaving the relationship entirely.

01:24:58.460 | So that's why one function of intimate partner violence

01:25:01.280 | is just sequestering the woman

01:25:03.400 | and keeping her all to himself.

01:25:05.300 | So it's both to prevent infidelity

01:25:08.380 | and to prevent defection.

01:25:10.620 | - I have a friend who's wife told me

01:25:14.420 | that if he cheats, I'll kill him, that's what she said.

01:25:21.900 | But it's actually just much easier

01:25:24.500 | to keep him very, very busy.

01:25:27.020 | And that statement now leaps to mind

01:25:29.760 | because of what you're describing,

01:25:31.500 | that there are many tactics by which people

01:25:33.760 | can engage this effort to reduce the mate value discrepancy,

01:25:38.460 | not all of which are overtly violent,

01:25:40.940 | but all of which are designed to constrain their behavior.

01:25:45.660 | - Right, right, yeah, so these would fall

01:25:47.500 | under what I would call mate retention tactics,

01:25:50.160 | only one or two of which fall under the violence category.

01:25:56.460 | Yeah, there are even within partner

01:26:00.740 | psychological manipulations about these things.

01:26:04.040 | So there are psychological manipulations

01:26:05.740 | about perceived mate value, no one else would want you,

01:26:10.740 | you're a loser, there's denigration of partner

01:26:15.420 | within the relationship, even feigning anger

01:26:20.420 | to make the partner feel guilty

01:26:22.500 | about say looking at someone else.

01:26:25.620 | So there's all kinds of internecine warfare

01:26:29.900 | that goes on within relationships

01:26:31.740 | to manipulate perceptions of these things.

01:26:34.400 | This is, I'm creating a much too jaded view

01:26:36.440 | of romance and love, I think.

01:26:38.340 | - Oh, no, we will get to the happy endings and long,

01:26:42.660 | I mean, there are certainly

01:26:43.500 | many happy relationships out there.

01:26:45.460 | As a neuroscientist, I hear about this

01:26:48.260 | and the immediacy of how people fall into a pattern

01:26:53.260 | of jealousy or a pattern of cheating and not always,

01:26:58.500 | but, and it just speaks to brain circuitry

01:27:01.700 | that's evolved to protect something.

01:27:03.540 | And I'm sure this statement is not exhaustive,

01:27:06.900 | but I think it's accurate to say that every species,

01:27:09.040 | but especially humans, wants to make more of itself

01:27:13.240 | and protect its young, but these issues of paternity

01:27:16.540 | and resource allocation, I mean, I think they're vital.

01:27:19.080 | And I look forward to a day where evolutionary psychology

01:27:21.900 | and neuroscience can merge at the level

01:27:24.180 | of underlying mechanism, but I don't think it's dark,

01:27:27.760 | I think it's just the way we're wired at some level.

01:27:32.300 | - Speaking of dark, could you tell us about the dark triad?

01:27:36.180 | - Yeah, so the dark triad,

01:27:37.540 | so we've been talking about sex differences on average,

01:27:40.580 | but there are critical within sex, individual differences.

01:27:44.340 | And the dark triad is one of the most important ones.

01:27:47.700 | The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics.

01:27:51.820 | So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

01:27:56.620 | Homeworks of narcissism are things like grandiosity,

01:28:00.980 | person thinks that they're more intelligent,

01:28:04.340 | more attractive, more dazzling,

01:28:06.340 | more charming than they actually are.

01:28:08.340 | I think they're the greatest persons in sliced bread.

01:28:11.940 | Importantly with narcissism,

01:28:13.380 | you also get a sense of entitlement.

01:28:16.620 | So they feel entitled to a larger share of the pie,

01:28:20.160 | whether that be the financial pie, the status pie,

01:28:23.060 | or the sexual pie.

01:28:24.560 | Machiavellianism is high scores tend to pursue

01:28:30.340 | an exploitative social strategy.

01:28:33.140 | So they might feign cooperation,

01:28:35.260 | but then cheat on subsequent moves.

01:28:38.600 | They view other people as pawns to be manipulated

01:28:43.020 | for their own instrumental gains.

01:28:45.100 | And then psychopathy, one of the hallmarks of psychopathy

01:28:48.540 | is a lack of empathy.

01:28:50.280 | So most people have a normal empathy circuit

01:28:53.180 | where if a child falls down and gets hurt,

01:28:56.140 | we feel compassion for the harm that that person

01:29:00.260 | is undergoing.

01:29:01.420 | Or if a puppy gets hit by a car or whatever,

01:29:04.900 | we feel compassion.

01:29:07.020 | Psychopaths don't, that is those high on this,

01:29:09.580 | it's a dimensional thing, it's not a categorical thing.

01:29:13.180 | So those high on psychopathy basically lack empathy.

01:29:17.500 | And so if you combine these qualities,

01:29:20.540 | narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,

01:29:25.120 | you have some very bad dudes.

01:29:29.140 | And I say bad dudes 'cause men tend to score higher

01:29:31.880 | in these things than women,

01:29:33.340 | especially on the psychopathy dimension.

01:29:36.800 | So when you talk about clinical levels of psychopathy,

01:29:39.500 | it's estimated to be something like 1% of women

01:29:43.360 | and about 4% of men.

01:29:45.140 | So men are much higher on that.

01:29:48.380 | So why is this important?

01:29:50.340 | Well, it's important in the mating context

01:29:52.700 | because those who are high on dark triad traits

01:29:57.360 | tend to be sexual deceivers for one.

01:30:02.120 | So they're very often very charming,

01:30:04.760 | very good at seducing women and then abandoning them

01:30:08.200 | sometimes with after fleecing them

01:30:11.620 | or draining their bank account.

01:30:13.540 | They're very good at the art of seduction.

01:30:19.960 | They are also tend to be sexual harassers,

01:30:24.420 | serial sexual harassers, and sexual coercers.

01:30:27.820 | So when it comes to forms of sexual violence,

01:30:34.040 | high dark triad guys tend to be perpetrators of this.

01:30:38.160 | And so like most men, I think would be,

01:30:41.760 | find it ethically abhorrent to sexually harass

01:30:44.780 | say a woman in the workplace,

01:30:46.660 | dark triad guys, in part, maybe they feel entitled to it.

01:30:50.740 | And in part, they do.

01:30:52.700 | I mean, in some cases that I report in the book,

01:30:55.220 | there are like literal descriptions

01:30:56.920 | where the guys are writing in these journals,

01:30:58.620 | oh, I knew she was attracted to me.

01:31:01.500 | That's why she met me in the Xerox room

01:31:05.720 | just when I was there 'cause she wanted to admire

01:31:07.900 | my bulging biceps or whatever.

01:31:10.220 | - It's all about them.

01:31:11.220 | - Yeah, and this gets into a bias that I talk about,

01:31:15.920 | which is the male sexual misperception bias,

01:31:19.460 | where a woman smiles at a man,

01:31:21.020 | man thinks, oh, she wants my body, she's attracted to me.

01:31:24.760 | And women are thinking, oh, I'm just being friendly,

01:31:27.500 | I'm being polite or professional.

01:31:29.880 | But these guys, high dark triad guys,

01:31:33.540 | are more susceptible to the sexual overperception bias.

01:31:37.800 | And they literally believe that the woman

01:31:40.460 | is attracted to them and sending them signals,

01:31:43.720 | green lights, to sexually approach.

01:31:46.860 | And so if you combine dark triad traits

01:31:50.400 | with the dispositional pursuit

01:31:52.940 | of a short-term mating strategy,

01:31:54.860 | that's an especially deadly combination.

01:31:57.400 | That's when you get sexual harassment, sexual coercion.

01:32:01.300 | So these are very bad dudes,

01:32:04.260 | also predictors of intimate partner violence.

01:32:07.840 | - What approximate frequency in the male population

01:32:11.500 | have all three of the dark triad traits?

01:32:14.060 | And I realize that they're on a continuum,

01:32:15.660 | sociopathy, narcissism.

01:32:17.020 | - That's why you can't say it,

01:32:18.060 | 'cause they are on a continuum,

01:32:19.260 | and it's sort of arbitrary where you draw the line.

01:32:23.200 | But I think it's a minority of men,

01:32:26.340 | it's a subset of men who commit the vast majority

01:32:30.260 | of these acts of sexual violence.

01:32:32.220 | And that's why it's not like,

01:32:33.880 | if you look at victims of sexual violence,

01:32:37.980 | they're more numerous than the perpetrators

01:32:40.420 | of sexual violence, because the perpetrators

01:32:42.500 | tend to be serial offenders, so to speak.

01:32:45.620 | One guy in the workplace harassing 15 different women,

01:32:49.460 | one guy sexually coercing multiple women.

01:32:53.100 | So that's why you have, in well-known cases in the news,

01:32:56.540 | like Harvey Weinstein, probably over 100 different women.

01:33:01.540 | Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein,

01:33:03.820 | some of these more famous cases,

01:33:06.060 | these are a large number of victims,

01:33:08.820 | but pretty much sole perpetrators.

01:33:13.820 | And there's no question that these guys,

01:33:16.180 | like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein,

01:33:19.640 | were definitely high on dark triad traits.

01:33:22.380 | - You mentioned stalking briefly.

01:33:26.420 | Maybe we could just talk about some of the

01:33:32.180 | less known features about stalking.

01:33:34.380 | I think I once heard you give a lecture

01:33:36.460 | where you said that one of the scariest things

01:33:39.580 | about stalking is that sometimes it works.

01:33:42.680 | - Yes, yeah.

01:33:43.740 | So, well, stalking has multiple motivations,

01:33:48.300 | but one of the most frequent motivations

01:33:51.180 | is a mating motivation, where either there's a breakup

01:33:56.180 | and the woman dumps the guy

01:34:00.180 | and the guy doesn't want to get dumped,

01:34:02.580 | he wants to maintain a relationship with her.

01:34:04.960 | And I should say that when it comes to criminal stalking,

01:34:08.100 | there's a huge sex difference.

01:34:09.420 | About 80% of the stalkers tend to be men, about 20% women.

01:34:13.320 | So there are women stalkers,

01:34:15.460 | but they're about a fourth the number compared to men.

01:34:20.460 | So the motivation of the guys

01:34:25.260 | tends to be either an attempt to get back together

01:34:29.060 | with the woman, either sexually or in a relationship,

01:34:34.000 | or and/or to interfere with her future mating prospects.

01:34:39.000 | And it works in some of the time in two senses.

01:34:43.900 | One is it does interfere with her attempts to remade.

01:34:48.400 | So in fact, it scares off some guys.

01:34:51.100 | So like you show up and pick up a woman at her apartment

01:34:55.620 | for a date and her ex is sitting out there glaring at you.

01:35:00.080 | - Or, and I'm actually familiar with the circumstance

01:35:03.740 | where early in a relationship,

01:35:05.400 | somebody mentions that an ex has made veiled threats

01:35:09.900 | about surveillance, for instance.

01:35:12.360 | I've actually had that happen several times

01:35:14.340 | in my dating history where someone would say,

01:35:16.780 | you started opening up about previous relationships

01:35:19.020 | a little bit as it's appropriate.

01:35:20.580 | And someone says, yeah, he mentioned that he was going to

01:35:24.340 | send someone around to surveil me, that kind of thing,

01:35:29.340 | which is a very interesting factoid to pick up.

01:35:33.660 | But I heard it enough times,

01:35:36.240 | and people I know have reported hearing this enough times

01:35:39.900 | that I'm guessing that that's probably more frequent

01:35:43.340 | than people actually trailing people in cars

01:35:46.200 | and things of that sort.

01:35:47.220 | But planting that, it's like the psychological

01:35:49.300 | sea of surveillance is a form of harassment in some sense.

01:35:52.620 | - Yes, absolutely.

01:35:53.620 | I think that you're right.

01:35:54.460 | I mean, there's that planting the psychological seeds,

01:35:57.580 | but then also with surveillance,

01:35:59.960 | some surveyors remain hidden, so you don't know necessarily.

01:36:04.740 | - Yeah, I confess in this case,

01:36:06.380 | it did not act as a deterrent

01:36:07.760 | for continuing the relationship, but that's another story.

01:36:11.640 | So how often do women respond,

01:36:16.640 | I have to put this in quotes,

01:36:19.280 | for those that are listening, air quotes, end quotes,

01:36:21.320 | positively to stalking.

01:36:22.400 | I mean, how often does it work to re-secure the partner

01:36:26.080 | after they've been broken up?

01:36:27.400 | - So in our studies, it's a minority of cases

01:36:31.180 | that it works to re-establish.

01:36:34.300 | I think something like 15% of the time

01:36:37.500 | that it works either to temporarily re-establish

01:36:41.580 | a sexual relationship or lure the woman back in

01:36:44.880 | for a more permanent relationship.

01:36:46.860 | So most of the time it doesn't work.

01:36:49.140 | But one woman in our study said the guy,

01:36:54.140 | every time she went out with another guy,

01:36:57.100 | he would threaten the other guy.

01:36:59.120 | And she said after about six months,

01:37:01.340 | there were no other guys.

01:37:02.360 | He'd basically scared off all the other guys.

01:37:04.620 | And so she went back to him

01:37:06.060 | because there were no other guys around.

01:37:07.580 | - Yeah, I experienced this when I was in college.

01:37:10.300 | I lived in a small town, very population dense,

01:37:13.220 | Isla Vista, UC Santa Barbara.

01:37:16.260 | And there was a couple where every time

01:37:19.580 | this woman would date someone,

01:37:20.580 | he'd basically beat up whoever the new suitor was.

01:37:23.700 | And pretty soon no one would go near them.

01:37:25.120 | They got a reputation as the kind of Sid and Nancy couple.

01:37:28.440 | And indeed it worked.

01:37:30.220 | It worked in the sense that no one dare go near her

01:37:33.840 | and they ended up together.

01:37:35.320 | So I've seen real life examples of this.

01:37:38.340 | - Yeah, so it happens.

01:37:39.660 | But it is in general, not a successful strategy.

01:37:44.460 | - Oh no, and it's not what I'm suggesting.

01:37:45.860 | I was just shocked to learn that,

01:37:47.380 | 'cause we hear stalking and we have this,

01:37:50.280 | there's one very extreme image of it.

01:37:52.020 | But the underlying motivations I think

01:37:53.680 | are reveal something about mating dynamics.

01:37:57.660 | - Yeah, and I think that the circumstances

01:38:00.160 | are often a mate value discrepancy

01:38:02.500 | where the guy realizes correctly

01:38:06.420 | that he will be unable to replace her

01:38:09.220 | with a mate of equivalent mate value.

01:38:12.980 | Or in some cases, any mate.

01:38:15.660 | You know, it's like, well, she was with me once,

01:38:18.120 | maybe I can get her back with me again.

01:38:23.020 | So the psychology is very understandable,

01:38:26.740 | but it tends not to work.

01:38:29.200 | Because the other thing we found,

01:38:30.740 | we did a study of 2,500 victims of stalking.

01:38:34.240 | This is with Josh Duntley, a former student of mine

01:38:36.760 | who's now a professor in a criminology department.

01:38:39.220 | And what we found is there were large differences

01:38:43.220 | between the stalker and the victim of the stalker

01:38:47.560 | where the stalker tends to be much lower in mate value

01:38:52.140 | than the victim.

01:38:52.980 | And so basically it's typically the woman

01:38:55.700 | who realizes she can do a lot better on the mating market.

01:39:00.140 | And the guy realizes I am never gonna be able to replace her

01:39:04.940 | with a woman of equivalent mate value.

01:39:07.340 | And so I'm gonna use this last ditch desperate measure

01:39:11.260 | to try to get her back.

01:39:12.820 | And occasionally it works.

01:39:14.360 | - I'm thinking more about this mate value thing.

01:39:21.540 | This number, this metric, the eight, 10, six,

01:39:25.540 | whatever it is, and mate value discrepancy

01:39:28.440 | playing such a strong role in all these dynamics.

01:39:31.300 | I should have asked this earlier,

01:39:33.780 | but what is the impact on mate value,

01:39:38.260 | perceived or real, of a woman having already had children?

01:39:43.260 | For instance, friends of mine who are married and divorced

01:39:49.180 | who have children will often post pictures of themselves

01:39:51.500 | with their children in their online profiles

01:39:53.840 | because it shows a strong sense of paternal instinct.

01:39:57.820 | There's the puppy thing,

01:39:59.480 | people with dogs or puppies demonstrating a capacity to care

01:40:05.580 | and for caretaking.

01:40:07.900 | In women, the opposite is also true.

01:40:09.820 | Women with children show capacity.

01:40:11.460 | It demonstrates fertility, at least at one point,

01:40:14.620 | perhaps still fertility that's still present.

01:40:18.280 | Does it positively, negatively, or neutrally impact

01:40:22.200 | a woman to already have children when seeking another mate,

01:40:25.680 | regardless of whether or not she was married

01:40:27.240 | or had the children out of wedlock?

01:40:28.740 | - Yeah, as a general rule, it decreases her mate value

01:40:32.220 | because kids with another mate are viewed as a cost,

01:40:35.720 | not a benefit.

01:40:36.980 | And they're a cost on multiple dimensions,

01:40:41.080 | one of which they're gonna be a cost to the guy

01:40:44.620 | because he's gonna have to invest resources, time,

01:40:48.580 | attention, so forth, but also a portion of her effort

01:40:52.480 | and resources are gonna be devoted toward kids

01:40:54.920 | who are not genetically related to him,

01:40:56.840 | and which is one reason why stepfamilies,

01:40:59.280 | there's often a lot of conflict within stepfamilies,

01:41:02.000 | very explicable from an evolutionary perspective.

01:41:04.620 | So in general, it's a cost, not a benefit.

01:41:08.040 | Sometimes it can be a benefit though.

01:41:09.600 | So I know one case where a woman got divorced,

01:41:12.840 | she had two kids and she ended up successfully mating

01:41:15.940 | with a guy who was also divorced

01:41:18.020 | and had primary custody of his two kids.

01:41:20.300 | And so there was a compatibility there.

01:41:23.440 | But as a general rule, it will decrease a woman's

01:41:26.480 | and a man's mate value to have kids,

01:41:29.020 | especially kids who are young and financially dependent.

01:41:32.920 | But what happens is let's say the woman would be an eight

01:41:37.320 | without kids, a guy who's a six might be able to attract her

01:41:43.320 | and might feel lucky to attract her

01:41:48.320 | because there's no way he would have been able

01:41:50.340 | to attract her under other conditions.

01:41:52.140 | But that's why the display of effort investing in her kids

01:41:57.140 | is often a mating tactic.

01:41:59.180 | He's showing, okay, I'm willing to invest in kids.

01:42:02.140 | I'm willing to sacrifice.

01:42:03.860 | And so they, in essence, become equivalent in mate value

01:42:07.740 | as a result of that.

01:42:09.460 | But will she be able to attract on average other eights?

01:42:14.460 | Less likely, but the same is true of guys.

01:42:18.360 | And this is why the reason that it affects women

01:42:22.240 | more than men is 'cause more custody tends to go with women.

01:42:27.000 | That is the kids, women tend to have greater custody

01:42:30.600 | and women tend to invest more in the kids

01:42:34.060 | throughout their lives.

01:42:35.920 | Now there are other things like alimony

01:42:38.120 | and child support payments and so forth.

01:42:39.900 | But all the women I've talked to,

01:42:42.700 | I've talked to one-on-one with many women about this,

01:42:45.800 | they view a guy with kids as a cost, not a benefit,

01:42:50.080 | unless the kids are old enough and they've left home

01:42:52.780 | and are no longer financially dependent.

01:42:55.640 | - And everything you just described is consistent

01:42:58.560 | with what you said earlier,

01:42:59.620 | which is that with subsequent marriages

01:43:01.960 | or as men get older, the tendency is to seek mates

01:43:05.920 | that are progressively younger, right?

01:43:08.920 | Because there's a higher, lower probability

01:43:11.420 | they'll already have children if they're much younger.

01:43:14.200 | - Right, right, and if the guy is successful,

01:43:17.420 | if he has status and resources and has other qualities

01:43:21.100 | associated with higher mate value,

01:43:22.680 | then he will remain attractive to younger women.

01:43:26.240 | - I realize it's not your specific area of expertise,

01:43:28.760 | but these days there's a lot of discussion

01:43:31.000 | about how early childhood attachment to parents

01:43:35.480 | influences mate choice later on.

01:43:37.440 | This kind of general categorization of avoidant and anxious

01:43:41.400 | and anxious avoidant and all this kind of thing.

01:43:44.560 | And again, putting my hat on as a neuroscientist,

01:43:47.160 | I think it makes sense that the neural circuits

01:43:51.520 | for attachment in childhood would be somehow partially

01:43:56.520 | or in whole repurposed for other forms of attachment.

01:43:59.540 | We don't just tend to say, okay, that brain circuitry

01:44:01.840 | was from when I was a kid and now I'm an adult

01:44:03.760 | and so I'll develop this new attachment circuitry.

01:44:05.760 | I'm guessing it evolves and whatnot.

01:44:07.860 | But is there anything interesting about that,

01:44:12.860 | about childhood attachment strategies

01:44:15.840 | vis-a-vis stability of long-term partner choice,

01:44:19.120 | or is that too big of a leap for us to make here?

01:44:21.040 | - Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer

01:44:22.960 | some sort of informed speculation about it.

01:44:27.560 | And as you point out, it's not my area of expertise,

01:44:30.440 | but I know a little bit about it.

01:44:32.000 | And I mean, I think that a secure attachment style,

01:44:36.960 | if both partners have a secure attachment style,

01:44:39.040 | that's conducive to a long-term mateship.

01:44:41.120 | Avoidant attachment styles,

01:44:45.040 | avoidant people tend to have more difficulty with intimacy

01:44:49.120 | and also higher probability of infidelity.

01:44:51.660 | And anxious attachment style, I don't know,

01:44:57.320 | can create problems of its own.

01:44:59.480 | You know, in the overly clingy, dependent,

01:45:02.680 | you know, absorbing what I call high relationship load.

01:45:06.120 | So, you know, there's like mutation load,

01:45:08.480 | which we all have a certain number of mutations.

01:45:10.440 | There's, you know, parasite load.

01:45:14.520 | There's also what I call relationship load.

01:45:16.560 | So what is the baggage that someone brings

01:45:18.700 | to the relationship?

01:45:19.800 | - Probably correlated with the frequency of demand

01:45:22.240 | of immediate text message responses.

01:45:24.360 | - Right.

01:45:25.200 | - Well, I think that the frequency of demand,

01:45:26.440 | like the latent, the expected low latency

01:45:29.580 | of text message responses,

01:45:31.920 | plays out consistently in relationships.

01:45:34.620 | You know, early on,

01:45:35.460 | there's a very low expectation of response.

01:45:37.080 | And then as people get attached,

01:45:39.320 | depending on their level of anxiety,

01:45:40.880 | if they don't hear back from somebody really quickly,

01:45:42.880 | where the mind goes is a very interesting aspect.

01:45:46.040 | You know, do you become suspicious?

01:45:47.920 | Do you become anxious?

01:45:48.740 | Can you stabilize your own internal milieu?

01:45:51.200 | Or do you need to see the dot dot dot that's coming back?

01:45:54.880 | I'd love to see a study on that at some point.

01:45:57.140 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:57.980 | No, that's a good one.

01:45:58.800 | And my intuition suggests that your prediction

01:46:02.000 | about that would pan out.

01:46:03.960 | It would be the insecure that would really be,

01:46:06.920 | you know, getting upset if there were not

01:46:09.420 | that immediate response to the text.

01:46:11.520 | - Yeah, I have a friend, a female friend,

01:46:13.580 | who deliberately, quote unquote, using her language,

01:46:17.240 | trains her potential partners to be comfortable

01:46:21.840 | with a variable response latency.

01:46:24.040 | But then I asked her if she's comfortable

01:46:26.080 | with a variable response latency,

01:46:27.440 | and she said, "Absolutely not."

01:46:29.360 | So there's an asymmetry, at least in that case.

01:46:32.940 | This is almost certainly a more rare circumstance,

01:46:37.080 | but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask

01:46:40.000 | about unconventional relationships.

01:46:42.400 | These days, I don't think it's just

01:46:45.560 | by virtue of living in California.

01:46:47.640 | You hear more and more about monogamish,

01:46:51.280 | as opposed to monogamous,

01:46:53.720 | and various forms of polyamory

01:46:56.280 | that may or may not include the amory part.

01:46:58.960 | You know, passes and permission

01:47:02.480 | based on seasons, circumstance, and prior infidelities.

01:47:08.040 | Like, okay, somebody had a mishap early on.

01:47:11.540 | You know, you have one pass, so to speak.

01:47:15.120 | And you hear this kind of language getting thrown around.

01:47:18.320 | And it's intriguing to me because it seems like

01:47:21.400 | an effort to bypass some of the more,

01:47:25.040 | if you will, hardwired,

01:47:27.800 | or at least culturally hardwired aspects

01:47:30.000 | of mate choice and sexual partner choice.

01:47:32.200 | You know, acknowledging jealousy,

01:47:34.760 | but confronting it by allowing your partner

01:47:36.880 | to be with somebody else, for instance.

01:47:39.320 | I confess I have friends

01:47:40.640 | who have unconventional relationships.

01:47:43.040 | I have friends with conventional relationships.

01:47:45.560 | Any thoughts on polyamory?

01:47:48.000 | - Yeah, yeah, I do have a couple of thoughts on it.

01:47:50.480 | I haven't studied it extensively,

01:47:52.080 | but I think that the way I would phrase it is

01:47:56.920 | that there's an attempt to overcome

01:48:01.920 | certain evolved features of our mating psychology,

01:48:07.080 | but often in the service of other aspects

01:48:10.480 | of our mating psychology.

01:48:11.680 | So what I mean by that is this.

01:48:13.040 | So talk about polyamory.

01:48:15.180 | First of all, there's a sex difference on average.

01:48:18.760 | That is, men are more likely to want to initiate

01:48:21.720 | a polyamorous relationship than women.

01:48:24.080 | There are lots of exceptions,

01:48:25.280 | and I actually know of at least one exception personally,

01:48:29.520 | friends of mine who are in a polyamorous relationship.

01:48:33.240 | But the motivation for men

01:48:35.600 | is that evolved desire for sexual variety.

01:48:38.840 | So it gives him access to a wider variety of sex partners,

01:48:43.840 | which is part of our evolved sexual psychology,

01:48:46.920 | especially for men.

01:48:48.800 | Women, one motivation,

01:48:50.920 | now women also have a desire for sexual variety,

01:48:53.540 | on average tends not to be as great as that of men,

01:48:56.840 | but also have it.

01:48:58.380 | But some women agree to a polyamorous relationship

01:49:02.560 | as a mate retention tactic.

01:49:04.560 | That is, this guy, in order to keep him,

01:49:08.240 | she has to agree to the relationship.

01:49:10.120 | And so the motivations for engaging in polyamory

01:49:14.000 | are somewhat sex differentiated.

01:49:16.360 | - On average.

01:49:17.200 | - On average, on average, there's lots of exceptions.

01:49:19.520 | So now when it comes to sexual jealousy,

01:49:22.440 | there is this recognition that there,

01:49:24.320 | and the way that I would frame it,

01:49:26.280 | there's this evolved emotion,

01:49:27.960 | where it triggers sexual jealousy,

01:49:30.760 | seeing your partner having sex,

01:49:32.440 | or imagining your partner having sex,

01:49:34.300 | or falling in love with someone else.

01:49:37.040 | But interestingly, and there haven't been studies on this,

01:49:39.840 | but I know of this one polyamorous couple

01:49:42.280 | where they reported to me,

01:49:45.440 | both of them reported to me,

01:49:46.560 | she said it doesn't bother her at all

01:49:50.120 | if her husband, they're married,

01:49:52.160 | has sex with other women.

01:49:53.680 | They allow it.

01:49:54.520 | I think it's like every Thursday night or whatever,

01:49:56.300 | they have the different couples have different rules.

01:49:58.920 | But one time she saw him walking down the street

01:50:02.800 | hand in hand affectionately with a former girlfriend,

01:50:06.480 | and she got extremely jealous,

01:50:08.840 | because it signaled an emotional connection.

01:50:11.320 | So the sexual didn't bother her, the emotional did.

01:50:14.240 | She happens to be bisexual,

01:50:16.560 | and she and her partner said that it really upset him

01:50:21.560 | when she slept with other men,

01:50:23.880 | but it was fine if she slept with other women.

01:50:26.520 | - I think that's a fairly common thing

01:50:28.080 | that among the men that I know

01:50:29.920 | that are in polyamorous relationships,

01:50:31.520 | that that's a fairly common statement.

01:50:33.080 | - Yeah, and so he kept trying to,

01:50:34.880 | in these internecine manipulations,

01:50:38.260 | trying to encourage her to sleep with other women,

01:50:41.560 | but not with men, and in her case,

01:50:45.440 | encouraging him not to get emotionally involved

01:50:47.760 | with other women, but the sex was okay.

01:50:50.340 | So I think that, you know,

01:50:51.960 | I think that in the modern environment,

01:50:53.940 | you know, we have a very rich

01:50:55.580 | and complicated evolved mating psychology,

01:50:58.600 | and what we're doing in these novel forms,

01:51:02.040 | or semi-novel, 'cause these things

01:51:03.800 | have a pretty deep history themselves,

01:51:08.640 | that we're attempting to maximize

01:51:11.960 | some of our evolved desires while keeping quiescent

01:51:16.680 | other evolved aspects of our sexual psychology,

01:51:19.580 | like jealousy, so satisfying our desire for sexual variety,

01:51:24.040 | but keeping jealousy at bay,

01:51:26.000 | and different couples do it in different ways,

01:51:27.600 | so as you alluded to.

01:51:29.720 | So I know one couple where, live in Los Angeles,

01:51:32.920 | and the woman from the woman said

01:51:35.760 | she gives her husband permission to have an affair,

01:51:38.100 | sleep with other women, as long as it's outside

01:51:39.960 | of the city limits of L.A., you know,

01:51:42.200 | and this other couple, it has to be Thursday night,

01:51:45.640 | you know, and so different, people have different--

01:51:47.360 | - So there are constraints on,

01:51:48.880 | but the constraints are specific

01:51:52.120 | and somewhat arbitrary to the relationship.

01:51:54.480 | - Yeah, yeah, they're specific,

01:51:55.840 | and often in polyamorous relationships,

01:51:59.120 | people talk it out and come to an agreement

01:52:02.720 | on what is acceptable and what's out of bounds.

01:52:05.560 | So, but in a way, I mean, in a way, it's just,

01:52:10.280 | you know, we can't change our evolved sexual psychology,

01:52:13.540 | I don't think.

01:52:14.540 | What we can do is we can activate certain elements of it

01:52:17.820 | and keep others quiescent, and that's all good.

01:52:22.780 | In a way, we do in the modern environment,

01:52:25.660 | so even to take it outside of polyamory, pornography, okay?

01:52:30.220 | Widely consumed internet pornography, what does that do?

01:52:34.780 | Well, there's a big sex difference there.

01:52:36.220 | Men tend to consume it a lot more than women.

01:52:39.000 | The forms of the pornography are different,

01:52:42.020 | but in a way, the pornography, what it does is it

01:52:44.840 | parasitize men's evolved desire for sexual variety

01:52:48.020 | so they can, in some sense,

01:52:52.180 | psychologically experience sexual,

01:52:55.080 | a variety of different women sexually

01:52:57.580 | without actually doing it

01:52:59.160 | by just looking at their computer screen.

01:53:01.260 | And so in a way, another way of phrasing that

01:53:04.680 | is that we create modern, novel, cultural inventions

01:53:09.680 | in ways that satisfy our evolved desires

01:53:14.300 | and our evolved sexual desires.

01:53:16.480 | - Yeah, it's interesting with the kind of explosion

01:53:19.540 | of online pornography.

01:53:20.660 | I have a colleague at Stanford in psychiatry, Anna Lemke,

01:53:23.940 | who studies the dopamine system,

01:53:25.300 | and she mentioned two things of interest.

01:53:27.700 | One is that not only is there a tremendous variety

01:53:31.140 | of experiences that are available to people to view

01:53:34.340 | in pornography, but the intensity is also quite high,

01:53:37.720 | so much so that at least for young people

01:53:41.420 | who are observing a lot of pornography, it's possible,

01:53:44.840 | and there are studies looking at this now,

01:53:46.400 | that their brain circuits become wired

01:53:48.060 | to observing sexual acts as opposed to being engaged

01:53:50.740 | in them, which can be extremely problematic.

01:53:53.520 | So it's a sharp blade, so to speak.

01:53:56.580 | This pornography thing isn't what it once was,

01:53:59.860 | and it's evolving quickly.

01:54:03.340 | - Very interesting.

01:54:04.380 | So how should one frame all this?

01:54:08.880 | So I imagine a number of people listening

01:54:10.940 | are in relationships or would hope to be in a relationship.

01:54:14.560 | In terms of understanding what we are selecting

01:54:18.200 | for consciously or subconsciously,

01:54:21.340 | it seems like there are common themes.

01:54:23.460 | People want to feel attractive and attracted.

01:54:27.260 | People want to make sure that there's stability

01:54:31.620 | of the relationship, so when we hear about security,

01:54:33.760 | oftentimes I think of this kind of warm oxytocin,

01:54:36.460 | serotonin-like thing, but this mate value thing

01:54:41.220 | seems so powerful in all this, assessing mate value.

01:54:44.780 | So how objective are people about assessing their own value

01:54:49.780 | in terms of finding, securing, and over time,

01:54:54.920 | maintaining a relationship?

01:54:56.060 | Securing is dynamic because people age at different rates.

01:55:01.340 | Is there an objective metric of this stuff?

01:55:05.900 | I guess you get a lot of statistics about somebody's image

01:55:09.020 | and you come up with an average value

01:55:11.560 | based on the population.

01:55:13.100 | But how should people assess themselves?

01:55:15.060 | Because it seems like one of the features

01:55:17.040 | that would be very powerful for leading to happiness,

01:55:21.260 | of good partner selection that's stable,

01:55:24.980 | where one doesn't have to resort to these Machiavellian

01:55:27.860 | or diabolical or any of these other strategies,

01:55:30.780 | would be to be very honest with oneself.

01:55:34.060 | And how does one do that?

01:55:36.100 | - Yeah, great questions.

01:55:38.340 | And I don't think that the science has all the answers.

01:55:42.620 | So a couple of things.

01:55:44.820 | So one is that I think people are generally pretty good

01:55:48.980 | at self-assessing mate value.

01:55:51.180 | And even self-esteem has been hypothesized

01:55:56.460 | to be one internal monitoring device

01:55:59.740 | that tracks mate value.

01:56:01.500 | So when we get a promotion at work

01:56:03.160 | or we get a rise in status,

01:56:04.300 | we feel an elevated sense of self-esteem.

01:56:06.860 | We get fired, we get rejected,

01:56:09.020 | we get ostracized, our self-esteem plummets.

01:56:12.180 | So our self-evaluation, I think,

01:56:15.440 | does track mate value to some extent.

01:56:19.100 | There are people who overestimate their mate value,

01:56:22.240 | people high on narcissism in particular,

01:56:25.740 | and some people underestimate their mate value.

01:56:28.980 | Another important element

01:56:31.220 | is that there's consensual mate value.

01:56:34.860 | So that is, if you asked a group of 100 people,

01:56:38.820 | there's a fair amount of consensus

01:56:40.260 | that this person's an eight, that person's a six.

01:56:42.860 | But there are also individual differences in mate value.

01:56:46.160 | So one example is I know a woman who's a professor

01:56:49.900 | and she places a high premium on guys

01:56:54.140 | who are deeply steeped in Russian literature,

01:56:57.420 | which she is, so that she can have in-depth conversations

01:57:00.540 | about Russian literature.

01:57:01.780 | - Note to young men, learn Russian literature.

01:57:04.100 | - Well, but this is high

01:57:06.180 | and it's a dimension of mate value that's important for her,

01:57:09.220 | but probably not important for a lot of other people.

01:57:12.140 | And so, whereas other people, let's say,

01:57:14.500 | might be, let's say you're into football or some sport,

01:57:19.500 | then, and the other partner thinks sports are stupid,

01:57:24.300 | then that's someone who's also into sports

01:57:27.980 | is gonna be higher in mate value for you.

01:57:29.860 | So there are these individual differences

01:57:31.820 | in components of mate value, which is good,

01:57:34.100 | 'cause that means if everyone were going after

01:57:36.340 | the same people and there was total consensus on mate value,

01:57:40.440 | then there would be a lot of mate-less people

01:57:43.300 | and a lot of problems in the world

01:57:45.300 | and a lot of dissatisfied people.

01:57:47.060 | So both are important, the consensual aspects

01:57:51.340 | and the individually differentiated components of mate value.

01:57:56.340 | But in terms of accuracy of assessment,

01:58:02.420 | it's, there are no good measures scientifically to do this

01:58:06.500 | because it's sufficiently complicated.

01:58:09.580 | So I mentioned, we've mentioned maybe half,

01:58:13.380 | maybe a dozen different components of mate value,

01:58:16.780 | physical attractiveness, kindness, emotional stability,

01:58:19.760 | health status, et cetera, and these aren't the only ones.

01:58:24.760 | So I teach a course on psychology of human mating

01:58:28.620 | and I ask the people, it's a large course,

01:58:30.780 | couple hundred people, tell me,

01:58:32.740 | what do women want in a mate?

01:58:34.780 | And so I started with the blackboard.

01:58:36.620 | This is back in the old days when there was a blackboard,

01:58:39.060 | a piece of chalk, and they say,

01:58:40.420 | I want a mate who has a good sense of humor,

01:58:42.140 | sorry, sense of humor, intelligent, right, kind.

01:58:45.300 | And so I go through this and I go through five blackboards

01:58:49.020 | and then I run out of space over what women want.

01:58:51.780 | Now I do the same for men and men kind of run out of space

01:58:54.320 | after about a blackboard and a half.

01:58:56.620 | But what that tells me is that these qualities

01:59:00.280 | are large in number and complicated in nature.

01:59:02.960 | So you say, you want a guy who's nice and generous.

01:59:06.780 | They say, yeah, so like a guy who at the end of every month

01:59:09.560 | takes his whole paycheck and gives it to the wino,

01:59:13.120 | homeless person.

01:59:14.080 | Well, no, not that generous, you know, generous toward me,

01:59:17.440 | but not toward everyone else.

01:59:19.540 | Nice in general, but not so nice

01:59:23.240 | that they're getting exploited.

01:59:24.880 | So, or even, you know, now there's something,

01:59:27.500 | you can't be too healthy.

01:59:29.240 | So people, that's unidimensional, but you want a guy,

01:59:32.540 | women want a guy who's confident, but not too confident.

01:59:36.460 | You know, 'cause too confident will mean

01:59:38.260 | he's either arrogant, narcissistic,

01:59:40.040 | or not sufficiently manipulable.

01:59:44.480 | So anyway, so my point is that

01:59:47.720 | because there are so many different components of mate value

01:59:50.880 | and that they vary in amount,

01:59:54.360 | so it's not just listing the qualities and summing them up,

01:59:57.160 | they vary in amount, it's a very complicated endeavor

02:00:00.760 | to assess accurately.

02:00:02.380 | But I think people have a good intuitive sense

02:00:05.960 | of people's relative mate value,

02:00:08.160 | especially if you're in a group

02:00:10.240 | and you've been able to interact with them for a long time.

02:00:13.000 | And one indication is, again, that attention structure,

02:00:17.500 | how many other people really want to mate with this person,

02:00:20.880 | that's a good cue that they're high in mate value.

02:00:23.500 | Nobody wants to mate with you,

02:00:25.120 | then cue that you're low in mate value.

02:00:27.520 | - Reminds me of the time when one is trying to decide

02:00:30.860 | who to ask to the prom.

02:00:32.900 | You know, there's a complicated assessment

02:00:35.600 | based on who one would like to go with,

02:00:38.200 | whether or not you're already partnered,

02:00:40.100 | who would say yes, who would say no,

02:00:41.540 | because there's a risk in rejection too,

02:00:43.760 | because that, if I'm guessing correctly,

02:00:46.600 | could lower one's own perceived mate value.

02:00:50.440 | - Yeah, it's getting rejected.

02:00:51.700 | - Right, frequency of rejections

02:00:53.520 | probably doesn't lend itself well

02:00:55.040 | to increasing one's own view of their mate value.

02:00:59.560 | - Right, which is why many guys

02:01:01.620 | have what I call mating anxiety.

02:01:04.700 | That is, they don't approach them

02:01:08.040 | because they risk getting shot down.

02:01:10.420 | They're trying to maintain that number

02:01:12.900 | by reducing the amount of data.

02:01:16.400 | - Right. - Yeah, very interesting.

02:01:18.900 | - But it backfires in the modern environment.

02:01:22.800 | So there's a famous psychologist, Albert Ellis,

02:01:25.600 | who had mating anxiety, and he assigned himself

02:01:28.420 | the task of approaching, asking,

02:01:30.920 | like I can't remember what the number was,

02:01:32.380 | but let's say 50 women out on dates.

02:01:34.840 | He lived in New York City, so there were a lot of women.

02:01:37.160 | - He could just stand still and they would stream past.

02:01:39.200 | - Yeah. - And he assigned himself,

02:01:40.640 | like ask 50 women on a date every week.

02:01:45.040 | And he said, after two weeks,

02:01:46.340 | his mating anxiety disappeared.

02:01:47.800 | 'Cause most of them said, buzz off, creep.

02:01:50.920 | But he decided, well, he's actually getting rejected,

02:01:53.560 | didn't cause my world to collapse, and it actually was okay.

02:01:56.540 | And so he kind of inured himself to this rejection.

02:02:00.180 | And so it ended up, he ended up doing quite well

02:02:04.000 | on his mating life.

02:02:05.080 | - Another point for cognitive behavioral desensitization.

02:02:07.760 | - Yes, exactly.

02:02:08.680 | - He ran the experiment.

02:02:10.480 | Just a couple more questions.

02:02:11.880 | Earlier, you mentioned self-deception-based deception,

02:02:15.820 | or something of that sort.

02:02:18.320 | Self-deception, that people aren't always trying

02:02:21.080 | to convince somebody else of something

02:02:23.200 | that secretly they know isn't true,

02:02:24.760 | but that they deceive themselves.

02:02:27.000 | - Yeah, yes. - Could you embellish

02:02:28.020 | on that a little bit?

02:02:28.860 | - Yeah, so, well, this is actually,

02:02:30.140 | this hypothesis is the famous evolutionary biologist,

02:02:33.640 | Robert Trivers, first advanced this hypothesis

02:02:36.320 | in the preface in 1976 to Dawkins' book, "The Selfish Gene."

02:02:41.320 | And he's subsequently written more about it,

02:02:46.040 | both in a scientific article and in a more popular book.

02:02:49.880 | But the idea is that if, the core idea is that

02:02:53.000 | successful deception is facilitated by self-deception.

02:02:57.760 | So if you really believe that, and X,

02:03:02.560 | then you're gonna be a more successful salesman

02:03:04.760 | to convince other people of X.

02:03:06.680 | So if you believe you're, let's say, a 10 and made value,

02:03:10.320 | you truly believe it, even if you're not,

02:03:13.560 | I'm gonna have a more successful time convincing you

02:03:16.580 | that I am as well.

02:03:17.800 | And so the hypothesis is basically

02:03:20.160 | that people self-deceive in order to increase

02:03:24.440 | the effectiveness of actual deception, okay?

02:03:27.520 | But I think that there are people who are,

02:03:34.440 | so in one other dimension I'll mention too,

02:03:36.880 | is that animals often take each other

02:03:39.560 | at our own word for things.

02:03:41.760 | So if we're self-confident, people assume

02:03:44.780 | that we must have the goods to back up that self-confidence.

02:03:48.000 | If we're a quivering mass of insecurity,

02:03:50.320 | people believe, well, we don't have the goods

02:03:52.260 | to back up anything, you know?

02:03:54.080 | And so people use other people's displays

02:03:58.160 | of their self-confidence as a cue to their goods.

02:04:01.800 | And it's, in general, a pretty reliable cue,

02:04:04.880 | but then there are overestimates and underestimates

02:04:07.600 | as we've talked about, like with narcissism.

02:04:10.200 | - Yeah, we see this with the job candidates.

02:04:12.740 | You know, you are taught to look very carefully

02:04:15.600 | at the application and consider all aspects,

02:04:18.500 | but ultimately you consider that also in light of, you know,

02:04:21.980 | how firmly someone believes in the vision

02:04:24.300 | of what they're trying to bring to the profession.

02:04:27.600 | And that's, I think, largely a subconscious process

02:04:31.200 | and that being aware of it can be helpful.

02:04:33.500 | But yeah, when somebody is confident,

02:04:34.680 | you tend to think that they're going to get

02:04:36.020 | where they say they're going to go.

02:04:37.560 | And it acts as a bit of a heuristic for not needing,

02:04:42.120 | the impulse is that one then doesn't need

02:04:44.040 | to go vet all the information quite as carefully.

02:04:46.220 | But if, I guess if one is aware of it,

02:04:47.800 | then you know to dig deeper in,

02:04:51.160 | because it seems like there's a lot of deception going on.

02:04:53.720 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:04:55.320 | Well, and, you know, and something we talked about earlier,

02:05:00.720 | people high on psychopathy are very good at deception.

02:05:05.600 | I don't know whether they are good at self-deception

02:05:09.920 | or whether they're just really good deceivers, you know?

02:05:12.760 | So, but they can be very effective.

02:05:15.840 | And out in California, you know,

02:05:18.760 | you live out in California,

02:05:20.160 | I'm sure you've seen your fair share of cases like that.

02:05:23.520 | - Oh yeah, I think across today's discussion

02:05:27.280 | and various examples pop to mind of seeing these features

02:05:32.280 | in humans, it's so interesting.

02:05:34.080 | I find the work that you do incredibly interesting.

02:05:36.600 | I think this field of evolutionary psychology

02:05:38.600 | is fascinating and I hope, I said it before,

02:05:43.160 | but I'll say it again.

02:05:44.000 | I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology

02:05:46.000 | are nudging towards one another.

02:05:48.280 | And it's only a matter of time

02:05:49.560 | before they merge in some formal way.

02:05:53.200 | I mean, there is the work, for instance,

02:05:54.360 | on polygamous versus monogamous,

02:05:55.880 | prairie voles and levels of vasopressin,

02:05:57.960 | but it's a big leap to go from vasopressin

02:05:59.880 | and a prairie vole, no disrespect to that beautiful work,

02:06:03.040 | but to humans and say, oh, vasopressin inhalants

02:06:06.040 | are going to make you monogamous or something.

02:06:08.280 | I think that's, I probably got the direction

02:06:10.480 | of the effect wrong, but you get the point.

02:06:12.160 | - Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.

02:06:13.560 | And I think it will happen.

02:06:15.660 | I think it's starting to happen and it will happen

02:06:18.160 | because getting at the neuroscience

02:06:20.240 | is getting at the underlying mechanisms

02:06:22.120 | that are driving the process.

02:06:23.820 | So, what an evolutionary perspective brings to bear

02:06:27.520 | is evolved function and ultimate explanation,

02:06:32.080 | the selective forces that created adaptations,

02:06:35.120 | the functions of those adaptations,

02:06:37.140 | and the neuroscience brings,

02:06:38.680 | well, what is the underlying machinery

02:06:40.800 | that these mechanisms are instantiated in?

02:06:43.980 | - Yeah, it would be wonderful to collaborate someday.

02:06:46.240 | Maybe we'll do a brain imaging study on jealousy

02:06:48.920 | or something in, I don't know, and throw it.

02:06:51.800 | You're the psychologist.

02:06:52.940 | You would come up with a beautiful experimental design.

02:06:56.440 | I'm certain that people are going

02:06:58.000 | to want to learn more about your work.

02:06:59.640 | Certainly, we will give them links

02:07:00.920 | to your social media and other sites.

02:07:03.500 | You've written a tremendous number

02:07:04.840 | of really interesting books.

02:07:06.320 | Tell us about your most recent book

02:07:09.400 | and maybe some of the others that,

02:07:10.800 | if people are interested in these topics

02:07:12.420 | and they want to learn more, that they could explore.

02:07:15.120 | - Sure, okay, so, well, my most recent book

02:07:18.800 | is called "When Men Behave Badly,

02:07:21.280 | The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,

02:07:23.940 | Harassment, and Assault,"

02:07:25.820 | and that book deals with conflict between the sexes,

02:07:29.100 | sexual conflict, and so it deals with them

02:07:31.820 | both in what I call mating market conflicts,

02:07:36.920 | some of the topics we've been talking about,

02:07:38.600 | deception in internet dating and things like that.

02:07:41.960 | Second is conflict that occurs within mating relationships

02:07:46.040 | of the sort that we've been talking about as well,

02:07:48.200 | financial infidelity, emotional infidelity,

02:07:50.580 | sexual infidelity, coping with conflict

02:07:54.120 | within a relationship,

02:07:55.240 | and I actually have some suggestions for strategies

02:07:58.040 | for coping with conflict within a relationship.

02:08:01.360 | Coping in the after,

02:08:02.880 | dealing with the aftermath of breakups.

02:08:05.120 | So often there's an asymmetry.

02:08:06.580 | One person wants to break up, the other doesn't.

02:08:08.960 | So I talk about coping in the aftermath,

02:08:11.840 | and then I also talk in this book,

02:08:13.960 | "When Men Behave Badly,"

02:08:15.160 | about some of the darker sides of human mating,

02:08:18.320 | like intimate partner violence, stalking,

02:08:22.780 | sexual harassment, sexual coercion.

02:08:25.520 | So that's what that book's about,

02:08:26.880 | and I think it's gotten well-reviewed

02:08:30.440 | and people find it very useful in understanding

02:08:33.660 | what is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena.

02:08:37.180 | Why do men and women seem at odds with each other

02:08:39.880 | in so many domains?

02:08:41.140 | Why do some of these recurrent forms

02:08:43.600 | of sexual conflict occur?

02:08:45.700 | So that's what that book's about.

02:08:47.780 | My previous book, so my first book,

02:08:50.120 | which I've had the good fortune

02:08:51.520 | to be able to revise a couple of times,

02:08:54.080 | deals more broadly with human mating strategies.

02:08:57.440 | It's called "The Evolution of Desire,

02:08:59.380 | Strategies of Human Mating,"

02:09:01.320 | and gives people a broad overview

02:09:03.260 | of what people want in a mate,

02:09:05.880 | tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention,

02:09:09.560 | and so forth throughout the whole mating process,

02:09:11.920 | serial mating, causes of divorce, and so forth.

02:09:16.080 | And then even more broadly,

02:09:18.200 | I have a textbook called "Evolutionary Psychology,

02:09:21.540 | The New Science of the Mind,"

02:09:23.520 | which is in its sixth edition right now,

02:09:26.780 | and it's the most widely used textbook

02:09:29.140 | in evolutionary psychology around North America and Europe,

02:09:33.020 | and actually, it's been translated even into Arabic

02:09:36.840 | and other countries.

02:09:38.180 | So that deals somewhat with mating,

02:09:41.100 | but also deals with survival problems or evolved fears

02:09:45.380 | and phobias, issues about kin and family,

02:09:50.380 | extended family, friendships, social hierarchies,

02:09:54.500 | status hierarchies, warfare, and other topics.

02:09:59.120 | So "The Evolutionary Psychology" textbook

02:10:01.580 | is the broadest book,

02:10:03.320 | and then maybe the second broadest

02:10:04.860 | is "The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating,"

02:10:09.320 | and then for those interested in "Conflict Between the Sexes,"

02:10:12.680 | the latest book, "When Men Behave Badly."

02:10:16.140 | - Fantastic.

02:10:16.980 | I love your work.

02:10:19.100 | I'm so grateful for the clarity and depth and rigor

02:10:23.100 | with which you do it, and you convey it to us.

02:10:25.980 | I know I speak for many people,

02:10:28.180 | when I just want to say thank you.

02:10:29.680 | This is a tremendously informative conversation.

02:10:32.620 | - Thank you.

02:10:33.460 | Well, it's been a delight to talk with you,

02:10:35.000 | and I hope we do engage in that research collaboration

02:10:38.860 | of merging neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

02:10:41.420 | - Let's do it.

02:10:42.300 | - All right.

02:10:43.140 | - Great, thank you, David.

02:10:43.960 | - Thank you.

02:10:44.800 | - Thank you for joining me for my conversation

02:10:46.540 | with Dr. David Buss.

02:10:48.180 | Be sure to check out the link to his website

02:10:50.060 | in the show caption,

02:10:51.580 | and be sure to check out his new book,

02:10:53.520 | "When Men Behave Badly,

02:10:55.140 | The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception,

02:10:57.060 | Harassment, and Assault."

02:10:58.840 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

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02:11:42.580 | In many episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:11:44.660 | we discuss supplements.

02:11:46.420 | While supplements might not be for everybody,

02:11:48.660 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

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02:11:52.900 | and other aspects of human performance and daily life.

02:11:55.820 | One issue with supplements

02:11:56.940 | is that many of the supplement companies out there

02:11:59.620 | are subpar with respect to quality,

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02:12:44.460 | Thank you once again for joining me

02:12:46.020 | for my discussion with Dr. David Buss

02:12:47.980 | about human mate selection and strategy

02:12:50.300 | and many other extremely interesting topics today.

02:12:53.580 | And last but not least,

02:12:55.340 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:12:57.140 | [upbeat music]

02:12:59.720 | (upbeat music)

Dr. David Buss: How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term | Huberman Lab #48

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