Essentials: How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in the Short & Long Term

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and

00:00:05.400 | actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

00:00:10.000 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

00:00:16.340 | School of Medicine. And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss.

00:00:20.640 | Well, David, delighted to be here. Excited to ask you a number of questions about

00:00:25.100 | these super interesting topics about how people select mates. Just to start off, perhaps you could

00:00:31.700 | just orient us a little bit about mate choice. You know, some of the primary criteria that studies

00:00:40.180 | show men and women use in order to select mates, transient mates, as well as lifetime mates.

00:00:47.440 | Right. Well, that's a critical distinction because what people look for in a long-term

00:00:52.120 | committed mateship, like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship,

00:00:56.080 | is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex. So that's actually critical.

00:01:01.340 | I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical

00:01:06.180 | framework for understanding mate choice. Sure.

00:01:09.000 | It basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Darwin noticed that there were phenomena

00:01:14.800 | that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival selection. So he came up with the theory

00:01:19.700 | of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival

00:01:24.920 | advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage. And he identified two causal processes by which

00:01:31.820 | mating advantage could occur. One is intrasexual competition. And the logic was whatever qualities

00:01:38.600 | led to success in these same-sex battles, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers.

00:01:43.340 | And so you see evolution, which is change over time, and increase in frequency of the characteristics

00:01:49.760 | associated with winning these, what Darwin called contest competition. And we know that the logic of

00:01:55.540 | that is more general now and involves things like, in our species, competing for position and status

00:02:00.800 | hierarchies. But the second most relevant to your question about mate choice is preferential mate choice.

00:02:08.760 | That was the second causal pathway. And the logic there is that if members of one sex agree with one another

00:02:16.060 | about the qualities that are desired, then those of the opposite sex who possess the desired qualities or

00:02:22.000 | embody those desired qualities, they have a mating advantage. Those lacking desired qualities get banished,

00:02:28.320 | shunned, shunned, ignored, or in the modern environment become incels. The logic there is very simple but also very

00:02:34.740 | powerful. And that is that whatever qualities are desired, consensually desired, if there's some heritable

00:02:41.840 | basis to those, then those increase in frequency over time. And in the human case, these two causal

00:02:49.440 | processes of sexual selection are related to each other in that the preferences of the mate preferences of one sex

00:02:56.100 | basically set the ground rules for competition in the opposite sex. So if, for example, hypothetically,

00:03:03.460 | women preferred to mate with men who were able and willing to devote resources to them, then that would

00:03:10.740 | create competition among men to claw their way, you know, and beat out other men in resource acquisition

00:03:18.500 | and then displaying that their willingness to commit that to a particular woman. So that's sort of a little bit of

00:03:24.100 | theoretical backdrop. So you asked, well, what are the qualities that men and women desire? And maybe

00:03:31.460 | we'll start with long term mating and then shift to short term mating. The most large scale study that's been

00:03:38.420 | done on this is a study that I did a while back of 37 different cultures, and it's now been replicated by other

00:03:44.820 | researchers. But basically, what we found is three clusters of things. We found qualities that both men and women

00:03:52.980 | wanted in a long term mate. We found some qualities that were sex differentiated, where women preferred

00:04:00.340 | them more than men, or men preferred them more than women. And then we found some attributes that were

00:04:05.300 | highly variable across cultures in whether people found these as desirable or indispensable or irrelevant.

00:04:12.340 | So if you talk about universal desires, so things that men and women share, things like intelligence,

00:04:18.020 | kindness, mutual attraction and love, good health, dependability, emotional stability, although there's

00:04:27.300 | a bit of a sex difference there with women preferring it a bit more than men. So you go to anywhere in the

00:04:32.740 | world and these are qualities that people universally desire in long term mates. Sex differences. So sex

00:04:40.260 | differences basically fell into two clusters. So women more than men prioritized good earning capacity,

00:04:48.980 | slightly older age, and the qualities associated with resource acquisition. So these are things like a man's

00:04:59.220 | social status. Does he have drive? Is he ambitious? Does he have a good long term resource trajectory is

00:05:07.540 | one way that I like to phrase it because women often they don't look at necessarily

00:05:12.260 | the resources that a guy possesses at this moment. But what is his trajectory? Women attend to the

00:05:20.740 | attention structure. So the attention structure is a key determinant of status. So there's people who are high in

00:05:28.100 | status are those to whom the most people pay the most attention. Hard work, ambition, does he have clear

00:05:34.180 | goals or is he in an existential crisis not knowing what he's going to do with his life? Also women use

00:05:41.940 | what's called in the literature mate choice copying. So we've done studies where you just take a guy,

00:05:48.580 | photograph him alone versus take the same guy, put an attractive woman next to him or put two women next to him,

00:05:55.940 | and women judge exactly the same guy to be much more attractive if he's paired with women. From an

00:06:02.980 | evolutionary perspective, it's reasonable that women would prioritize these qualities because of the

00:06:09.060 | tremendous asymmetry in our reproductive biology, namely that fertilization occurs internally within women.

00:06:16.340 | Women bear the burdens of the nine month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive, as well as creating

00:06:23.700 | opportunity costs in terms of mobility and solving other tasks that people need to solve in the course

00:06:30.260 | of their lives. And so one way to phrase that is that the costs of making a bad mate choice are much

00:06:37.940 | heavier for women when it comes to sexual behavior, certainly. And the benefits correspondingly of making a

00:06:47.220 | wise mate choice are higher for women in the sexual context. But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in

00:06:55.940 | our species. And so what do men value more than women? Physical attractiveness. So physical appearance

00:07:03.380 | provides a wealth of information about a person's health status, but also provides for men a wealth of

00:07:11.300 | information about information about a woman's fertility, her reproductive value. Now, not that men think

00:07:16.580 | about that consciously. I mean, you men don't walk down the street and see a woman and say, "Oh, I find her

00:07:21.780 | attractive because I think she must be very fertile." They just find those cues attractive. We know now, based on

00:07:29.300 | the last 20 years of the last 20 years of scientific studies, that the cues that men find attractive

00:07:35.860 | women are not at all arbitrary. Things like clear skin, clear eyes, symmetrical features, a low waist to hip ratio,

00:07:46.100 | full lips, lustrous hair. All these are qualities that are associated with youth and health, and hence have

00:07:56.420 | evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness. And so it's not just that men are these superficial

00:08:02.500 | creatures who evaluate women on the basis of appearance. There's an underlying logic to why they do so.

00:08:08.980 | And as I said, relative youth, this age thing is one of the largest sex differences you find

00:08:16.180 | in long-term age selection with women preferring somewhat older men and men preferring somewhat

00:08:21.860 | younger women. It's also expressed in preferences. So, say, a 25-year-old man would, say, prefer a woman who's

00:08:30.100 | 20 or in her early 20s. A 35-year-old man might prefer a woman who's in her late 20s or early 30s. A 50-year-old

00:08:40.180 | man might prefer a woman who's, say, 35 to 38. So marriage and long-term mating are things other than

00:08:48.340 | reproductive unions in the modern environment. And if you get too large an age gap, then essentially

00:08:53.620 | you're in different cultures. And if the cultural gap gets too large, you don't understand each other.

00:08:58.500 | Could you tell us about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some

00:09:06.020 | of the things around mate choice selection? Yeah. Well, so basically, both men and women do deceive.

00:09:13.620 | So we have the modern cultural invention of online dating. People do lie, but they lie in predictable

00:09:21.140 | ways. They lie in ways that attempt to embody the mate preferences of the person they're trying to

00:09:28.020 | attract. Both sexes post photos that are not truly representative of what they actually look like.

00:09:34.580 | So they might post photos of themselves when they were younger, or they're even advice

00:09:40.660 | tips on how to create the best selfie of the best angle that will maximally, you know, enhance what you

00:09:51.380 | look like. What happens with internet dating is that the photograph tends to overwhelm all the other

00:09:58.660 | cues, and all the other cues are written statements. And we weren't really evolved to process written

00:10:05.220 | statements. But we were evolved to respond to physical cues. And men tend to attend to the visual cues much

00:10:14.260 | more than women. So women in their mate selection, they have olfactory cues. So what does the guy sound

00:10:20.100 | like his vocal qualities? That's auditory cues. But olfactory cues, what does he smell like? If the guy

00:10:29.060 | doesn't smell right, even if he embodies all the other qualities women want, that's a deal breaker.

00:10:34.180 | And so I encourage people just, you know, stop with the 100 texts back and forth or messaging and meet a

00:10:43.300 | person for a cup of coffee. And then of course, some qualities you can't assess even with a half hour

00:10:49.220 | or interaction. You can tell a lot. But things like emotional stability, which is absolutely critical

00:10:55.380 | in long-term mating, is to do something like go on a trip together, take a vacation, and where you're

00:11:03.140 | even in an unfamiliar environment where you have to cope with things that you're not familiar with. And

00:11:10.100 | one of the hallmarks of emotional instability is how they respond to stress. And so this is the sort of

00:11:18.900 | information you can't get on a coffee date. You know, you can only get by assessing it over time.

00:11:25.060 | So one form of deception which we haven't mentioned is deception about whether you're interested in a

00:11:30.580 | long-term committed relationship or a short-term hookup. The overt display that, "Hey, I'm interested

00:11:38.660 | in just a short-term hookup. I'm interested in sex, so I want to have sex right now. Let's just go back to

00:11:43.940 | my apartment." These are very ineffective tactics. So we find in our studies of deception that men tend to

00:11:50.660 | exaggerate how similar they are and how aligned they are in their values and religious orientations

00:11:58.340 | and political values and so forth. And I think that's probably an evolutionarily

00:12:02.980 | recurrent form of deception that women have defenses against.

00:12:07.140 | We've talked a little bit about mate choice, but in terms of sexual partner choice, are there any good

00:12:14.260 | studies exploring what people are selecting for? We know something about how the preferences for a sex

00:12:21.460 | partner differ from preference for a long-term mate. There is overlap, of course, but one thing is

00:12:28.500 | physical appearance. So physical appearance for women becomes more important in short-term mating. So those

00:12:36.340 | physical attributes are more important for women. They remain important for men, physical appearance,

00:12:44.740 | in short-term mating, but with the footnote that men are willing to drop their standards in short-term

00:12:52.100 | mating if it's low commitment, low risk, just sex, you know, without entangling commitments. Women are more likely to

00:13:03.860 | prioritize what I call bad boy qualities, guys who are a little arrogant, guys who are risk-taking. Women are more

00:13:12.180 | attracted to those guys in short-term mating than long-term mating, whereas in long-term mating they go

00:13:18.100 | more for the good dad qualities. Is this guy dependable? Is he going to be a good father to my children? In short-term

00:13:24.340 | I think he's going to be a good father to my children? In short-term mating, there's a good father to me.

00:13:32.740 | And in short-term mating, women use that mate-copying heuristic. That is, if there are thousands of other

00:13:32.900 | women who find him attractive, women find him attractive. And so that's why you have the groupie

00:13:37.540 | phenomenon. If you took like a still photo of some of these rock stars and asked women how attractive the

00:13:43.060 | guy he is versus tell him he's a famous rock star and showed the thousands of women screaming at him,

00:13:49.620 | they judge him entirely differently. This is just an illustration of how circumstance-dependent

00:13:56.500 | women's mate attraction is for guys. It depends on his status, the number of women that are attracted to

00:14:06.500 | him, the attention structure, is how he interacts with a puppy. Whereas for men, it almost doesn't

00:14:13.460 | matter. Context is more irrelevant. They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues that the woman

00:14:20.420 | is displaying in context be damned. What's known about jealousy in men versus women? And I mean,

00:14:27.460 | we hear, or I've heard at some point that a large fraction of homicides are the consequence of jealous

00:14:33.620 | lovers. That's the darkest angle of all this. But in evolutionary psychology context, what is jealousy?

00:14:43.540 | Jealousy is an evolved emotion that serves several adaptive functions. Okay. Once you have

00:14:49.940 | long-term mating, you need a defense to prevent or preserve the investment that you've made and are

00:14:58.820 | making in long-term mateship. And so jealousy serves this mate guarding function, if you will, or mate

00:15:06.020 | retention function. And so jealousy gets activated when there are threats to that romantic relationship.

00:15:12.820 | The threats come from many sources. So they could be you detect cues to your partner's infidelity,

00:15:19.460 | or cues of a lack of an emotional distance between you and your partner. So that's one set of cues.

00:15:27.700 | But then there's another set of interested mate poachers. So, you know, if you're mated to someone who's

00:15:34.180 | desirable, which many people are, other people still desire them. So jealousy motivates people to be

00:15:40.740 | attentive to potential mate poachers. Even if there are no mate poachers and no cues to infidelity, if a mate value

00:15:48.580 | discrepancy opens up in a relationship. So colloquially people say things like, "He's not good enough for you."

00:15:56.260 | You know, or "I think you could do better." So people implicitly have a notion of relative mate value and

00:16:03.060 | discrepancies therein. Okay. But discrepancies can open up where none previously existed. So you get fired from a job

00:16:11.460 | all of a sudden, you know, and most people are very understanding and forgiving about that, if it's not too

00:16:18.500 | long. But you go six months, eight months, people start having problems. Or someone's career takes off.

00:16:25.300 | Let's say a woman becomes a famous singer or actress or a man does. Career takes off. All of a sudden,

00:16:32.740 | there's a mate value discrepancy where you have access to a larger pool of potential mates and higher

00:16:38.580 | mate value potential mates. So people are attentive to mate value discrepancies. And so jealousy can get

00:16:44.980 | activated even if there are no immediate threats to a relationship, but that the mate value discrepancy

00:16:51.940 | is a threat that looms on the horizon of the relationship because we know statistically the

00:16:58.740 | higher mate value person is more likely to have an affair and is more likely to dump the other person

00:17:05.620 | and trade up in the mating market. And then what people do about it depends on

00:17:10.580 | what their options are. And people do things that I, in my published scientific work, I say range from

00:17:17.380 | vigilance to violence. And that can include stalking, following, hacking into iphones or computers,

00:17:25.300 | monitoring the behavior of mate poachers, looking at eye contact between other men and your partner,

00:17:34.980 | there's a whole suite of things that, you know, is involved in vigilance. And then at the other

00:17:41.460 | extreme is violence. In America, something like 28 to 30% of all people who are married will experience

00:17:49.460 | intimate partner violence in their, in their relationship. So it's not a trivial percentage.

00:17:54.340 | Could you tell us about the dark triad? Yeah. So the dark triad, so we've been talking about

00:17:59.460 | sex differences on average, but there are critical within sex, individual differences. And the dark

00:18:05.780 | triad is one of the most important ones. The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics.

00:18:12.660 | So narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. If you combine these qualities, you have some very bad

00:18:20.900 | dudes. And I say bad dudes because men tend to score higher in these things than women. Why is this

00:18:25.940 | important? Well, it's important in the mating context because those who are high on dark triad traits tend

00:18:33.780 | to be sexual deceivers, for one. So they're very often very charming, very good at seducing women and

00:18:42.980 | then abandoning them. They're very good at, at the art of seduction. They are also tend to be serial

00:18:52.740 | sexual harassers and sexual coercers. And so if you combine dark triad traits with the dispositional

00:19:00.260 | pursuit of a short-term mating strategy, that's an especially deadly combination. That's when you get

00:19:06.260 | sexual harassment, sexual coercion. It's a subset of men who commit the vast majority of these acts of

00:19:12.820 | sexual violence. You mentioned stalking briefly. Maybe we could just talk about some of the less known

00:19:18.500 | features about stalking. I think I once heard you give a lecture where you said that one of the scariest

00:19:24.660 | things about stalking is that sometimes it works. Yes. Yeah. So, well, stalking has multiple motivations,

00:19:33.300 | but one of the most frequent motivations is a mating motivation where either there's a breakup and the

00:19:44.020 | the woman dumps the guy and the guy doesn't want to get dumped. He wants to maintain a relationship with

00:19:49.380 | her. And I should say that when it comes to criminal stalking, there's a huge sex difference. About 80%

00:19:55.220 | of the stalkers tend to be men, about 20% women. So there's, so there are women stalkers, but they're,

00:20:02.900 | you know, about a fourth the number compared to men. So the motivation of the guys tends to be either an

00:20:11.940 | attempt to get back together with the woman, either sexually or in a relationship or and/or to interfere

00:20:21.380 | with her future mating prospects. And it works in some of the time in two senses. One is, it does interfere

00:20:30.900 | with her attempts to remate. So in fact, it scares off some guys. So like you show up and pick up a woman at

00:20:39.860 | her apartment for a date and her ex is sitting out there glaring at you. And I think that the circumstances are

00:20:47.540 | often a mate value discrepancy where the guy realizes correctly that he will be unable to replace her

00:20:55.780 | with a mate of equivalent mate value, or in some cases, any mate. You know, it's like, well, she

00:21:04.100 | she was with me once, maybe she, I can get her back with me again. And another thing we found, we did a

00:21:09.780 | study of 2500 victims of stalking. This is with Josh Duntley, a former student of mine, who's now a

00:21:15.940 | professor in a criminology department. And what we found is, there were large sex difference, large

00:21:22.980 | differences between the stalker and the victim of the stalker, where where the stalker tends to be much

00:21:28.740 | lower in mate value than the victim. And so basically, the it's typically the woman who

00:21:34.980 | realizes she can do a lot better on the mating market. And the guy realizes, I am never going

00:21:41.700 | to be able to replace her with a with a woman of equivalent mate value. And so I'm going to use this

00:21:48.100 | last ditch desperate measure to try to get her back. And occasionally it works.

00:21:52.740 | I realize it's not your specific area of expertise. But these days, there's a lot of discussion about how

00:21:59.300 | early childhood attachment to parents influences mate choice later on. Is there anything interesting

00:22:06.340 | about that, about childhood attachment strategies, vis-a-vis stability of long term partner choice? Or is

00:22:14.900 | that too big of a leap for us to make here? Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer some sort of informed

00:22:20.820 | speculation about it, you know, a secure attachment style. If both partners have a secure attachment

00:22:27.380 | style, that's conducive to a long term mateship. Avoidant attachment styles, avoidant people tend to

00:22:35.060 | have more difficulty with intimacy and also higher probability of infidelity.

00:22:40.100 | And anxious attachment style, I don't know, can create problems of its own, you know, in the overly clingy,

00:22:50.100 | dependent, you know, absorbing what I call high relationship load. What is the baggage that

00:22:55.460 | someone brings to the relationship? How should one frame all this? So I imagine a number of people

00:23:01.700 | listening are in relationships or would hope to be in a relationship. You know, in terms of

00:23:07.460 | understanding what we are selecting for consciously or subconsciously, it seems like there are common

00:23:13.540 | themes, people want to feel attractive and attracted. People want to make sure that there's stability of

00:23:22.900 | the relationship. So when we hear about security, oftentimes I think of this kind of warm oxytocin,

00:23:27.620 | serotonin-like thing. But this mate value thing seems so powerful in all this, assessing mate value. So

00:23:36.100 | how objective are people about assessing their own value in terms of finding, securing, and over time

00:23:46.100 | maintaining a relationship? Securing is dynamic because people age at different rates.

00:23:50.340 | - Right. - Is there an objective metric of this stuff? I guess you get a lot of statistics about

00:23:58.900 | somebody's image and you come up with an average value based on the population. But how should people

00:24:05.300 | assess themselves? Because it seems like one of the features that would be very powerful for leading to

00:24:10.820 | happiness, of good partner selection, that's stable, would be to be very honest with oneself. And how does one do that?

00:24:20.660 | - A couple things. So one is that I think people are generally pretty good at self-assessing mate value.

00:24:27.460 | And even self-esteem has been hypothesized to be one internal monitoring device that tracks

00:24:37.460 | mate value. So when we get a promotion at work or we get a rise in status, we feel an elevated sense

00:24:42.580 | of self-esteem. We get fired, we get rejected, we get ostracized, our self-esteem plummets.

00:24:48.740 | So our self-evaluation, I think, does track mate value to some extent. There are people who overestimate

00:24:57.540 | their mate value, people high on narcissism in particular, and some people underestimate their mate value.

00:25:05.780 | Another important element is that there's consensual mate value. So that is, if you asked a group of 100

00:25:13.940 | people, there's a fair amount of consensus that this person's an eight, that person's a six. But there are

00:25:19.940 | also individual differences in mate value. So let's say you're into football and another partner thinks

00:25:26.340 | sports are stupid, then that's someone who's also into sports is going to be higher in mate value for you.

00:25:33.620 | So there are these individual differences in components of mate value, which is good because

00:25:38.020 | that means if everyone were going after the same people and there was total consensus on mate value,

00:25:44.180 | then there would be a lot of mateless people and a lot of problems in the world and a lot of dissatisfied

00:25:50.500 | people. So both are important, the consensual aspects and the individually differentiated components

00:25:59.060 | of mate value. But in terms of accuracy of assessment, there are no good measures scientifically to do this,

00:26:10.340 | because it's a very complicated endeavor to assess accurately. But I think people have a good intuitive

00:26:16.420 | sense of people's relative mate value, especially if you're in a group and you've been able to interact

00:26:23.220 | with them for a long time. And one indication is, again, that attention structure, how many other

00:26:30.100 | people really want to mate with this person, that's a good cue that they're high in mate value.

00:26:35.060 | I find the work that you do incredibly interesting. I think this field of evolutionary psychology is

00:26:40.100 | fascinating. And I hope, I said it before, but I'll say it again, I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary

00:26:46.420 | psychology are nudging towards one another. I think you're absolutely right. And I think it will happen.

00:26:52.100 | I think it's starting to happen. And it will happen because getting at the neuroscience is getting

00:26:57.060 | at the underlying mechanisms that are driving the process. So, you know, what an evolutionary perspective

00:27:03.220 | brings to bear is evolved function and ultimate explanation, the selective forces that created

00:27:10.820 | adaptations, the functions of those adaptations, and the neuroscience brings, well, what is the underlying

00:27:16.180 | machinery that these mechanisms are instantiated in? I'm certain that people are going to want to

00:27:22.420 | learn more about your work. Certainly we will give them links to your social media and other sites. You've

00:27:27.780 | written a tremendous number of really interesting books. Tell us about your most recent book and maybe some of

00:27:34.100 | the others that if people are interested in these topics and they want to learn more that they could explore.

00:27:38.980 | Sure. Sure. Okay. So, well, my most recent book is called When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of

00:27:46.260 | Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault. And that book deals with conflict between the sexes, sexual conflict.

00:27:54.340 | And so it deals with them both in what I call mating market conflicts, some of the topics we've been talking

00:28:02.340 | about, deception in internet dating and things like that. Second is conflict that occurs within mating

00:28:08.340 | relationships of the sort that we've been talking about as well: financial infidelity, emotional infidelity,

00:28:14.660 | sexual infidelity, coping with conflict within a relationship. And I actually have some suggestions for

00:28:21.460 | strategies for coping with conflict within a relationship. Coping in the after, dealing with the aftermath of

00:28:28.340 | breakups. So often there's an asymmetry. One person wants to break up, the other doesn't. So I talk about coping in the aftermath.

00:28:35.620 | And then I also talk in this book, When Men Behave Badly, about some of the darker sides of human

00:28:41.940 | mating, like intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual coercion. So that's what that

00:28:50.180 | book's about. And I think it, you know, it's gotten well-reviewed and people find it very useful in

00:28:56.420 | understanding what is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena. You know, why do men and women seem at

00:29:02.660 | odds with each other in so many domains? Why do some of these recurrent forms of sexual conflict occur?

00:29:09.700 | So that's what that book's about. My previous book, so my first book, which I've had the good fortune to

00:29:15.620 | be able to revise a couple of times, deals more broadly with human mating strategies. It's called

00:29:21.780 | the evolution of desire strategies of human mating and gives people a broad overview of what people

00:29:28.100 | want in a mate, tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention, and so forth throughout the whole

00:29:35.060 | mating process, serial mating, causes of divorce and so forth. And then even more broadly, I have a

00:29:42.660 | textbook called evolutionary psychology, the new science of the mind, which is in its sixth edition

00:29:50.340 | right now. And it's the most widely used textbook in evolutionary psychology around North America and

00:29:56.660 | Europe. And actually, it's been translated even into Arabic and other countries. So that deals somewhat

00:30:04.580 | with mating, but also deals with survival problems, or evolved fears and phobias,

00:30:12.100 | issues about kin and family, extended family, friendships, social hierarchies, status hierarchies,

00:30:19.940 | warfare, and other topics. So the evolutionary psychology textbook is the broadest

00:30:26.500 | book. And then maybe the second broadest is the evolution of desire strategies of human mating.

00:30:33.380 | And then for those interested in conflict between the sexes, the latest book, When Men Behave Badly.

00:30:39.060 | - Fantastic. I love your work. I'm so grateful for the clarity and depth and rigor with which you do it.

00:30:48.260 | - Thank you.

00:30:48.580 | - And you convey it to us. I know I speak for many people when I just want to say thank you. This

00:30:53.940 | is a tremendously informative conversation.

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

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