Evolution, Sex & Desire | David Buss | EP 235

53m read

·Nov 7, 2024

A lot of the truths that psychologists have stumbled over, let's say, are actually quite painful. I mean, I reviewed the IQ literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it, and it's very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability. It's really quite a staggering thing to understand how broad that gap is and how much pain that causes, especially at the lower end of the distribution.

The fact that men are stringently selected for, let's say, the capacity to acquire a position in a competence hierarchy, and women are brutally punished in terms of their sexual attractiveness for not manifesting signs of fertility and youth—it's like there's a real harshness to that. But I think it's the harshness of life, and actually understanding that makes it less harsh, insofar as understanding is useful.

Yeah, yeah, no, I would agree with that. I've stumbled across a lot of findings in my research, and we'll get to the issue of conflict between the sexes that I find personally distressing. You know, I wish it didn't exist, but they do, and I feel similarly that we're better off confronting our nature and the empirical reality, including sex differences in that nature, rather than just pretending that these features don't exist.

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Hello everybody, I'm very pleased today to have as my guest Dr. David Buss, who's been a real influence on my thinking, I think perhaps more than any other living psychologist I respect and have learned from what he's done. David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Michigan. He is considered the world's leading scientific expert on strategies of human mating and is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His many books include "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating," "Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind," "The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love," and "Sex: The Mysterious Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill," and "Why Women Have Sex," which you'd think would definitely be a bestseller.

His new book, "When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault," was published in 2021, and it uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes. Dr. Buss has more than 300 scientific publications, and just to give those of you who are listening some sense of what that means, you can get a PhD from a pretty top-rated research institution in psychology with three publications—a thesis made of three publications. So to have 300 publications is in some sense the equivalent of 100 PhDs, so that's worth thinking about for a while. In 2019, he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world.

I'm very pleased that you agreed to talk with me today about these contentious topics, and I would like to restate what I said earlier, which is your work has been very influential as far as I'm concerned. I've really liked reading everything you've done for the last 20 years—I haven't read all of it, but I've read lots of it.

So, well, thank you. It's my pleasure to be talking to you. I've been reading your work for some time, and I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.

So maybe you could start by telling everyone—telling me—why did you get interested in evolutionary psychology per se? How did that come about and when? Because you were one of the founders of this field, which is a burgeoning field and an important one, tying psychology to evolutionary biology—a crucial thing to do.

Yes, so well, basically, when I started my academic career, there was no such thing as evolutionary psychology. I was trained in personality psychology at UC Berkeley. But what I was interested in and the reason that I got into personality psychology was that I was interested in human nature. You know, what motivates people? What are the goals towards which people aspire and seek? What gets people out of bed in the morning? What makes people tick? What is human nature made of?

When I got into the field of personality, I went through all the standard theories—Freud, Jung, Kelly, Maslow—you know, the list. Many seemed to have some intuitive appeal, but none seemed to be grounded in a solid scientific foundation. That's really what ultimately led me to evolutionary theory: to try to identify what are the causal processes that created human nature, whatever that nature may be. Even the more biologically oriented psychologists, the behaviorists, for example, like Skinner—the people who studied rats and who did that so carefully—because that's a great tradition, and it really led to the emergence of neuroscience—there was not a lot of evolutionary thinking there, because underlying that behaviorist ethos was the idea that human beings were something like a blank slate and that almost everything we did was learned.

Yes, yeah, indeed. Skinner believed—he actually overlapped a bit with him at Harvard—so I was able to actually have a couple of conversations with him. He believed that what evolution had created was simply a couple of domain-general learning mechanisms. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning were the ones that he focused on, and he built this whole theory about that. Essentially, what he equipped humans and rats—or pigeons—with was this blank slate domain-general learning mechanisms, and then all subsequent action is based on contingencies of reinforcement.

But I think even then, even when I was in graduate school, that view struck me as really problematic. For one thing, sex differences emerge very early in life. Rough-and-tumble play by age three or so emerges consistently early in development, and sense of humor—these things are cross-culturally universal. The notion that all of our nature consists just of the contingencies of reinforcement during our lifespan struck me as problematic.

So really that search for a solid scientific foundation for a theory of human nature is what led me to evolutionary theory. Reading people like Trevors, Don Simons, George C. Williams, of course W.D. Hamilton—some of the great evolutionary biologists of the last century—led me to the view that I could actually test some evolutionary hypotheses in humans. At the time I started, there were almost no empirical tests. If you know anything about the kind of Berkeley-Minnesota tradition, a lot of my mentors were from Minnesota. There's a very strong empirical tradition, and so as a psychologist trained in an empirical tradition, you have to test these things.

What I realized was that there were almost no empirical tests of these evolutionary hypotheses. Some of the most obvious ones were mating. As a sexually reproducing species, everything has to go through mating. If humans don't have pretty interesting and complex psychological adaptations for mating, then we're kind of out of business. Survival and mating—if you're a sexually reproducing species, you have to go through the bottleneck of mating.

And that is—it's not a simple process; of course, if you're asexual, you don't have to go searching for a mate. But sexually reproducing species, you have to select a mate, you have to attract a mate—in our species, you have to be mutually selected by that mate. Then in our species, of course, we have long-term mating—pair-bonded mating—which is extremely rare in the mammalian world.

We have something like 5,000 species plus of mammals, and only something like 3 to 5 percent have anything resembling pair-bonded long-term mating. But humans do have it—it's part of our nature.

Now, as we get into mating strategies, one of the things that I argue is that long-term mating is not the only mating strategy within the human menu of mating strategies. We have long-term pair bonding, but we also have short-term mating, casual sex, hookups, as they're now called on college campuses; we have infidelity rates. So that's kind of a mixed mating strategy—one long-term mate, some short-term sex partners on the side. We also do serial mating, and then if you look across cultures, we have—in Western cultures—presumptively monogamous mating systems. Some cultures have polygynous mating systems—one man, multiple wives—some restricted to four, some don't have any restrictions, and then very, very rarely do you have a polyandrous mating system (less than one percent), where it's one woman, multiple men.

So, anyway, do you have any sense of what conditions give rise to that rare exception—this polyandrous system? Since it's so uncommon, how is it that it sustains itself, and why isn't that a challenge to the notion of central monogamy, let's say?

Yes, well, the conditions under which it occurs are typically where one man cannot support a whole family. If there's a large field and one man can't support a wife and children, then it will be two men. The polyandrous mating is almost entirely brothers, and that genetic relatedness helps to ease what normally would be a pretty intense jealous reaction to someone else having sex with your wife.

So why isn't it sufficient to say, like this—or more modern blank slate theorists might—that patriarchy is a sufficient explanation for the difference in mating strategies across the sexes, and that the reason that polyandry is so uncommon is because women are dominated by men everywhere and that's arbitrary and an expression of power? It has nothing to do with our central biological tendency.

Okay, that's a really interesting question, and I have a couple of different thoughts on it. First of all, the question—the first question is what does one mean by patriarchy? If you get into it—and I've asked people who invoke those sort of explanations, "Well, what do you mean by patriarchy?" and usually that causes them to stumble and mumble around. They just know, "Well, patriarchy is self-explanatory." Well, it's not self-explanatory, because if you break it down analytically, you can identify different components.

So is it the case that men worldwide tend to have more resources, more economic resources than women on average? Well, the answer is yes. But then even if you take that component of what's called patriarchy, you can ask the question, "Well, how did it come to pass that across all cultures, or nearly all cultures, men on average have more resources?"

Well, as one biological anthropologist, I think this was Irv DeVore at Harvard, said, "Men are one long breeding experiment run by women." One of the things that one of my first studies, the 37 culture study, documented is that women have a universal preference for men with resources. That sets up a co-evolutionary process whereby those men who were chosen as mates tended to be motivated and have the ability and willingness to acquire resources.

Let me ask you about that specifically—this is a question that I tried to address experimentally at one point, but I couldn't get the experiments organized properly to test this specific hypothesis. Do you know of any research pitting female mate choice in relation to men against men who have resources versus men who show the traits that allow them to acquire resources—pitting those directly against one another?

Yeah, great question, and I'm not aware of any studies that have done that directly. See, I think that—this is something I want to talk to you about in relation to the dark triad issue, which we'll get into. It seems to me that women use markers of status partly as indicators of available resources because those are useful, but I don't think women are that uncanny, let's say. It's too simple. I think they use the presence of resources as a proxy for the personality and cognitive traits, let's say, including physical health, that would enable a man, even stripped of his current set of resources, to be highly likely to acquire them in the future. Maybe current recurrent resources are a good proxy for that.

Yeah, I think it is. One issue is that cash economies are relatively recent in our human history—maybe seven to ten thousand years old or so. So we are able to stockpile economic resources in a way that was evolutionarily unprecedented due to cash economies. But I think that you're absolutely right that what women tend to look for—and this shows up even in my studies as well—is the characteristics that are statistically reliably correlated with resource acquisition, which will be things like intelligence, social status, dependability, athletic prowess.

Is this guy a good hunter? You know, so you go to a culture like the Aceh of Paraguay, and basically what leads to high status in men is hunting skills—that's the big main effect there.

So I think even things like—you know, I know you've talked about this, and you measure them as some of the big five characteristics—even things like emotional stability and conscientiousness, which we know are linked with hard work and industriousness and achievement in modern work contexts, likely were true ancestrally as well. Women didn't want a guy who's going to be sitting around in the hammock all day smoking whatever the local weed or hallucinogen is. She's going to want a guy who has the motivation to get out there and hunt and bring back the bacon, so to speak.

Yeah, and the hunting thing is really interesting when you think about how much we've abstracted ourselves out of our basic biological niche in some sense. Because hunting, getting to the point, hitting the target, aiming right, and being specific with words—all of that is very tightly related, as far as I can tell psychologically.

And then you said something quite interesting earlier as well, that we didn't comment on. You talked about men as a breeding experiment run by women. This ties into another reason why evolutionary psychology is so important: because we're unbelievably highly sexually selected, and that has to do with women's choosing us.

So, maybe we could start our discussion of sexual differences and mating strategy with that. First of all, what's the evidence that suggests that women are in fact choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men, and how much choosier are they?

Okay, great question. Well, maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is. Because most people, when they think about evolution, they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature-written tooth and claw and a kind of randomness, too. That's kind of implicit in the natural selection theory, where sexual selection is anything but random.

Yeah, absolutely. So sexual selection—if natural selection, this is oversimplified, but is the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage, or the survival advantage that accrued to the possessors, so things like fear of snakes, fear of heights, spiders, darkness, strangers, food preferences—things that led to better survival—sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success. Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success could occur. One is same-sex competition, or intra-sexual competition, and the logic there is that whatever he thought about it in terms of contest competition—where there was a physical battle, like two stags locking horns in combat, with the victor gaining sexual access to the female, the loser ambling off with a broken antler, dejected with low self-esteem and probably needing some psychotherapy—whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles, whether it be athleticism, strength, agility, cunning, or whatever, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors accrued. Qualities associated with losing, basically, bit the evolutionary dust.

The second component, so that's intra-sexual competition, which actually the logic is more general than Darwin envisioned. In our species, as we were alluding to, we often compete for position and status hierarchies. We can engage in intra-sexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition, although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with males.

The other component process is basically what Darwin called female choice. The logic there is that whatever qualities, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired, that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage. They are preferentially chosen; those lacking the desired qualities basically become incels or involuntarily celibate, but they get shunned, banished, or ignored.

Now, the twist on that—and so I think sexual selection is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans—but the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice, at least when it comes to long-term mating. Especially, I should say, especially when it comes to long-term mating.

That gets to the issue of Trevor's theory of parental investment, where he asked the question, "Well, which sex does the choosing? Which sex does the competing?" His answer was the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be choosier; the sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex.

But in long-term mating, now we know from our reproductive biology that women have that nine-month pregnancy, which is obligatory. So women can't say, "Look, I'm really busy with my career; I really only want to put in three months." It's just part of our reproductive biology to produce one child, while men can produce that same child through one act of sex. So women are at least, when it comes to sex, the choosier sex—the higher-investing sex—in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for men.

If men and women hook up, have sex for one night, and in the morning they both realize, "Oh, this is a mistake; I shouldn't have done that," if the woman gets pregnant, then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her offspring, a guy perhaps who is someone that has poor genetic material or does not have a robust immune system, et cetera. So anyway, that's a long-winded answer to your question about sexual selection.

Good. So, let's go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say that you asked about the evidence for females being choosier. They are choosier primarily in the context of casual sex or short-term sex, and that's where you find the big sex differences. There's a ton of evidence for this; this is a sex difference that I capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety.

So men have a much greater desire for, meaning a variety of sex partners, than women do. The choosiness comes in. I'll just give you one experiment—this is a classic study done by Elaine Hatfield and Russell Clark—where they had male and female confederates (which for listeners are members of the experimental team; it doesn't mean people from the South United States) simply walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say, "Hi, I've been noticing you around campus lately. I find you very attractive. Would you," and they asked them one of three questions: "Would you go on a date with me tonight? Would you come back to my apartment with me? Would you have sex with me?" It was a between-groups design; they simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests.

Of the women, a little over 50 percent agreed to go out on a date with the guy, 6 percent agreed to go back to his apartment, and 0 percent agreed to have sex with him. Most women need a little more information about the guy before they're willing to have sex.

Of the men approached by the female confederate, about 50 percent agreed to go out on the date, 69 percent agreed to go back to her apartment, and 75 percent agreed to have sex with her. So if you talk about choosing us—are you willing to have sex with a total stranger whom you've met for 30 seconds? Women, unwilling to; in general, men, very willing to.

This is a study that's been replicated now in several European studies. Very difficult to do this, as you might imagine, to get this by the IRBs or ethics committees in the United States anyway. I assume it's similar in Canada or worse.

Yeah, the kinds of studies we really want to do are more difficult to do nowadays. But it's been replicated in several Western European countries, and you can get women off of the 0 percent; you can get a few percent of the women saying yes if the guy's really charming. If he's a Brad Pitt or, I don't know what the modern equivalent is—Ryan Gosling or one of the, you know, or perhaps a famous rock star.

So, but that's one illustration of the answer to your question about what is the evidence for female choosiness. Now, the interesting thing—I'll give you one more. There are studies that ask, "What is the minimum percentile of intelligence that you would accept in a potential partner?" Then you explain percentiles to people so they understand: 99th percentile, 1st percentile, 50th, and so forth. Basically, for things like a marriage partner, men and women are roughly equal—they both are very exact—and they say what they want, like say 65th to 70th percentile intelligence. Where the sex difference comes up is just as a sex partner, a pure sex partner with no investment—women still maintain their 60th or 60-plus percentile in intelligence, whereas men drop to embarrassing levels. The 35th, 40th percentile men go, you know, if she can mumble a little bit, that's fine.

Or even not so. So that's another indication of female choosiness that they maintain greater choosiness when it comes to short-term sex and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex. And here's—I'll give you one more now that I'm rambling on, and then I'll get to some other interesting issues. This is an item on the sociosexuality inventory that colleagues Steve Gangstad and Jeff Simpson developed a long time ago. One of the items is an attitude item, and it says, "Sex without love is okay." Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

And there you get a large sex difference. So in the seven-point scale, where four is the midpoint, men average about 5.5, so they say, "Yeah, sex without love? Yeah, yeah, that's okay." Women are about 3.5, okay? They're below the midpoint. That's another indication of this sex difference in choosiness.

Do you know if that's modulated by big five trait agreeableness?

Oh, that's a great question, and I haven't seen any studies that link that to the big five with that item or the sociosexuality inventory in general.

You'd wonder if compassion and empathy might be one of the things driving that and the value that's placed on that as a consequence of being high or low in agreeableness. That would fit into some degree with the dark triad work because the primary difference there is—we'll talk about the dark triad in a minute—is that the dark triad types are low in agreeableness, centrally. It's not the only thing, but that's central.

Yeah, and that's where there's a big sex difference. I want to ask you a terminological question.

Sure, okay, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just thought we should say a few more words about your question about patriarchy. Because I thought that was a really interesting question and there's some interesting complexities associated with that. What I started with is that you have to break it down analytically into precisely what causal process you're invoking. Usually, when people invoke it, it's like this mysterious causal force in the ether that somehow comes down and infects people's minds, and they don't get into the question of, "Well, what are the causal origins of what you're calling patriarchy?"

To get to that, you have to get to things like female mate preferences and the co-evolution of those mate preferences with male mating strategies. And part of male mating strategies is to prioritize resource acquisition and clawing their way up the status hierarchy and selling their grandmother to get ahead. Studies of this get to another sex difference: that women tend to allocate their time, energy, and investment across a wider array of, you know, what we call adaptive problems.

So, you know, women more than men invest in kin. Even if they're married, they invest more in their in-laws, in their friendships, et cetera. Men on average tend to be more mono-maniacal about getting ahead.

So, you could say the most effective long-term strategy for smashing the patriarchy is for women to select low-ranking mates to sleep with.

Yes, so if I should get in lots of trouble for that—well, if women change their mate preferences so that they didn't care about status and resources, or those qualities, and you iterated that over enough generations, it would ultimately change male behavior.

So, I have a terminological issue that was raised to me by one of my graduate students—a very intelligent man, a very careful thinker. I had faster graduate students, but I don't think I had any who would worry a problem absolutely to death as much as he would. He always got to—he was an engineer, and as an engineer, he would really get to the bottom of things like you did with the patriarchy, at least to some degree. He told me once I started speaking more public, "Stop using the term dominance hierarchy or status hierarchy. There's a political supposition nested inside there that's not helpful. How about competence hierarchy?"

I thought, "Oh, that's real interesting." Okay, so that's one issue. Now I have another question that's teamed with that that I want to run by you with regards to sexual selection. So we could say that it's the actions of female selection that have shaped men to a large degree because of the choosingness of women. But I want to run a counter position by you: imagine a football team in a small American town—it's kind of an archetypal issue—and the whole town is celebrating the football team.

The football team is ranked in terms of competence, and the football team wins a game, and all the guys lift the quarterback up on their shoulders because he was the hero of the game, and they march him out of the stadium, and so he sleeps with the cheerleaders. I would say he was elected by the men to sleep with them because if it's not competitive—like, I think the idea that it's competition isn't exactly right. And terminology really matters. Because men will organize themselves into groups, and those who become elevated in status don't do it by dominating.

You know, my students said, "You don't get people to wear a choke collar and a chain." It's not dominance.

So, yeah, so I'm so glad that you asked that because we just—it—this whole subject of status hierarchies and dominance hierarchies is something that we are studying now in my lab, and we just published a paper that confirms precisely the point that you're making. We looked at basically whether status is determined by dominance—which in the literature is sometimes defined as cost infliction. You have the ability and willingness to inflict costs, you know, beat up your rivals, or confer benefits—which gets to your point about competence—and what we found is that it is conferring benefits—i.e., the ability and willingness to confer benefits—that led to high status.

Okay, so I'm going to stop just for one sec because I want to add something with regard to our discussion of the patriarchy. Because one of the unspoken suppositions of the idea of the patriarchy is that part of the reason that it's bad is because it's dominance and oppression that leads to the formation of these hierarchies, and that's a central claim. But this gets to a real alternative to that—which—and so what do you mean by benefit exactly in that context?

So, well, these are conferring benefits on either individuals or the group that you're part of. The example that you used of the quarterback, who scored the winning touchdown or led the team to victory—he's conferring a large benefit on the coalition of which he's a part. And we evolved as coalitional species, but the benefits are many in number.

I mean, they could be meat from the hunt, providing not just to your family but also to the group in small group living. They often shared the spoils of the hunt. Providing physical protection—so having the ability, bravery. The physical ability, the athleticism, but also the courage to offer protection for a potential mate or for members of your coalition.

So there are many, many different types of benefits. I read recently that among smaller groups that are dependent on hunting that in the male groups where hunting takes place, one of the most common characteristics of the hunters with more prowess is that they're willing to be self-sacrificing in their food choice after they kill something. The men are—have status conferred on them because they were successful hunters, but if they can be successful hunters and give someone else who was there a bigger share than they get, even though they did the hunting, that's a way of moving up in status.

That kind of behavior is very common in men's groups in small societies around the world.

Yes, the opposite of narcissism—interestingly enough.

Yeah, no, that's right. And that's why in our study, we had 240 things that could either increase or decrease your status. One of them was precisely that: generosity with resources. So you can have all the resources in the world, but if you're stingy and don't share them with your group, then you're not going to be rising in status.

But I just had one interesting curly cue to your point about this generosity issue. That’s Tim Hill, who is the bio-anthropologist who's studied the Aceh in the greatest deities, lived with them on and off for 25 years or so. What he said in the Aceh about hunting skill—they also share their resources. So the hunt, the large game animal goes to a central distributor.

But here's the interesting curlicue: sometimes the head hunter will slice off a prime piece of meat and have a friend or emissary give it to his affair partner before returning to the home base. So good hunters tend to have more sex partners in the Aceh and I suspect in many hunter-gatherer groups.

Right, and that would be a specific exception that would be of sexual benefit to that hunter outside the general sexual benefit that generosity would give him as a consequence of being of high status among his cohort.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that's kind of building on your point about this generous issue of generosity with resources is that people form groups. Often there's competition between groups for having members that are, in this case, good hunters or who contribute above and beyond to the group welfare.

If a hunter feels like he's not sufficiently appreciated by the group, he can go to another group or form another group. That's one of the interesting things about, you know, this gets into human history—once group—there's the fissioning of groups. Once they get to a certain point, they often say, "Look, I'm not sufficiently appreciated in this group; I'm going to take my allies and form my own group."

So I was also thinking about this in terms of, let's say, reciprocity. Imagine that we're in a small hunting group, we don't have refrigeration, so we're not going to be able to store meat with any great degree of reliability. So you might say, "Well, what's the best way to store meat?" I would say you should store meat in your status among the hunting group, right?

So if you're generous and you share and then that evokes reciprocity from other hunters in your group who also have prowess, then you've stored future meat in the potential for them to generate resources in the future, and that's reciprocity dependent. That kind of long-term honesty could also be selected for in these status so-called status hierarchies—competence hierarchies is better.

And so my student, he said there's a subterranean Marxism in the terminology; it's status hierarchy. Dominance hierarchy implies that it's oppression that's building the hierarchies, and that's something really worthy of note, that objection.

Yeah, so this experiment—here's another thing that could be pitted in that competition. So imagine you had men who could confer benefits and who were incapable of inflicting costs, and men who could confer benefits but were capable of inflicting costs. I think you'd see winners on that side because of that free rider problem, and that ties into what we'll discuss in relation to the dark triad because there's some mystery about why women seem to be attracted to these so-called dark triad traits.

I would say that they’re using them as insufficient markers for the ability to or the acquisition of status. Narcissists capitalize on that, right? Because a narcissist looks confident, and lots of confident people are competent, but some confident people aren't competent, but they can fool you.

And then I think the other explanation is that if you had to choose between a benefit conferred who could punish free riders and one who couldn't, you should pick the former.

One who could deal with free riders who could and would—the capability to inflict costs.

And so you see this sort of thing—I really like the Disney movie "Beauty and the Beast." I think they got it right. There's Gaston in that movie, and he's a narcissist, and he has physical prowess, like he can't understand why he's not the guy. But he's narcissistic. And then there's the beast, who's a beast, but he's tameable.

He can be a benefit confer, and he has the capacity to inflict costs.

Yes, and the two are often correlated in nature. For example, if you have physical prowess or athletic ability, then you have both the ability to confer benefits in the form of, say, protection or hunting skills, but also the ability to inflict costs by, you know—

Okay, let's talk about the dark triad then in relationship to agreeableness because the—do you want to just tell everybody what the dark triad is first so that we're all on the same page?

Yeah, so the dark triad—I think this was originally named by one of your Canadian psychology colleagues, Del Paulhus at UBC. The dark triad originally was, well, three traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Narcissism is typically marked by a sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement. They think they're the most intelligent, the smartest, the most attractive, the most charming, the most skilled, etc. In the words of one of my former graduate students, they think they're hot, but they're not.

I think there's a way in which people do have the ability to assess whether that high self-esteem is warranted or not because we have even words in our language for things like arrogant—someone who thinks they are more beautiful, more intelligent, more capable than they actually are.

So that's narcissism. But the entitlement is, I think, a critical component of narcissism where they feel, "I'm so great; I deserve a larger share of the pie," including the sexual pie when we get to the issue of sexual conflict and sexual coercion.

Machiavellianism, I mean, that stems from "The Prince"—I can't remember how many hundreds of years ago that was written—but it's basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy. They are, when we were talking about reciprocity earlier, they will feign reciprocity, feign being good reciprocators, but then they will cheat.

And so these are the liars, the cheaters.

Alright, so if the patriarchy was based on exploitative power, then dark triad personality traits would be adaptively and practically useful and desirable if that was the case.

Yes, if that is the case.

Okay, now—and that gets complicated because one of the things your research has indicated is that there is a manner in which women are attracted to people who manifest dark triad traits.

Yeah, I would say I would add the qualifier that it tends to be younger women—so teenagers or women in their early 20s. Women, as they mature and get more experience on the mating market, tend to be less attracted to these dark triad characters.

Okay, so here's a hypothesis: it's not that easy to distinguish the willingness to use casual power and control from competence when you're not very experienced. So the dark triad types can feign status-related competence, and they can ensnare naive women.

Yes, yeah, that's right. They also have some qualities that women genuinely do desire. The narcissists tend to put themselves at the center of attention, and one of the things we know about status hierarchies is that the attention structure is very important.

That is, the high-status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay them the most attention. Women are drawn.

One anecdote: a female colleague of mine, very intelligent evolutionary psychologist, said she went to a conference and found herself very attracted to the organizer of the conference. Then, six months later, she encountered him, and he was just a normal attendee at the conference, and she didn't find him very attractive. She wondered, "What was I thinking?"

But what it was is he was at the center of the attention structure.

Well, the attention structure is an unbelievably reliable indicator of what's valuable, because we don't devote our visual attentive resources to anything that isn't of singular value in the environment.

That's precisely why we compete for attention. It's also an extremely valuable resource. Absolutely. So, I mean, a valuable and limited resource—it's finite.

Really, at every moment in time, we're making decisions about what to allocate our attention to.

I read a funny study once—you might be aware of this—where monkeys, I think they were green monkeys, but I'm not sure, were shown photographs of other members of their troop, and they gazed much longer at the high-status individuals in the photographs.

Yeah, so, you know, and then you think about that too. There's something really interesting about that because imagine that that compulsion to attend to what acquired status—or let's say competence status—is accompanied in human beings by a profound instinct to imitate.

Right, that's right.

Because we are social learners. One of the things that we try to do is to emulate those who have qualities that are associated with status, and that gets into—those vary from group to group and subgroup to subgroup. In the modern environment, we have this kind of a weird situation of a proliferation of status hierarchies, where you can be, I don't know, the top social influencer, where the only thing you have going for you is, I don't know, a line of makeup or something like that, or nothing at all.

I mean, Paris Hilton was like famous for being famous, and she got a lot of attention, but there was no real benefit there. But, you know, we have like—if you play video games, for example—which I don't happen to, but their status hierarchies within those, you know, the most skilled video game player, the most skilled football player, rugby player, tennis player.

It's a good thing we can create all these competence hierarchies, because what it means is that diverse talents have the opportunity to acquire the status that might also alternatively entice them to violence, let's say.

Because that is associated with status inequality. One of the solutions to status inequalities is diverse games of competence as diverse a range as possible.

That's a good thing, and I mean, if there was just one status hierarchy, then that means status is inherently a relative gauge, a relative metric.

And if you're the number one, no one else can be the number one, but if you can be the best scholar, the best writer, the best World of Warcraft player, the best tennis player, these multiple status hierarchies give more people the opportunity to gain in status.

Another argument against the patriarchy as a unitary idea, right?

Well, which patriarchy do you mean? Do you mean like the evil coalition of plumbers, which is a joke I've made before? Power is not—it’s plumbers, really? No, they're not organized in terms of their success by which plumber is the meanest and the toughest. That's not how it works at all.

Absolutely, and I mean, that gets into the issue of, oh, there are large pools of men who are at the bottom of the status hierarchy and who don't have the qualities that women desire. So are they really oppressing women?

There’s this interesting—I think I illustrated this with a photo that I think got captioned, but it's two very elegant women with designer handbags, and they're walking by a guy who's fixing the tar in the street. He's a street worker, fixing the tar, and as they walk by this guy who's groveling on the ground, they say, "Stop oppressing me."

Right, right.

Well, I wanted to talk to you a bit more about the dark triad issue too because there's a mystery in it, and I think it's one that corrupts psychology to some degree—research psychology.

Oh yes, okay, so we didn't mention the third one.

Oh yes, the third element of the dark triad, which is psychopathy. One of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy. Most normal humans have an empathy circuit. We feel compassion if someone gets hurt, or if a pet gets injured, or a child falls down and skins a knee.

We feel a sense of compassion for the suffering of other people, but psychopaths don't. It's like they might laugh if someone gets hurt. One of the hallmarks seems to be that they’re not responsive to punishment, that they're more oriented toward reward. Warnings of punishing them don't tend to change their behavior.

It isn't obvious that they have an empathy for their future selves.

Right, so punishments—like, well, you know, part of the reason that you react to punishment is because you don't want your future self to be punished again, but you have to care about that before that works, right?

Right, yeah.

Yeah, they grab for all the gusto right now and don't think about the future consequences.

So one of the things that one of the big five personality traits that the dark triad is most associated with is agreeableness—low agreeableness.

That's a big one.

That I do think that research psychologists and psychologists in general have a kind of ethical bias in relationship to the agreeableness dimension.

And of course women are higher in trait agreeableness than men, reliably—it’s about half a standard deviation; it’s one of the biggest sex differences.

And it’s associated with compassion and politeness in the work we’ve done, anyway. So, what is the ethical utility of lower agreeableness?

You'd think what would interfere possibly with sharing, right? Because if you're more compassionate and more empathic, you're going to feel the hunger of other people, and you'd be more motivated to care for them, let's say.

But it's also possible that that low agreeableness has something to do with, well, perhaps hunting prowess—that might be part of it—but it also might be part of the solution to the free rider problem.

And so women are in a conundrum with agreeableness, right? Because they need a mate who's agreeable enough so they can bond with them and that will care for their children and cares in general, but they need someone who's disagreeable enough so that they're capable, let's say, of dealing with free riders, right?

Yeah, so one way of saying that is agreeable with respect to them but the potential for being disagreeable with respect to those others when they need to be punished or they need to ward off an attacker, right?

You could see that that's a real tight line to walk down. Part of what constrains agreeableness, let's say, from a temperamental perspective—if you're low in agreeableness, let's say—you're less empathic, you're more competitive, you're rougher, blunter, tougher.

You know, emo—what would you say? At least with regards to the compassion you show to others, and so what helps modulate that? Well, some of that would be conscientiousness.

In the dark triad types, you see low conscientiousness as well. Really low agreeable, high conscientious types are quite interesting because you can trust them because they'll do their duty, but they're very blunt and direct and harsh, and that can be helpful as well because they'll tell you unpleasant truths even if they hurt your feelings.

So there's some utility in that. You can imagine that agreeableness can be modified, let's say, by conscientiousness so that—and that takes the—the psychopathy edge off it because low agreeableness and low conscientiousness—that's a rough combination.

Yes.

And so women are attracted to some degree to the lower agreeable types, and I think that accounts for the bad boy paradox that you described, at least in part. It may take further experience and wisdom on the part of judicious women to see where they can get the disagreeableness that's necessary, but it has to be hemmed in by something like, well, conscientiousness.

Yeah, I mean, one other reason that I think that women are attracted to the dark triad—at least the younger women—is that they're often risk-takers. They will do things like motorcycle jumping or ski jumping or take physical risks, speeding in their cars. The kind of daredevil mentality—and women, at least younger women, find that exciting.

But I wonder if they can—I wonder if they confuse that with trait openness, right? Because the open types are going to experiment; they're going to try lots of different things, and that daredevil, you know, "I don't care" might be easily—not easily distinguished from the capacity to engage in creative problem-solving pursuits, you know, and perhaps with courage as well.

Yeah, I think courage—and also one of the, you know, that people who take risks often, in fact, have the ability to afford those risks. If you're not an athletic person, you're going to fail at that.

In some sense, some of these daredevil behaviors, I think, are kind of cues that you have the ability to afford to take those risks. But these high dark triad guys are absolutely disastrous as long-term mates.

So that they might be exciting for sure; that's why I think that women, as they mature, stop being attracted to these guys, especially if they're looking for a long-term mate because these are guys—they're the dark red—they're more likely to cheat, they're more likely to seduce and abandon them, they're more likely to engage in deceptive mating tactics.

And so they tend to be big trouble when it comes to long-term mating.

Yeah, well, it also looks like they value themselves greatly. Sometimes people value themselves greatly, and so they have high mate desirability in your terminology, or maybe some little corruption of your terminology.

Again, I think the dark triad guys mimic that. It's like, "I'm so good, I can afford to distribute my sexual prowess wherever I see fit."

And there's some of that happens as men rise in competence hierarchies as well.

Well, yes, and it happens with women when they rise in their hierarchy.

How do you understand—here’s a question I'd really like to hear you answer: how do you distinguish between female and male hierarchies for sexual selection? Because there are obviously women that are more desirable to men.

So where are the big sex differences there? I know that men and women will mate across and up competence hierarchies, and men will mate across and down, roughly speaking, but there are other differences.

Yeah, so we recently published a study on 14 different cultures on the sex differences and similarities, and indeed there are differences. So even things like physical attractiveness—increases both male and female status, but it increases female status more than male status.

Why? Well, what we argue is that, and this is one thing my 37 culture studies showed, is that men place a greater priority on physical attractiveness, physical appearance, good looks. It's not an arbitrary social construction; it's basically an evolved preference for fertility cues. Those men who mated with infertile women failed to become ancestors, and so we're all descendants of them.

I have to ask you this too—here's something I really got in trouble for. I was doing an interview with an NBC reporter; I don't remember who it was, but he didn't like me at all. He was trying to catch me out in all sorts of things, and we talked about makeup in the workplace, and I said that women use makeup to enhance their sexual attractiveness.

You wouldn't believe the flack I got for that. I said, "Well, the reddening of the lips, for example, and the rouging of the cheeks is not only a signal to mimic youth and fertility, but it's likely associated with mimicry of ripe fruit because our visual system evolved to detect ripe fruit."

If you look through any advertising—like any magazine, women's magazines in particular—the association between makeup and fruit is there in the imagery all the time.

So did I say something that I shouldn't have said? Am I wrong about that in some important ways?

You're not wrong about it, but I know what you mean. I've got some flack for that as well. One thing that, you know, on this finding that men prioritize physical attractiveness and that physical attractiveness is not just this arbitrary social construction, but in fact, underlying it is a set of cues to youth and cues to health and hence cues to fertility.

This is a very upsetting notion to some people. I was actually, even before I published the 37 culture study, I gave a talk on it to a sociology department when I was at Michigan. A professor—female professor—came up to me afterward and said that I shouldn't publish the findings. I said, "Well, why not?"

Because, you know, to me, empirical findings are empirical findings. But she said that women had it hard enough without being told that men have this evolved preference for it. You know, and the standard social science model is more comfortable for people to believe, "Oh, it's just arbitrary and infinitely changeable." You know, you go to any different culture, and they value a whole different set of things.

The notion that we have evolved preferences for fertility cues is anathema to some people. You can understand it to some degree because a lot of these—
a lot of the truths that psychologists have stumbled over, let's say, are actually quite painful.

I mean, I reviewed the IQ literature for about 20 years trying to get to the bottom of it, and it's very distressing to realize how wide the human differential is in cognitive ability.

It's really quite a staggering thing to understand how broad that gap is and how much pain that causes, especially at the lower end of the distribution. The fact that men are stringently selected for, let's say, the capacity to acquire a position in a competence hierarchy, and women are brutally punished in terms of their sexual attractiveness for not manifesting signs of fertility and youth, it's like there's a real harshness to that.

But what I think it's the harshness of life, and actually understanding that makes it less harsh, insofar as understanding is useful.

Yeah, yeah, no, I would agree with that. You know, I mean I've stumbled across a lot of findings in my research, and we'll get to the issue of conflict between the sexes that I find personally distressing. You know, I wish it didn't exist, but they do; and so I feel similarly that, you know, we're better off confronting our nature and the empirical reality, including sex differences in that nature, rather than just pretending that these features don't exist.

[Music]

Hello, everybody! I'm very pleased today to have as my guest Dr. David Buss, who's been a real influence on my thinking; I think perhaps more than any other living psychologist I respect and have learned from what he's done. David Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously taught at Harvard and at the University of Michigan. He is considered the world's leading scientific expert on strategies of human mating and is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His many books include The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, and Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love, and Sex: The Mysterious Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill and why Women Have Sex, which you'd think would definitely be a bestseller.

His new book, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault, was published in 2021, and it uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes. Dr. Buss has more than 300 scientific publications, and just to give those of you who are listening some sense of what that means, you can get a PhD from a pretty top-rated research institution in psychology with three publications—a thesis made of three publications. So to have 300 publications is in some sense the equivalent of 100 PhDs, so that's worth thinking about for a while. In 2019, he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world.

So, well, thank you. It's my pleasure to be talking to you. I've been reading your work for some time, and I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.

Even the more biologically oriented psychologists, the behaviorists, for example, like Skinner—the people who studied rats and who did that so carefully—because that's a great tradition, and it really led to the emergence of neuroscience—there was not a lot of evolutionary thinking there, because underlying that behaviorist ethos was the idea that human beings were something like a blank slate and that almost everything we did was learned.

We have something like 5,000 species plus of mammals, and only something like 3 to 5 percent have anything resembling pair-bonded long-term mating. But humans do have it—it's part of our nature.

Is this guy a good hunter? You know, so you go to a culture like the Aceh of Paraguay, and basically what leads to high status in men is hunting skills—that's the big main effect there.

Yeah, and the hunting thing is really interesting when you think about also how much we've abstracted ourselves out of our basic biological niche in some sense because hunting and getting to the point and hitting the target and aiming right and being specific with words and all of that, that kind of goal-oriented action, those are all very tightly related, as far as I can tell psychologically.

And then you said something quite interesting earlier as well that we didn't comment on. You talked about men as a breeding experiment run by women, and this ties into another reason why evolutionary psychology is so important because we're unbelievably highly sexually selected.

That has to do with women's choosing us. So maybe we could start our discussion of sexual differences and mating strategy with that. First of all, what's the evidence that suggests that women are in fact choosier when it comes to sexual partners than men, and how much choosier are they?

Okay, great question. Well, maybe first we could just define for listeners what sexual selection theory is because most people, when they think about evolution, they think of survival of the fittest and that sort of nature-written tooth and claw and yes, a kind of randomness too, which you know, that's kind of implicit in the natural selection theory where sexual selection is anything but random.

Absolutely, yeah, so sexual selection—natural selection, this is oversimplified, but is the evolution of adaptations due to their survival advantage, or the survival advantage that accrued to the possessors. So things like fear of snakes, fear of heights, spiders, darkness, strangers, food preferences—things that led to better survival—sexual selection deals with the evolution of qualities that lead to mating success. Darwin identified two causal processes by which mating success could occur.

One is same-sex competition, or intra-sexual competition, and the logic there is that whatever—he thought about it in terms of contest competition, where there was a physical battle, like two stags locking horns in combat. The victor gaining sexual access to the female, the loser ambling off with a broken antler, dejected with low self-esteem and probably needing some psychotherapy.

The logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles, whether it be athleticism, strength, agility, cunning, or whatever, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers due to the sexual access that the victors accrued. Qualities associated with losing, basically, bit the evolutionary dust.

The second component, so that's intrasexual competition, which actually the logic is more general than Darwin envisioned, so like in our species, as we were alluding to, we often compete for position and status hierarchies.

We can engage in intrasexual competition without engaging in this physical battle or contest competition, although I think that the contest competition was also part of human evolutionary history with males. The other component process is basically what Darwin called female choice and the logic there is that whatever qualities, if there's some consensus about the qualities that are desired, that men possessing the desired qualities have a mating advantage.

They have preferentially chosen those lacking the desired qualities basically become incels or involuntarily celibate, but they get shunned, banished, or ignored. Now, the twist on that—and so I think sexual selection is by far a more interesting process and definitely has occurred with respect to humans—but the twist there is that we have mutual mate choice, at least when it comes to long-term mating, especially—I should say, especially when it comes to long-term mating.

That gets to the issue of Trevor's theory of parental investment where he said he asked the question, "Well, which sex does the choosing? Which sex does the competing?" His answer was the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be cheesier. The sex that invests less tends to be more competitive for access to those desirable members of the opposite sex.

But in long-term mating, now we know from our reproductive biology that women have that nine-month pregnancy, which is obligatory, so women can't say, "Look, I'm really busy with my career; I really only want to put in three months." It's just part of our reproductive biology to produce one child, and men can produce that same child through one act of sex.

So, women are at least in when it comes to sex, the choosier sex, the higher investing sex, in part because the costs of making a bad mating decision are much more severe for women than for men. If men and women hook up, have sex for one night, in the morning, they both realize, "Oh, this is a mistake, I shouldn't have done that." If the woman gets pregnant, then she might be pregnant with a guy who is not going to invest in her offspring—some guy perhaps who has poor genetic material, does not have a robust immune system, et cetera.

So anyway, that's a long-winded answer to your question about sexual selection.

Good, so let's go ahead, please go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say that the—you asked about the evidence for females being choosier, and they are choosier primarily in the context of casual sex or short-term sex. So, that's where you find the big sex differences. There’s a ton of evidence for this; this is a sex difference that I capture in the book under the category of desire for sexual variety.

So men have a much greater desire for meaning—a variety of sex partners than women do, and the choosiness comes in. I'll just give you one experiment. This is a classic study done by Elaine Hatfield and Russell Clark where they had male and female confederates—which for listeners are members of the experimental team; it doesn't mean people from the South United States—simply walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say, "Hi, I've been noticing you around campus lately. I find you very attractive. Would you," and they asked them one of three questions: "Would you go on a date with me tonight? Would you come back to my apartment with me? Would you have sex with me?" It was a between-groups design; they simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests.

This is a study that's been replicated now in several European studies—very difficult to do this, as you might imagine—to get this by the IRBs or ethics committees in the United States anyway. I assume it's similar in Canada or worse.

Yeah, the kinds of studies we really want to do are more difficult to do nowadays. But it's been replicated in several Western European countries, and you can get women off of the zero percent; you can get a few percent of the women saying yes if the guy’s really really charming. If he’s a Brad Pitt or, I don’t know what the modern equivalent is—Ryan Gosling or one of the, you know, or perhaps a famous rock star.

Then you explain percentiles to people so they understand: 99th percentile, 1st percentile, 50th, and so forth. Basically, for things like a marriage partner, men and women are roughly equal—they both are very exact—and they say what they want, like say 65th or 70th percentile intelligence. Where the sex difference comes up is just as a sex partner, a pure sex partner with no investment—women still maintain they still want, let’s say, 60th or 60 plus percentile in intelligence, whereas men drop to embarrassing levels. The 35th, 40th percentile men go, you know, if she can mumble a little bit, that's fine, or even not so.

So that’s another indication of female choosiness that they maintain greater choosiness when it comes to short-term sex and are simply less comfortable with having sex with total strangers or casual sex. And here’s—I'll give you one more now that I'm rambling on, and then I'll get to some other interesting issues. This is an item on the sociosexuality inventory that colleagues Steve Gangstad and Jeff Simpson developed a long time ago. One of the items is an attitude item, and it says, "Sex without love is okay. Do you agree with that or disagree with that?"

And there you get a large sex difference so. In the seven-point scale, where four is the midpoint, men average about 5.5, so they say, "Yeah, sex without love is okay, yeah, that's okay." Women are about 3.5, okay? They're below the midpoint. That’s another indication of this sex difference in choosing this.

Do you know if that’s modulated by big five trait agreeableness?

Oh, that’s a great question, and I haven’t seen any studies that link that to the big five to that item or the sociosexuality inventory in general.

You’d wonder if compassion and empathy might be one of the things driving that and the value that's placed on that as a consequence of being high or low in agreeableness. That would fit into some degree with the dark triad work because the primary difference there is—we’ll talk about the dark triad in a minute—is that the dark triad types are low in agreeableness, centrally. It's not the only thing but that's central.

Yeah, and that's where there's a big sex difference—and I want to ask you a terminological question—so I'm sorry. Please, sorry to interrupt, but I just—I thought we should say a few more words about your question about patriarchy. Because I thought that was a really interesting question and there's some interesting complexities associated with that.

And so what I started with is that, you know, you have to break it down analytically into precisely what causal process you're invoking, and usually when people invoke it, it's like this mysterious causal force in the ether that somehow comes down and infects people's minds. They don't get into the question of, "Well, what are the causal origins of what you’re calling patriarchy?" To get to that, you have to get to things like female mate preferences and the co-evolution of those mate preferences with male mating strategies, and part of male mating strategies is to prioritize resource acquisition and clawing their way up the status hierarchy and, you know, selling their grandmother to get ahead.

Studies of this get to another sex difference that women tend to allocate their time, energy, and investment across a wider array of, you know, what we call adaptive problems. So, you know, women more than men invest in kin. Even if they’re married, they invest more in their in-laws, in their friendships, etc.

Men on average tend to be more mono-maniacal about getting ahead. So, you could say the most effective long-term strategy for smashing the patriarchy is for women to select low-ranking mates to sleep with.

Yes, so if—I should get in lots of trouble for that.

Well, if women change their mate preferences so that they didn’t care about status and resources, or those qualities, and you iterated that over enough generations, it would ultimately change male behavior.

So, I have a terminological issue that was raised to me by one of my graduate students—a very intelligent man, a very careful thinker. I had faster graduate students, but I don’t think I had any who would worry a problem absolutely to death as much as he would. He always got to—he was an engineer, and as an engineer, he would really get to the bottom of things like you did with the patriarchy, at least to some degree.

He told me once I started speaking more publicly, "Stop using the term dominance hierarchy or status hierarchy. There’s a political supposition nested inside there that’s not helpful. How about competence hierarchy?"

But I want to run a counter position by you—imagine a football team in a small American town; it’s kind of an archetypal issue—and the whole town is celebrating the football team. The football team is ranked in terms of competence, and the football team wins a game, and all the guys lift the quarterback up on their shoulders because he was the hero of the game, and they march him out of the stadium. So he sleeps with the cheerleaders.

I would say he was elected by the men to sleep with them because if it's not competitive—like, I think the idea that it's competition isn't exactly right.

And terminology really matters because men will organize themselves into groups and those who become elevated in status don't do it by dominating.

You know, my students said, “You don’t get people to wear a choke collar and a chain—it’s not dominance.”

So yeah, I’m so glad that you asked that because we just—this—this whole subject of status hierarchies and dominance hierarchies is something that we are studying now in my lab, and we just published a paper that confirms precisely the point that you’re making. Where we looked at—basically, whether status is determined by dominance, which I do, which in the literature is sometimes defined as cost infliction.

You have the ability and willingness to inflict costs, and you know, beat up your rivals or confer benefits—which gets to your point about competence. And what we found is that it’s conferring benefits—that is the ability and willingness to confer benefits—that led to high status.

Okay, so I

Evolution, Sex & Desire | David Buss | EP 235

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