--:-- Andrew Huberman: Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, my conversation with Dr. David Buss.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Well, David, delighted to be here. Excited to ask you a number of questions about these super interesting topics about how people select mates.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Just to start off, perhaps you could just orient us a little bit about mate choice. You know, some of the primary criteria that studies show men and women use in order to select mates.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Well, that's a critical distinction because what people look for in a long-term committed mateship, like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship, is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex. So that's actually critical.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework for understanding mate choice.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Sure. It basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Darwin noticed that there were phenomena that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival selection. So he came up with the theory of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And he identified two causal processes by which mating advantage could occur.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: One is intrasexual competition. And the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same-sex battles, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And the second most relevant to your question about mate choice is preferential mate choice.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: That was the second causal pathway. And the logic there is that if members of one sex agree with one another about the qualities that are desired, then those of the opposite sex who possess the desired qualities or embody those desired qualities, they have a mating advantage.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So you asked, well, what are the qualities that men and women desire? And maybe we'll start with long-term mating and then shift to short-term mating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: The most large-scale study that's been done on this is a study that I did a while back of 37 different cultures. And it's now been replicated by other researchers.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And basically what we found is three clusters of things.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: We found qualities that both men and women wanted in a long-term mate. We found some qualities that were sex-differentiated, where women preferred them more than men or men preferred them more than women.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And then we found some attributes that were highly variable across cultures in whether people found these as desirable or indispensable or irrelevant.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So if you talk about universal desires, so things that men and women share, things like intelligence, kindness, mutual attraction and love, good health, dependability, emotional stability...
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Although there's a bit of a sex difference there with women preferring it a bit more than men.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So you go to anywhere in the world, and these are qualities that people universally desire in long-term mates.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Sex differences. So sex differences basically fell into two clusters.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So women more than men prioritized good earning capacity, slightly older age, and the qualities associated with resource acquisition.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So these are things like a man's social status. Does he have drive? Is he ambitious? Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory is one way that I like to phrase it.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Because women often, they don't look at necessarily the resources that a guy possesses at this moment, but what is his trajectory?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Women attend to the attention structure. So the attention structure is a key determinant of status.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So the people who are high in status are those to whom the most people pay the most attention.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals or is he in an existential crisis just not knowing what he's going to do with his life.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Also, women use what's called in the literature mate choice copying.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So we've done studies where you just take a guy, photograph him alone, versus take the same guy, put an attractive woman next to him or put two women next to him, and women judge exactly the same guy to be much more attractive if he's paired with women.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: From an evolutionary perspective, it's reasonable that women would prioritize these qualities because of the tremendous asymmetry in our reproductive biology, namely that fertilization occurs internally within women.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Women bear the burdens of the nine-month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive, as well as creating opportunity costs in terms of mobility and solving other tasks that people need to solve in the course of their lives.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And so one way to phrase that is that the costs of making a bad mate choice are much heavier for women when it comes to sexual behavior, certainly.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And the benefits correspondingly of making a wise mate choice are higher for women in the sexual context.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so what do men value more than women? Physical attractiveness.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So physical appearance provides a wealth of information about a person's health status, but also provides for men a wealth of information about a woman's fertility, her reproductive value.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Now, not that men think about that consciously. I mean, men don't walk down the street and see a woman and say, oh, I find her attractive because I think she must be very fertile.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: They just find those cues attractive. We know now, based on the last 20 years of scientific studies, that the cues that men find attractive women are not at all arbitrary.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Things like clear skin, clear eyes, symmetrical features, a low waist to hip ratio, full lips, lustrous hair.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: All these are qualities that are associated with youth and health and hence have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so it's not just that men are these superficial creatures who evaluate women on the basis of appearance.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: There's an underlying logic to why they do so.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And as I said, relative youth, this age thing is one of the largest sex differences you find in long-term age selection with women preferring somewhat older men and men preferring somewhat younger women.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: It's also expressed in preferences. So say a 25-year-old man would say prefer a woman who's 20 or in her early 20s.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: 35-year-old man might prefer a woman who's in her late 20s or early 30s.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: 50-year-old man might prefer a woman who's say 35 to 38.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So marriage and long-term mating are things other than reproductive unions in the modern environment.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And if you get too large an age gap then essentially you in different cultures And if the cultural gap gets too large you don't understand each other
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Element.
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--:-- Andrew Huberman: Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Drinking element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I'll also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I love the raspberry, I love the citrus flavor.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Right now, Element has a limited edition lemonade flavor that is absolutely delicious.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or watermelon.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Again, I can't pick just one flavor, I love them all.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Could you tell us about how men and women leverage deception versus truth telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Yeah, well, so basically the Both men and women do deceive.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So we have the modern cultural invention of online dating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: People do lie, but they lie in predictable ways.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: They lie in ways that attempt to embody the mate preferences of the person they're trying to attract.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Both sexes post photos that are not truly representative of what they actually look like.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So they might post photos of themselves when they were younger or there are even advice tips on how to create the best selfie of the best angle that will maximally, you know, enhance what you look like.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: What happens with internet dating is that the photograph tends to overwhelm all the other cues.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And all the other cues are written statements.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And we weren't really evolved to process written statements.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: But we were evolved to respond to physical cues.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And men tend to attend to the visual cues much more than women.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So women in their mate selection, they have olfactory cues.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So what does the guy sound like? His vocal qualities. that's auditory cues, but olfactory cues.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: What does he smell like?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: If the guy doesn't smell right, even if he embodies all the other qualities women want, that's a deal breaker.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so I encourage people just, you know, stop with the hundred texts back and forth or messaging and meet a person for a cup of coffee.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And then, of course, some qualities you can't assess even with a half-hour interaction.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: You can tell a lot, but things like emotional stability, which is absolutely critical in long-term mating, is to do something like go on a trip together, take a vacation where you're even in an unfamiliar environment where you have to cope with things that you're not familiar with.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And one of the hallmarks of emotional instability is how they respond to stress.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so this is the sort of information you can't get on a coffee date.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: You know, you can only get by assessing it over time.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: One form of deception, which we haven't mentioned, is deception about whether you're interested in a long-term committed relationship or a short-term hookup.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: The overt display that, hey, I'm interested in just a short-term hookup.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I'm interested in sex, so I want to have sex right now.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Let's just go back to my apartment.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: These are very ineffective tactics.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So we find in our studies of deception that men tend to exaggerate how similar they are and how aligned they are in their values and religious orientations and political values and so forth.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And I think that's probably an evolutionarily recurrent form of deception that women have defenses against.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: We talked a little bit about mate choice, but in terms of sexual partner choice, are there any good studies exploring what people are selecting for?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: We know something about how the preferences for a sex partner differ from preference for a long-term mate.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: There is overlap, of course, but one thing is physical appearance.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So physical appearance for women becomes more important in short-term mating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So those physical attributes are more important for women.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: They remain important for men, physical appearance, in short-term mating, but with the footnote that men are willing to drop their standards in short-term mating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: If it's low commitment, low risk, just sex, you know, without entangling commitments.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Women are more likely to prioritize what I call bad boy qualities, guys who are a little arrogant, guys who are risk-taking.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Women are more attracted to those guys in short-term mating than long-term mating.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Whereas in long-term mating, they go more for the good dad qualities.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Is this guy dependable? Is he going to be a good father to my children?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: In short-term mating, women use that mate-copying heuristic.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: That is, if there are thousands of other women who find him attractive, women find him attractive.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so that's why you have the groupie phenomenon.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: If you took like a still photo of some of these rock stars and asked women how attractive the guy is versus tell him he's a famous rock star and show the thousands of women screaming at him, they judge him entirely differently.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: This is just an illustration of how circumstance-dependent women's mate attraction is for guys.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: It depends on his status, the number of women that are attracted to him, the attention structure, how he interacts with a puppy.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Whereas for men, it almost doesn't matter.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Context is more irrelevant.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues that the woman is displaying in context be damned.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: We've known for a long time that there are things that we can do to improve our sleep.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And that includes things that we can take.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Things like magnesium threonate, theanine, chamomile extract, and glycine.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Along with lesser known things like saffron and valerian root.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: These are all clinically supported ingredients that can help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling more refreshed.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I'm excited to share that our longtime sponsor, AG1, just created a new product called AGZ, a nightly drink designed to help you get better sleep and have you wake up feeling super refreshed.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Over the past few years, I've worked with the team at AG1 to help create this new AGZ formula.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: It has the best sleep-supporting compounds in exactly the right ratios in one easy-to-drink mix.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: This removes all the complexity of trying to forge the vast landscape of supplements focused on sleep and figuring out the right dosages and which ones to take for you.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: AGZ is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive sleep supplement on the market.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I take it 30 to 60 minutes before sleep.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: It's delicious, by the way.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And it dramatically increases both the quality and the depth of my sleep.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I know that both from my subjective experience of my sleep and because I track my sleep.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I'm excited for everyone to try this new AGZ formulation and to enjoy the benefits of better sleep.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: AGZ is available in chocolate, chocolate mint, and mixed berry flavors.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And as I mentioned before, they're all extremely delicious.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: My favorite of the three has to be, I think chocolate mint, but I really liked them all.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: If you'd like to try AGZ, go to drinkagz.com slash Huberman.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: What's known about jealousy in men versus women?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I mean, we hear, or I've heard at some point that a large fraction of homicides are the consequence of jealous lovers.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: That's the darkest angle of all this, but in evolutionary psychology context, what is jealousy?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Jealousy is an evolved emotion that serves several adaptive functions.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Once you have long mating you need a defense to prevent or preserve the investment that you made and are making in long mateship
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And so jealousy serves this mate guarding function, if you will, or mate retention function.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so jealousy gets activated when there are threats to that romantic relationship.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: The threats come from many sources.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So they could be you detect cues to your partner's infidelity or cues of a lack of an emotional distance between you and your partner.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So that's one set of cues.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: But then there's another set of interested mate poachers.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So, you know, if you're mated to someone who's desirable, which many people are, other people still desire them.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So jealousy motivates people to be attentive to potential mate poachers.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Even if there are no mate poachers and no cues to infidelity, if a mate value discrepancy opens up in a relationship.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So colloquially, people say things like, he's not good enough for you, you know, or I think you could do better.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So people implicitly have a notion of relative mate value and discrepancies therein.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: OK, but discrepancies can open up where none previously existed.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So you get fired from a job all of a sudden, you know, and most people are very understanding and forgiving about that if it's not too long.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: But you go six months, eight months, people start having problems.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Or someone's career takes off.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Let's say a woman becomes a famous singer or actress or a man does.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Career takes off.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: All of a sudden there's a mate value discrepancy.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Where you have access to a larger pool of potential mates and higher mate value potential mates.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So people are attentive to mate value discrepancies.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And so jealousy can get activated even if there are no immediate threats to a relationship, but that the mate value discrepancy is a threat that looms on the horizon of the relationship.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Because we know statistically the higher mate value person is more likely to have an affair and is more likely to dump the other person and trade up in the mating market.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And then what people do about it depends on what their options are.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And people do things that I, in my published scientific work, I say range from vigilance to violence.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And that can include stalking, following, hacking into iPhones or computers, There's monitoring the behavior of mate poachers, looking at eye contact between other men and your partner.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: There's a whole suite of things that is involved in vigilance.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And then at the other extreme is violence.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: In America, something like 28 to 30 percent of all people who are married will experience intimate partner violence in their relationship.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So it's not a trivial percentage.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Could you tell us about the dark triad?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Yeah, so the dark triad, so we've been talking about sex differences on average, but there are critical within sex individual differences.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And the dark triad is one of the most important ones.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: If you combine these qualities, you have some very bad dudes.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And I say bad dudes because men tend to score higher in these things than women.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Why is this important?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Well, it's important in the mating context because those who are high on dark triad traits tend to be sexual deceivers, for one.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So they're often very charming, very good at seducing women and then abandoning them.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: They're very good at the art of seduction.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: They also tend to be serial sexual harassers and sexual coercers.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so if you combine dark triad traits with the dispositional pursuit of a short-term mating strategy, that's an especially deadly combination.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: That's when you get sexual harassment, sexual coercion.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: It's a subset of men who commit the vast majority of these acts of sexual violence.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: You mentioned stalking briefly.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Maybe we could just talk about some of the less known features about stalking.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I think I once heard you give a lecture where you said that one of the scariest things about stalking is that sometimes it works.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Yeah. So, well, stalking has multiple motivations, but one of the most frequent motivations is a mating motivation where either there's a breakup and the woman dumps the guy and the guy doesn't want to get dumped.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: He wants to maintain a relationship with her.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I should say that when it comes to criminal stalking, there's a huge sex difference.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: About 80% of the stalkers tend to be men, about 20% women.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So there are women stalkers, but they're about a fourth the number compared to men.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So the motivation of the guys tends to be either an attempt to get back together with the woman, either sexually or in a relationship, and or to interfere with her future mating prospects.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And it works in some of the time in two senses.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: One is it does interfere with her attempts to remate.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So in fact, it scares off some guys.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So like you show up and pick up a woman at her apartment for a date and her ex is sitting out there glaring at you.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I think that the circumstances are often a mate value discrepancy where the guy realizes correctly that he will be unable to replace her with a maid of equivalent mate value, or in some cases, any mate.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: You know, it's like, well, she was with me once. Maybe I can get her back with me again.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And another thing we found, we did a study of 2,500 victims of stalking.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: This is with Josh Duntley, a former student of mine, who's now a professor in a criminology department.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And what we found is there were large differences between the stalker and the victim of the stalker, where the stalker tends to be much lower in mate value than the victim.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so basically, it's typically the woman who realizes she can do a lot better on the mating market.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And the guy realizes, I am never going to be able to replace her with a woman of equivalent mate value.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And so I'm going to use this last ditch desperate measure to try to get her back.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And occasionally it works.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function.
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--:-- Dr. David Buss: I've been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And I should say, by taking a second function test, that approach worked.
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--:-- Andrew Huberman: There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test.
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--:-- Andrew Huberman: I realize it's not your specific area of expertise, but these days there's a lot of discussion about how early childhood attachment to parents influences mate choice later on.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Is there anything interesting about childhood attachment strategies vis stability of long partner choice or is that too big of a leap for us to make here?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer some sort of informed speculation about a secure attachment style.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: If both partners have a secure attachment style, that's conducive to a long-term mateship.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So avoidant attachment styles, avoidant people tend to have more difficulty with intimacy and also higher probability of infidelity.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And anxious attachment style, I don't know, can create problems of its own, you know, in the overly clingy, dependent, you know, absorbing what I call high relationship load.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: What is the baggage that someone brings to the relationship?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: How should one frame all this?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So I imagine a number of people listening are in relationships or would hope to be in a relationship.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: You know, in terms of understanding what we are selecting for consciously or subconsciously, it seems like there are common themes.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: It's people want to feel attractive and attracted.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: People want to make sure that there's stability of the relationship.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So when we hear about security, oftentimes I think of this kind of warm oxytocin, serotonin-like thing.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: But this mate value seems so powerful in all this, assessing mate value.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So how objective are people about assessing their own value in terms of finding, securing, and over time maintaining a relationship?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Securing is dynamic because people age at different rates.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Is there an objective metric of this stuff?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I guess you get a lot of statistics about somebody's image and you come up with an average value based on the population.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: But how should people assess themselves?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Because it seems like one of the features that would be very powerful for leading to happiness of good partner selection that's stable would be to be very honest with oneself.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And how does one do that?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: A couple of things. So one is that I think people are generally pretty good at self-assessing mate value.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And even self-esteem has been hypothesized to be one internal monitoring device that tracks mate value.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So when we get a promotion at work or we get a rise in status, we feel an elevated sense of self-esteem.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: We get fired. We get rejected. We get ostracized. Our self-esteem plummets.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So our self-evaluation, I think, does track mate value to some extent.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: There are people who overestimate their mate value, people high on narcissism in particular, and some people underestimate their mate value.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Another important element is that there's consensual mate value so that is if you asked a group of 100 people you know there's a fair amount of consensus that this person's an eight that person's a six okay but there are also individual differences in mate value so let's say you're into football and another partner thinks sports are stupid you know then that's you know someone who's also into sports is going to be higher in mate value for you
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So there are these individual differences in components of mate value, which is good because that means if everyone were going after the same people and there was total consensus on mate value, then there would be a lot of mateless people and a lot of problems in the world and a lot of dissatisfied people.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So both are important, the consensual aspects and the individually differentiated components of mate value.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: But in terms of accuracy of assessment, there are no good measures scientifically to do this because it's a very complicated endeavor to assess accurately.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: But I think people have a good intuitive sense of people's relative mate value, especially if you're in a group and you've been able to interact with them for a long time.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And one indication is, again, that attention structure, how many other people really want to mate with this person, that's a good cue that they're high in mate value.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I find the work that you do incredibly interesting.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I think this field of evolutionary psychology is fascinating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I hope, I said it before, but I'll say it again. I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are nudging towards one another.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I think you're absolutely right.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I think it will happen.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And I think it's starting to happen and it will happen because getting at the neuroscience is getting at the underlying mechanisms that are driving the process.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So, you know, what an evolutionary perspective brings to bear is evolved function and ultimate explanation.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: The selective forces that created adaptations, the functions of those adaptations, and the neuroscience brings, well, what is the underlying machinery that these mechanisms are instantiated in?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I'm certain that people are going to want to learn more about your work.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Certainly, we will give them links to your social media and other sites.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: You've written a tremendous number of really interesting books.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Tell us about your most recent book and maybe some of the others that if people are interested in these topics and they want to learn more that they could explore.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Sure. Okay. So, well, my most recent book is called When Men Behave Badly, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And that book deals with conflict between the sexes, sexual conflict.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And so it deals with them both in what I call mating market conflicts.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Some of the topics we've been talking about, deception and internet dating and things like that.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Second is conflict that occurs within mating relationships of the sort that we've been talking about as well.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Financial infidelity, emotional infidelity, sexual infidelity, coping with conflict within a relationship.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I actually have some suggestions for strategies for coping with conflict within a relationship.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Coping in the after, dealing with the aftermath of breakups.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So often there's an asymmetry. One person wants to break up, the other doesn't.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So I talk about coping in the aftermath.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And then I also talk in this book, When Men Behave Badly, about some of the darker sides of human mating, like intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual coercion.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So that's what that book's about.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And I think it's gotten well-reviewed and people find it very useful in understanding what is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Why do men and women seem at odds with each other in so many domains?
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Why do some of these recurrent forms of sexual conflict occur?
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So that's what that book's about.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: My previous book, so my first book, which I've had the good fortune to be able to revise a couple times, deals more broadly with human mating strategies.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: It's called The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And gives people a broad overview of what people want in a mate, tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention, and so forth throughout the whole mating process, serial mating, causes of divorce, and so forth.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And then even more broadly, I have a textbook called Evolutionary Psychology, The New Science of the Mind.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: Which is in its sixth edition right now.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And it's the most widely used textbook in evolutionary psychology around North America and Europe.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And actually, it's been translated even into Arabic and other countries.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: So that deals somewhat with mating, but also deals with survival problems or evolved fears and phobias, issues about kin and family, extended family, friendships, social hierarchies, status hierarchies, warfare, and other topics.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: So the evolutionary psychology textbook is the broadest book.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: And then maybe the second broadest is the evolution of desire strategies of human mating.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: And then for those interested in conflict between the sexes, the latest book, When Men Behave Badly.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: Fantastic.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I love your work.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: I'm so grateful for the clarity and depth and rigor with which you do it and you convey it to us.
--:-- Dr. David Buss: I know I speak for many people when I just want to say thank you.
--:-- Andrew Huberman: This is a tremendously informative conversation.
