YouSaid · the spoken record

David Buss

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2022-05-04
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2022-05-04
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  1. “Yes, yeah, that's right. And in many psychological domains, there are no sex differences, or the sexes are very similar. But pornography is consumed about 80% of the consumers are men. So it is very heavily a male consumer. Industry, if you will. And I think that. It can have positive and negative effects depending on the circumstances. So one, Potential negative effect is that men might develop unrealistic expectations about what sex will be like or should be like in real life. And so I remember actually this I just heard about this one case of mentioning any names where a man got married and he had been accustomed to seeing very large breasts in his pornography consumption and discovered that his wife had what he perceived to be very small breasts. In fact, they were actually just medium size.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Great question. A big question. So, I mean, we could have a whole podcast just on that, or at least talk for a while about it. So I'll just say a couple things about that. One is, again, there's a sex difference, and I feel like I'm a broken record here hammering on this, but it is a lot.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “In that context, women become the valuable and scarce resource over which men compete, so anything in at least a successful sex is going to be selected for, and so men are very sensitive to being sexually conditioned. That's what's called sexual conditioning to whatever cues are associated with sex happening. From a woman's perspective, sex is not a scarce resource. So woman could go out here in Austin any night or probably any day on sixth street and have no problem having sex with a guy within ten minutes. A guy would have more difficulty. He's not going to go out, you know, unless he's...”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I don't know about society's clapping on the wrist, but I think what it is this, I think this is the evolutionary hypothesis anyway about why there's this sex difference. And that is that men are conditioned to anything that's going to lead to sex. Because whereas women don't have to be from a male perspective, because of women's greater investment, because the nine-month pregnancy, et cetera, in order to reproduce, women have to invest this tremendous amount. Men don't. One act of sex can produce an offspring. And so for men, but not for women. And so this huge asymmetry in investment means that the payoff matrix of different sexual strategies differs for the sexes.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Almost all fetishes males are overrepresented. And I think it's partly because There's some evidence that they're classically conditioned, so I think that first or early sexual experiences that people have kind of condition them to the cues that are present during those early ones. And so if your first sex experience happened to be involved with visual images of shoes or you're looking at shoes when you first had sex, that's just an example or leather or zippers or whatever the case is that people develop these very individualistic sexual turn-ons based on these early sexual experiences.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, well, that's a complicated question for which I don't think we have sufficient time to get into that. In detail, and it is complicated because there are some Sexual fantasies, by the way, I think are really fascinating window into our sexual psychology because in a way they're unconstrained by things like rules and norms in society and cultural presses that you're kind of free to fantasize about whatever you want to fantasize about. So I think it provides an interesting window into human sexuality. And there are some predictable ones and then there are some also individual or idiosyncratic ones. And again, there's a fundamental sex difference in this in that when you talk about fetishes or shoe fetishes, leather fetishes, different types of things, males are much more prone to those than females.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, we originally came up with a list of 237 reasons for why humans have sex, and they range from, you know, some of the obvious ones because it feels good, because I wanted to relieve stress, to relieve menstrual crafts, to get rid of a headache, to get my boyfriend off my back so I could get some work done. Yeah. So things like that to others like here's another one so that he'd take out the damn garbage. But another one, it was kind of interesting that. Someone, one nomination was to get closer to God. So there were some that were kind of spiritual motivations for having sex. And then some of the nastier ones like to get revenge on my partner or to get revenge on a rival. So that's sleeping with my rival's boyfriend. So there's some. Nasty stuff and some good stuff in there.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, and probably especially about female sexuality. And this is one of the interesting things and why it's so fun for me to collaborate with, in this case, female, because they do have a different sexual psychology than males. And so, and I've noticed this, that's why in my graduate society, I've had 30 or so PhD students, about half of them male, half have been female. The women come up with different questions, different scientific questions that I wouldn't have thought of necessarily. And so anyway, so it turned out to be good collaboration. I will say that we co-wrote it and that I did contribute to it. Especially the evolutionary insights.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I did, but I have to tell you a story about the origins of this idea, which I give credit to Cindy Meston for. And she's a colleague in the psychology department with me, and we would go out to dinner once a week or so, and we were just talking about this. She raised this issue. And so we started to brainstorm. Originally, it was why humans have sex. The scientific article we published was why humans, because we're interested in males and females. And so I said, I would come, well, they have sex because of X. And then Cindy Master would come up, she'd say, oh, here's seven other reasons. And then I'd come up with one more. And she'd come up with another seven. So she's in some sense importantly the originator or fountain of this idea.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I co wrote it with the female who's Cindy Meston, a wonderful friend and colleague and co-author and co-collaborator. I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to write a book called Why Women Have Sex by Myself as a Bay of”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “One of the hallmarks is a deficit in social mind reading. Just to add to your point about, I guess I've already made it, that of the dynamic properties of the roller coaster is depending on what problem you're trying to solve, you might want to toggle back and forth to one polar or the other.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, it's complicated and it's dynamic. And I would just add to it, I thought you phrased that brilliantly, but I would just add to that, it also depends on sort of what you're trying to do. And so I think some of the oscillation can be what problem you're trying to solve. And so if you're, I don't know, trying to build a bridge or something, you need to be very thing oriented. you know, make sure the damn thing actually works and doesn't collapse when a car goes over it. If you're trying to form a relationship and you're entirely thing-oriented, it's not going to work. That's one of the people, one of the things, and males tend to be more on the so-called spectrum side of things where”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's not in some dream or hypothetical state things have to actually work. But with the agency and communion, I think it's good to have a balance. And that's why I think some of the best romantic relationships are those where people are high on what they used to call androgyny, where they have both the positive features of agency and communion, the positive features of masculinity and femininity within the same mix, but also with the footnote of not the unmitigated agency or unmitigated communion, both of which can be negative. And so I view these as capacities and some people are out of balance. Some people have a good balance between the two. It sounds like you have a good balance between the two.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, so I guess what I would say to our earlier discussion of agency and communion, where I actually think that it's a sign of being well balanced to have both capacities within youth. And so you get people who are unimodal, or they just have one mode of operating. Let's say it's the thing mode, which engineers tend to be good at. You have to be good at it to be a good engineer because things have to actually work.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Men wanted to know did you fuck him or did you have sex with him? And so it's this sex difference in sensitivity to these different cues of infidelity. And of course, there's an evolutionary logic to this. It's been replicated, not the cheater study, but the hypothetical Sophie's choice study has been replicated now in Sweden and China. It's a universal sex difference.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “But men much more likely to say the sexual infidelity is what upsets me. More women, it's like, why are you even asking me? It's a no-brainer. 85% of the women say the emotional infidelities what bothers them anymore. Former student of mine, Barry Cooley did a really interesting study of analysis of this reality show called Cheaters. I've actually never seen it, but where if you suspect your partner of cheating, then a detective from the TV team will follow the person and then they'll call up and say, we've just seen, you found your husband here in no-tell motel. Do you want to come down and talk to him? And so what he analyzed, though, was the verbal interrogations that people had when they confronted their partner. And women wanted to know, are you in love with her?”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Participants, or we used to call them subjects into this, what I call the Sophie's choice of the jealousy dilemmas. I said, imagine your partner became interested in someone else and you discover that they have had passionate sexual intercourse with this person and they've gotten emotionally involved with them. They've fallen in love with them. Which aspect of the infidelity upsets you more? And when you And that's why I call it the Sophie Shirt. It's both terrible choices.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “In consensual terms within an explicit contract that the primary partners work out. So it's okay if you, you know, I know there's one couple it's okay if you do it outside the city limits of Los Angeles but not within some say it's okay for Thursday, but I want the weekend Friday and Saturday nights to me It's okay if there's sexual involvement but no emotional involvement. So there are different type different strategies that people work out and some of them are designed to try to keep jealousy at bay because I think it's an evolved emotion that is a natural emotion that people experience now interestingly there's a while we're on this topic there's a sex difference therein namely if you contrast sex jealousy with emotional jealousy or sexual infidelity with emotional infidelity. And so we in one set of studies I put my”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “If you're a one or a two, you're not going to be able to be polyamorous in all likelihood. There's a lot of attention to polyamory now, and it's unclear whether there's an increase in it or whether people are just talking about it more. It is the case, and I know several people who are in polyamorous relationships, and I've talked with them in detail about them. And jealousy is often a factor in that. And they describe it as kind of like an emotion that has to be somehow tamed or dealt with in some way. And so in polyamory, there are many different types of polyamory. So in like one type, for example, is you have a primary love partner and then some others on the side that are permitted usually with”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I think that we evolve to be, I prefer the term pair bonded. Species, so pair bonding is one of the strategies. Pair bond long-term mating is one of the strategies. But that doesn't necessarily mean for decades and decades are lifelong, because we often pair bond serially. So we'll get into a relationship that might last a year or five years and then break up and then form another relationship. So we engage in serial mating. We engage in infidelity. We engage in some short-term mating. And so we have what I describe as a menu of mating strategies and which particular mating strategy an individual adopts depends on a wide variety of factors. I think some are just kind of personal proclivities. Some depend on your mate value. So if you are an eight, a nine or a ten, you have more options for what mating strategy you want to pursue.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Or a mile flirtation You know, things like that. And so the violence is. Designed to head off the threat before it becomes real.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, except that a lot of it, a lot of the mate poaching is discovered or cues to mate poaching are discovered before the consummation of the act. So it might be just.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The mate poacher, yeah, but he but equally split. I think the non-lethal violence tends to be more directed toward the mate because it's, and this is a horrible thing of male sexual psychology, but I think part of the violence is functional in the sense that it's designed to keep a mate and prevent her from engaging in anything with other potential mate poachers. But people do. It goes back to the French law where they had the so-called crime of passion. So if a husband walked in and found his wife having sex with some other guy in bed and shot him, that was viewed as a crime of passion still not legal, but you kind of get a discount. Whereas if he goes home, thinks about it for a while, then gets the gun and comes back, then that's premeditated murder.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Tends to be evenly split. So sometimes, and that's, I mean, men especially, when someone poaches on their mate, they have homicidal fantasies.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And here's another interesting wrinkle that I also talk about in the book is sometimes people intentionally evoke jealousy in their partner. And I think that's also a kind of testing of a bond kind of issue. So, and especially women, but I think both sexes interpret a total absence of jealousy as a sign that their partner is not sufficiently committed to them or sufficiently in love with them. So if you, like, just say, I don't know, if you go to a party with your partner and then you leave the room for some reason, you come back and your partner is passionately kissing someone else and doesn't bother you at all. That might be a cue to the partner that maybe you're not very in love with that person or not very committed to them.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah. Well, and I think that sometimes the best relationships are when both people feel lucky to be with the other person.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Classes of things that can do cost inflicting things or benefit providing things. So the man in that situation might say, okay, I need to devote more attention to my partner. I need to up my game when it comes to resource acquisition. I need to lavish more attention and gifts on her. And so there's a whole suite of benefit provisioning things that can help to reduce that mate value discrepancy. And then there's also cost inflicting things. And humans, unfortunately, do both sets of things”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, yeah. So, in general, but there are errors in mate selection, you kind of alluded to that issue earlier that sometimes people make errors, errors in mate selection, which they do. So sometimes you think this person is well matched on mate value, but they're not. But then things change. So let's say they're the same. You have two sixes, and then all of a sudden the woman's career takes off. All of a sudden she's, you know, getting promotion, she's acquiring wealth, she's attracting men who are of a different mate value than she previously did. Well, that triggers jealousy in the guy, even if she swears she's going to be totally loyal and she has no signs of leaving or no signs of infidelity, a mate value discrepancy is going to trigger jealousy. Now, what can it do? Well, it can do in the broadest sense people can do two.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Is a direct threat to the relationship. But there's another more subtle trigger of jealousy, which is a mate-value discrepancy. So usually when people mate, they assort or pair up on overall mate value. So in the American 10-point scale, the eights tend to pair up with the eights, the sixes with the sixes, the tens with the tens, and the ones with the ones.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Leads to, and I've studied also homicidal ideation, which intersects with this topic in that men, sometimes women, to a lesser degree, develop homicidal ideation about people who are trying to poach their mates or who do poach their mates, successfully poach their mates. So what jealousy does is it alerts you to a threat to the relationship, and it motivates checking out the source of the threat. How threatening is this to people tend to increase vigilance of their partner in the modern world includes hacking into their cell phone or computer, monitoring them, sometimes stalking them, but also can include positive things. So it might be that, so one trigger of gel.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “the relationship and be sensitive to threats to the relationship. And I think jealousy is one of those. I think it's a key one. And now I think that there are a variety of benefits to it, but also a variety of costs or downsides to jealousy because we know that jealousy, male sexual jealousy is the leading cause of spousal abuse and spousal violence physical violence, probably emotional violence as well or psychological violence. And so that's what I call it the dangerous passion. It's a necessary emotion, but it is also a dangerous emotion, leads to homicide.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “You have to have an adaptation that is sensitive to threats to a valued relationship. And I think I alluded to this earlier, that just because you're in a relationship and you're in a relationship with a desirable partner doesn't mean that you've finished solving the problems of mating that you need to solve because there are threats from the outside. So mate poachers, people who try to lure your partner away for either a sexual encounter or a more committed romantic relationship. And then there's also dissatisfaction within the relationship. So your partner might become tempted to be sexually unfaithful or romantically unfaithful or emotionally unfaithful. And so we need humans with the evolution of long-term pair bonding. We need adaptations to guard.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So I've written a whole book on this called The Dangerous Passion, Why Jealousy is Necessary, Is Sex and Love. And I think that one cut at your question is that a moderate, so first of all, I think it's a feature, not a bug in most cases. So in the sense that”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah, it does go both ways. And I think even the emotional abuse is sometimes even worse than the physical abuse. You see that in studies of, even like childhood abuse, where it's the emotional abuse that is the most damaging.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Trip or something like that. Yeah. So where you experience unexpected things, stresses. You get a flat tire or whatever and you encounter and you see how the person deals with stress and you see how you deal with each other under stress. And I think that's unless you have put stress tests on relationships, you really don't know where things stand.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And I think that's a feature, not a bug, in the sense that, especially in the early stages of love, romantic love, we tend to overly romanticize and idealize our partner. So when there's an absence of evidence, we impute positive values. And this is one of my recommendations to friends that I know is if you're really considering a good long-term commitment to this person, go on vacation with them. Ideally too. The idea to a foreign country where both of you are unfamiliar.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And I mean, there's one hypothesis that was put forward by an Israeli biologist named Amos Zahavi called the testing of a bond. And so he asked the question, like, why do people inflict costs on their part? Even like kissing, you're introducing it's a disease vector. Why do people do these weird things inflicting costs or emotional liability is a way of inflicting costs? And what he argues is it's the testing of a bond. If the person's willing to tolerate, you know, this level of stress, this level of cost imposition, then that means they must be very committed to me. And so, and I think that's something people do in romantic relationships is they do test the strength of the bond. They test the commitment of the person.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Ries to the light. Right. Well, it can be addictive, but it's not good for long-term relationships. I mean, that characteristic, and there is a stable personality characteristic. It goes under different names, anxiety, neuroticism, emotional lability, et cetera. But that's the single personality characteristic that is most predictive of breakups and divorces. And in studies that I've done predictive of conflict in couples, people who are emotionally unstable, they just get into a lot of conflict with their partner. They create havoc. Now, that can be exciting, but bad for long-term happiness.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I don't know. I think that. I've seen, and this was another topic that I have studied intimate partner violence and some of the nastier stuff that goes on within relationships. And I think that When this nasty stuff happens, sometimes it's asymmetrical, but sometimes it's symmetrical in the sense that they get into these downward spirals where one is insulting the other or even with physical violence, one starts pushing the other, shoving the other, hitting the other, and then the other hits back. And so you get into these cycles. And so coming at one point in time, you know, in this case of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, years later and trying to disentangle what actually went on in their relationship, I don't feel qualified even to do that.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Yeah, well, it can bring out road rage. And also there's this, I don't know, when you're in the vehicle, you have this shell around you. And so there's this feeling that you are protected from.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Yeah, yeah. And so some elements of masculinity, the unmitigated masculinity is, I think, terrible. I was actually walking around downtown Austin earlier today. I'll give you this example. And this guy was, I guess, stuck and wanted the car ahead of him to move. And all of a sudden he screamed out of his move, you fucking car and then jumped out of his car to a place. To me, that's toxic masculinity, if you will. We don't need that, you know.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I've seen enough different relationships work and I've seen enough relationships implode to say there's no there's not one size fits all on these things. So even with respect to masculinity and femininity, some reduce psychologically to two other terms which are agency and communion. So where agency is, you know, are you instrumental, goal-oriented, get tasks done, et cetera, communion is more the love and forming connections with other people and so forth. And I published a study a while back on what's called unmitigated agency and unmitigated communion. So there are like good and bad aspects of agency and communion.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “It's like a spontaneous assessment of formidability. And it also that information is critical because that means like who you should not challenge or who you can challenge with punity. And there's functionality to submitting as well because you defer to someone so that you don't get vanquished and you live to see another day. So I think we actually have a very rich psychology of status hierarchies and dominance and submissiveness.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “One advantage of the status hierarchies is that you're not always battling. So you determine, and that's why, and here's another sexually dimorphic aspect of our psychology, formidability assessment. So there's evidence that males engage in this, you know, can I take this guy or can he take me? And it's like a”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Doesn't always work out well, but those who are presumably wise or good effective leaders, and even talk about, and I'm sure you're familiar with this, and I'm not an expert on this, but wartime leaders versus peacetime leaders. And so, again, it depends on what the goal is of the group that you are a part of. And so I think there is functionality and utility to a lot of our evolved psychology of status and dominance and submissiveness. So, for example, and you have to look at the individual psychology, and this is actually something I'm currently studying, again, with Patrick Durkee, where”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I'm personally in favor of equality on that dimension within a romantic relationship and I don't talk about my personal life, but I've been in relationships and the best ones tend to be those where there's equality. And one person does not dominate the other. I guess what I was, the reason I ask you is in what type of relationships, because there are some things like coalitions where hierarchy is very important to the function of the coalition. So it's like if you're like a war coalition or something in small group warfare, you can't just have equality. You have to have leaders that are determining the battle plan, so to speak. And so, if you have you're attacking a neighboring group or something and everyone gets an equal say, it's not going to work that way. And so we tend to appoint as leaders those who are”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yeah, well, I think what's missing from. Becca's analysis is, you know, I mean, it's a fascinating book to read denial of death, but what's missing is that I think that the reason And again, I think it's more men than women. I think there's a sex difference on this that men want to build a lasting legacy because that will in turn affect their lineage. And although I do now, Woody Allen is out of favor, but I remember this quote from him. He said, he said he didn't want to achieve immortality through his work. He wanted to achieve immortality by not dying.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Their friends, their grandmother, their kin, or whatever to claw their way up to the top of status hierarchy, women, much less so women spend more effort maintaining relationships with their kin, with their friends, their friend networks and so forth. And so in a way you could say, not only are men in positions of power more than women, now you're blaming women for why they are. And it's not a matter of blame, but I think that what I just outlined is an essential part of the causal process, the coevolution of women's mate preferences with men's motivational priorities.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's not by chance that most of them are men. And this is going to sound strange and hopefully not offensive to people. But if you ask the question, why is it the case that men are in positions of power so much more so than women? Well, in part, it can be traced to women's mate preferences. So it's one of the sex differences that women have over-evolutionary time, preferred men who had power, status, resources, etc. And what that has done is it's created selection pressure on men to attach a high motivational priority to clawing their way up the status hierarchy. And studies of time allocation distribution show this, where men are more willing to sacrifice.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, but I would say that the interesting thing about wealth is that it's an infinitely fungible resource. So you can use it and translate it into many, many other things, like buying Twitter or buying a big house or even getting mates or an artificial in the, I don't know if you want to get into that at all, but they have these sex dolls or virtual reality sex that some people are developing. If you have enough resources, you can purchase things like that. So you can translate wealth into a variety of other tangible things in ways that you couldn't ancestrally.”

    2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source