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David Buss
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- 2022-05-04
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- 2022-05-04
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“Number of people. Yeah. And this is one of the interesting things about the fact that cash economies are evolutionarily very recent in that people are like, so I guess recently or it's about to happen that Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter. Has it Okay, so they say the wealthiest or one of the wealthiest men on earth has now purchased the most influential media platform on earth. And so obviously you or I couldn't compete with Elon Musk for the purchase of Twitter. And so the fact that cash economies allow the stockpiling of unprecedented amounts of wealth. Produces these tremendous power differentials that didn't exist over most of human evolutionary history.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trustworthiness. They value intelligence, wisdom, knowledge. So even if you go across cultures even to the small scale cultures that we alluded to earlier, there are these wise people, wise men, wise women in the culture who have people go to for advice, for wisdom. And so having a wide range of knowledge is a universal status criterion. There's some things that are sex differentiated, and they often fall into the mating domain as well. This is where mating and status are interestingly related to each other in that successful mating increases your status, but having high status also gives you access to more desirable mates.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it matters because status influences your access to resources and your ability to influence other people within your group. And so this is part of the reason why women Prioritize a man's social status, how he is viewed in the eyes of others, because high status men have access to more resources. It's interesting that you ask about that because I've just published, this is with Patrick Durkee, a former graduate student of mine. We published a couple papers on precisely this issue where we looked at what we call human status criteria. That is, what are the things that lead to increases or decreases in status? And we did this in 14 different cultures. And we found some things that are universal, but also some things that are sex differentiated. And so universal things like people value”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's part of it. But I think another part has to do with, in that case, male coalitions. So we're in an intense, this is another unique characteristic. I don't know if you got into this with Richard Rangham. I don't remember you talking about this, but he's written a lot about male coalitionary psychology and humans cooperate to an extraordinary degree in forming coalitions for the purpose of competing with rival coalitions. And so you even see this with, well, you see it in the sports arenas with team sports, where this team wears a different uniform. They have different mascot, et cetera. And so part of that is male coalitionary psychology.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she tried to argue basically for the infinite malleability of things like gender and gender rules and so forth. And she said, look at this culture. In this culture, it's the men who paint their face. Whereas, you know, in Western cultures, it's the women who wear makeup and so forth. Well, it turns out if you look carefully at the culture where men paint their face, they're painting war paint on their face. They're not putting on makeup to enhance their cues to youth and cues to health. They're putting on war paint to make themselves more ferocious or to demarcate what tribe they're in, what coalition they're in. And so at sort of one level abstraction, you could say, well, there's high cultural variability and application of face paint. But on another level, there's really a fundamental functional difference in”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at the phenomenon. So, quick analogy, language. So you say, well, in China, they speak Chinese. In Korea, they speak Korean. In Brazil, they speak Portuguese. They say, look how culturally infinitely variable languages are, which they are at that level. But do humans have a universal human innate grammar? And I think the evidence points to the answer yes to that, at least That's what Steve Pink or Paul Bloom and some other others argue. So at one level of abstraction, things are infinitely culturally variable or at least highly culturally variable. At another level of abstraction, there's universality. So here's one example in the mating domain of this. So Margaret Meade, who is a famous anthropologist, studied the Samoan Island.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a political advocate. And so I adhere to the empirical data on empirical data are very strong in these domains. So with respect to sex differences in the mating domain and sexuality and things we haven't even talked about, like desire for sexual variety and sex differences in the whole desire for short-term mating, huge sex differences there. And these have been documented universally in all cultures. So, okay, now are there things that are culture specific or social cultural overlays onto these fundamental psychological sex differences? Absolutely. There's also an issue of levels of analysis, levels of abstraction, and how closely you”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally present in one sex and totally absent in the other. So there's overlap in the distributions. So I mentioned earlier that in the mating domain, men more than women on average prioritize physical appearance, physical attractiveness, relative youth. Women on average prioritize resources, resource acquisition, qualities that lead to resource acquisition like status, ambition, industriousness, and so forth. But there's overlap in the distribution. So some women place the total priority on how physically attractive the guy is and some men view that as irrelevant. And so the point that I'm making is that there are psychological sex differences that make some people uncomfortable. But, you know, it's one of these things where a scientist.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sex difference is, if you ask in what domains are the sex differences the largest, it turns out they occur within the domain of mating and sexuality. So our evolved sexual psychology, our evolved mating psychology is to some degree sexually dimorphic. With the very important asterisk that we're talking about overlapping distributions. So there are some things that, so if you look at human morphology, we talked about breasts earlier. Women have evolved functional breasts as functional for lactation. Men don't. So there's no amount of culture or social coercion can cause men to have lactating breasts. Psychologically, we don't see dimorphism that extreme where something is”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know magnitude of effects, it's an effect size of more than a standard deviation, difference between the means on this psychological sex difference. And so one of the interesting things is if you go to places like go to the most gender egalitarian cultures in the world, so places like Sweden or Norway, which are explicitly gender egalitarian and are truly in many, many ways, but you allow people freedom of choice. Some of these sex differences actually get larger. The psychological sex differences and also assortment into different occupational choices. But this is not something that I... Study, I study mating”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get to the issue of sex and gender. I mean, one cut at your question is, are there universal psychological sex differences? And the answer to that question is yes, there are some. So for example, well, and this is in one of your areas of specialty engineering, one of the interesting things is that It's called the people's thing dimension. So do you want an occupation? Do you want a job that involves people, social interaction? Or are you happy with a job that just involves things, mechanical objects or computer code or whatever? And this is one of the largest psychological sex differences that exists. And it's true in every culture. So in terms of”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that I phrase it, so I don't like sort of dividing the world into two categories, things that are biological versus things that are not biological. So biology is actually defined as the study of life and life processes. And so at that sort of abstract level, everything we do is biological, including culture and our capacity for culture, which I think is an evolved capacity that humans have.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. It's a great town. I was glad that I left and experienced, well, both coasts and also the Midwest, but happy to be back in Austin.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I got my undergraduate degree here and then left for 20 years and migrated around, so went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley for my PhD, Harvard for my first job, University of Michigan. And then a job opened up at University of Texas for an evolutionary psychologist. They wanted me, fortunately, so I was very happy to. So I've always loved Austin. I mean, it's.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fell in love with the city because it's a great move. And yeah, I've lived on both coasts as well, Boston area and then Berkeley, California. So I'm familiar with both.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, an inaccurate perception of how thin men desire women to be. And I think that's partly exacerbated by the fashion industry where the models are often rail thin and The lore is that clothes hang better on thin models and then on TV. They say you gain 15 pounds over what you really are or whatever for whatever reason women misperceive how thin men want them to be. And so you have, this is another huge sex difference, is eating disorders. Anorexia, for example, bulimia, binging, purging, where these eating disorders are nine to ten times more common in women than in men.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's just one other interesting empirical finding on that, and it has to do with another dimension that I think is harmful, and that's the thinness dimension. And so these are studies originally done by Paul Rosen, but they've been replicated, where if you ask men, okay, what is your ideal figure in a woman? And so they have these, say, nine figures that vary from very, very thin to average to plump, men give it the midpoint. They say the midpoint is relative thinness or plumpness is what I value. And you ask women, what is your ideal body type for you? They give it, they say thinner, but then if you ask them, what do you think males ideal body type is, they put it in exactly the same spot that they put their own ideal witches thin. And so there's actually”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“elevating the importance they attach to physical appearance. And then as you point out, the tremendous objectification that saturates social media and media in general is damaging and harmful. I don't know how to undo it though. I don't know how to design a society that undoes that.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Photographed or Photoshopped, they're highly selected and not at all representative. And so women compare themselves to that. So I think this social comparison is an evolved feature of humans. I mean, males do it, females do it, but it's exacerbated in the modern environment and wildly evolutionarily mismatched ways. And so I think that it is destructive. It's harmful. There's evidence that it hurts women's self-esteem. So here's just another factoid or fact, if you will, that at least in Western cultures, males and females have roughly the same overall average levels of self-esteem. But once puberty hits, all of a sudden women's self esteem starts to drop. And I think it's because when they enter make competition, then they start.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he says, don't read beauty magazines that will only make you feel ugly. And I think that there's truth to that. That is, especially with women, they look at all these images. And, you know, of course, they're...”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the mating domain. And so I think that, and there's actually evidence on this that Baz Luhrman actually said something like this in his sunscreen song. I don't know if you've ever heard that, but it's like I said, it's wonderful string of advice song about advice. But he says,”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple thoughts on that. I think it is damaging. The fact that so many images are displayed in social media. And so what I would say is that there's what's called in the field an evolutionary mismatch. So we evolved in the context of small group living where there was make competition, but your competitors were a small number of other potential individuals. And so people do comparisons. But now what we have is this bombardment of our visual system and our sexual psychology and our mating psychology with thousands and thousands of images that are not at all representative of who our actual competition is.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fashion tends to be linked with status, and that's why it constantly changes. The high status people start wearing a certain type of clothing. And then when the lower status people imitate them, then they have to shift to signal their status. And so I think the fashion and clothing is important linked to status.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there are a few things. So, one is The sort of arbitrary features of fashion, and then the other is the aspects of fashion that attempt to Magnify what is inherent in our evolved standards of beauty. So, for example, women tend to wear things that accentuate their waist tip ratio. So, I mean, historically in the old days, courses, for example, cinched the woman's waist. And you wouldn't see fashion develop in a way that made a woman seem old unhealthy, pockmarked signs of open source or lesion. There are certain domains, design spaces that you wouldn't, that no culture would develop. But there are arbitrary features, but sometimes they're not entirely arbitrary, or they're arbitrary at one level of description, but not at another. So, for example,”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difference between difference in morphology between males and females. Diming to morphic morphology. So, and women don't develop breasts until puberty or post-puberty. And so as a sexually dimorphic characteristic, we tend to be attracted to that. Same is true, by the way, with the waist to hip ratio that we mentioned earlier. Prior to puberty, males and females have very similar waist to ratios, but at puberty there's a differential hip development and fat deposition that creates a sexual dimorphism with respect to waist abratio. And so again, that's men are attracted to this waste ratio that no men consciously says that. They find this woman more attractive than that woman. They don't think, ah, she has a waste ratio of 0.70, that sort of thing.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think it's a cultural quirk because I think it's the shape that matters a lot because shape is going to be a huge fertility. And so one of the things that humans are attracted to in the opposite sex is sexually dimorphic features and breasts are sexually dimorphic feature.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my guess is it's something that's perhaps a quirk of culture or something that is evolutionarily recent. But I don't know. I mean, that's a topic that hasn't been explored much. I've never done work on it.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, no, nothing that I've seen there. You know, I think that there's individual variability. So this is something that comes up again, you know, when I ask women in my classes, you know, what do women want? Some will say, a large penis. But I think there's variability in that preference. And it also might depend in part on the variability in the woman's anatomy.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bodies of other people. And so, for example, they store it in their friends. So, you know, hunting success is, you know, it's a hit or miss kind of thing. So you might come back empty-handed four times out of five, but when you do, you share your meat with others. And then when they reciprocate by sharing their meat with you. And so you can store resources in the bodies of other people, which is, I think, an interesting way to think about it. But that can only go so far. And when you have cash economies, you have both the ability to stockpile resources, but also this kind of explosion and inequality of resources. And that's evolutionarily recent.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's resources. Now, what's interesting about modern culture is we have cash economies, but cash economies are relatively recent. And historically, there's over the vast 99% of human evolutionary history, you weren't able to stockpile resources in the way that you are today. Although there are interestingly certain ways you can do it. So you kill a large game animal, you bring it back, you get some status points because you give some to your family, you can share it more widely with the group, etc. But it's going to go bad, right? You can't just say, I'm going to keep this carcass around for the next several months. And I think it's Steve Pinker who might have used coined this phrase that they store the meat in”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, wealth is resources have always been important, especially to women. So is a man able to acquire resources and is he willing to dispense them to her and her kids? So that's always important. In traditional cultures, that boils down to hunting skills. So I asked a colleague, friend Kim Hill, who's probably the world's leading expert on the Aceh of Paraguay. And you ask him, like, what leads to high status in the Aceh in males hunting skills?”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that women. Might interpret a guy who is so obsessed with his body that they might view that as a sign of daunt narcissism. And that's not a good trait.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terms of physical appearance. A good shoulder to hip ratio, so relatively wide shoulders relative to hips is one. Women tend to prefer men who are physically fit and well toned but not muscle bound. So like if you go to, I don't know, someone like those early when Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing the Mr. whatever it was contest women don't find those attractive the extremely muscle bound guys They like a guy who's physically fit, high shouldered hip ratio. They like guys who are physically taller than they are and guys who are a bit above average in height. So if the average, so if the average is, I don't know, five, nine, five ten and out there for humans, depending on the culture, women prefer an inch or two taller than that.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It becomes cost inflicting or becomes sufficiently debilitated or who suffers an injury such that like in a hunter-gatherer societies where the mate can no longer hunt, can no longer provide resources for their kids and the woman, this becomes a problem. And so I think that we have adaptations to mate switch and to divest ourselves from some partners and trade up in the mating market under certain conditions.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that's a No, that raises an interesting set of questions. So I think that one issue is longevity. So, I mean, we didn't live to be 70, 80 years old in over 99% of human evolutionary history. And so we didn't necessarily evolve to be mated monogamously with one person for decades and decades and decades. But I also think that Long-term peer bonding is a critical strategy, but mate switching is also a critical strategy. So if you have a mate, for example, who”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's bad engineering. And so I developed an alternative hypothesis that I call the mate switching hypothesis, which is that affairs are one way in which women divest themselves of a cost inflicting partner or a partner who things aren't working out well with, and it's a way to either transition back into the mating market or to trade up in the mating market. And so anyway, so these are probably the two leading hypotheses about why women have affairs. And I am putting my money on the mate switching hypothesis. My esteemed colleagues are putting their money on the good genes hypothesis. But I think the evidence for the good genes hypothesis is starting to look shakier than initially.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Or more in contrast to men, where it's more like 30% of men who have affairs fall in love with or become attached to a fear partner. But from a design perspective, an engineering perspective, if you will, that's a disastrous thing if you're just trying to get good genes. So you're trying to retain the investment of one guy. While getting good Jean's surreptitiously from this, you know, guy who presumably has one, falling in love with him, becoming attached, that's not a feature you want.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of some other findings. So for women, a lot of short-term mating is not one night stand mating, but rather it's a fair mating. So if you ask the question, why do women have affairs? So let's restrict the question for the moment. My colleagues would argue well, women have affairs because they're trying to get good genes from one guy while they're getting investment from the regular partner, the husband. But the problem is that when women have affairs, 70 plus percent tend to fall in love with or become attached to their affair partner.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be a lot more additions coming. I revised it every four years or so because there's four years of new interesting work. And so it deserves updating. But the traditional, I should say, Answer to your question is that women go for good genes cues to good genes in the short term and cues to resources in the long term. And this has been a hypothesis that I didn't come up with this one by Steve Gangisted, a former student of mine, Marty Halton, Randy Thornhill, and some other very smart players in the field. And what they used is markers of good genes or things like symmetrical features and masculine features. So strong jawline, high shoulder to hip ratio. Other sorts of masculine features. But I started to doubt this explanation for what women want in the short term.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so but you're also asking a very interesting question about what is controversial within the evolutionary psychology field and not totally resolved.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so for short term mating, For both sexes, physical appearance looms very large. So women are, no, physical attractiveness and appearance, they're important for women in long-term mate selection. So I don't want to mislead anyone on that. They're just not as important as they are for men. And so a lot of characteristics come for women before physical appearance, physical attractiveness.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And there are cues that are probabilistically related to this underlying quality of fertility that we can't observe directly.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Men are much more inclined to fall in love at first sight. That's because they prioritize physical appearance. Why? Because physical appearance provides that this wealth of information about a woman's fertility status, and this is from an evolutionary perspective from a purely reproductive perspective in business school, they would call it job one. Job one is you have to select a fertile mate. So those who in our evolutionary past who selected infertile mates, so postmenopausal women for example, did not become our ancestors. So we are all the descendants of this long and unbroken chain of ancestors who, all of whom succeeded in selecting a fertile mate. But fertility cannot be observed directly.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in long term mates selection, there's a lot of overlap. So things like intelligence, good health, sense of humor, an agreeable personality, someone who's not too neurotic or moody or emotionally volatile. But there are key differences as well. And the differences stem from, they basically fall in the delimited number of domains. So for men, It's physical attractiveness, physical appearance, and youth are the two real big ones. Men prioritize those more than women do. And so that's why you have phenomena such as this, quote, love at first sight, where sometimes men can walk into a party and they see a woman across the room and say that I'm going to marry that woman. That's the woman for me. Women very rarely do that. Most men do not do that either.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right, and more so for women than for men. So then I turned to the men and I say, well, what do men want? And then I run out of space after about a blackboard and a half because they can't think of anything else.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say you want a mate who say generous with their resources, and they say, Yes, I want to make generous. So I said, so like a guy who, and this is in women's maize lecture, and a guy who at the end of every month gets his paycheck and gives it to the local Wino on the dragon. I said, well, no, not that generous. Generous toward me, not indiscriminately generous. And so. You want a mate who's ambitious, you know, who's a hard worker. Yes, but not a workaholic. And so then you get to interactions among different characteristics.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one way to put it. Yeah So, I teach a course in human sexuality at University of Texas at Austin. And one of the things, this is back in the days when there were chalkboards and you taught with a piece of chalk and wrote things on the board. And what I would do is I would ask the class, I teach the large class, one to 200, I'd say, what do women want? Tell me all the things women want in a long-term mate. And so I would start at one end of the blackboard. There were like five blackboards. And they say, well, I want a mate who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values. And I just go, and I fill five blackboards and then run out of space. And so the first large number of characteristics that people want. And then specific magnitudes of those characteristics or amounts.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wonderful question to answer it, though. I have to distinguish between long-term mating and short-term mating. And in long-term mating, it gets very complicated. So,”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a couple different hypotheses about it, but the one that I think is most plausible is that Again, comparing it to chimps. FEMA goes into Estris, the male just has to try to monopolize her while she's in that estris phase, and then they basically ignore the females after that. If you can't know when a woman is fertile, then you have to stick around a lot longer. And so I think long-term pair bonding co-evolved with concealed ovulation. And with that, also a very different form of sexuality, which is that we have sex throughout the ovulatory cycle. And chimps don't. There's a little bit of mating, a little bit of sex toward the edges of the estracycle, but very little.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In humans we have, and this was actually a third thing that I wanted to add earlier, we have concealed ovulation, okay, relatively concealed ovulation, which is remarkable given how close we are primatologically to chimpanzees. And so there's a little bit of evidence that there are subtle changes that occur when women ovulate non women not on hormonal contraceptives.”
2022-05-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source