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

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. Well, David, delighted to be here. Excited to ask you a number of questions about these super interesting topics about how people select mates. Just to start off, um perhaps you could just orient us a little bit um about mate choice. You know, some of the primary criteria that studies show men and women use in order to select mates, transient mates as well as um lifetime mates. Right. 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. I wonder if we can maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework for understanding mate choice. >> 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 it deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage. And he identified two causal processes by which mating advantage could occur. 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. And so, you see evolution, which is change over time, and increase in frequency of the characteristics associated with winning these what Darwin called contest competition. And we know that the logic of that is more general now, and involves things like in our species competing for position and status hierarchies. But the second, most relevant to your question about mate choice, is preferential mate choice. 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. Those lacking desired qualities get banished, shunned, ignored, or in the modern environment become incels. The logic there is very simple, but also very powerful. And that is that uh whatever qualities are desired, consensually desired, if there's some heritable basis to those, then those increase in frequency over time. And in in the human case, these two causal processes of sexual selection are related to each other in that the preferences of the mate preferences of one sex basically set the ground rules for competition in the opposite sex. So, if for example, hypothetically, women uh preferred to mate with men who were able and willing to devote resources to them, then that would create competition um among men to claw their way, you know, and beat out other men in resource acquisition and then displaying that their willingness to commit that to a particular woman. So, that's sort of a little bit of theoretical backdrop. Uh so, you asked, "Well, what are the qualities that men and women desire?" And maybe we'll start with uh long-term mating and then shift to short-term mating. 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, but basically what we found is three clusters of things. 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, and then we found some attributes that were highly variable across cultures in whether people found these as desirable or indispensable or irrelevant. So, if you talk about universal desires, the things that men and women share, things like intelligence, uh kindness, uh mutual attraction and love, uh good health, dependability, emotional stability, although there's a bit of a sex difference there, with women preferring it a bit more than men. So, you go to anywhere in the world and these are qualities that people universally desire in long-term mates. Sex differences. So, sex differences basically fell into two clusters. So, women more than men prioritized good earning capacity, um slightly older age, uh and the qualities associated with resource acquisition. So, the these are things like a man's social status. Uh does he have drive? Is he ambitious? Um uh does he have a good long-term resource trajectory is one way that I like to phrase it, because women often they don't look at necessarily um uh the resources that a guy possesses at this moment, but what is his trajectory? Women attend to the attention structure. So, um the attention structure is a key determinant of status. So, the people who are high in status are those to whom the most people pay the most attention. Hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals, or is he in an existential crisis, not knowing what he's going to do with his life? Also, women use uh what's called in the literature mate choice copying. So, we've done studies where you just take a guy, photograph him alone, uh 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 there's if there are he's paired with women. 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. Women bear the the burdens of the 9-month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive, as well as creating opportunity costs in terms of mobility and and solving other tasks that people need to solve in the course of their lives. And so, uh 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, uh because um it uh and the the benefits, correspondingly, of making a wise mate choice are higher for women in the sexual context. Um but as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species, and so, what do men value more than women? Uh physical attractiveness. 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, uh her reproductive value. Now, not that men think about that consciously. I mean, you 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." They just find those cues attractive. We know now, based on the last 20 years of scientific uh studies that the cues that men find attractive women are not at all arbitrary. Things like clear skin, clear eyes, symmetrical features, uh a a low waist-to-hip ratio, uh full lips, lustrous hair. All these are qualities that are associated with youth and health and hence have have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness. And so it's not just that men are these superficial creatures who evaluate women on the basis of appearance. There There is an underlying logic to why they do so. Um and as I said, relative youth, this this age thing is one of the largest sex differences you find in long-term mate selection, with women preferring somewhat older men and men preferring somewhat younger women. 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. 35-year-old man might prefer woman who's in her late 20s or early 30s. Uh 50-year-old man might prefer a woman who's say 35 to 38. So, marriage and long-term mating are uh things other than reproductive unions in the modern environment. And if you get too large an age gap, then essentially you're in different cultures. And if the cultural gap gets too large, you don't understand each other. Could you tell us about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling in communicating some of the things around mate choice selection? Yeah, well, so basically the both men and women do deceive. Um so we have uh the modern cultural invention of online dating. People do lie, but they lie in predictable ways. They lie in ways that attempt to embody the mate preferences of the person they're trying to attract. Both sexes post photos that are not truly representative of what they actually look like. So they might post photos of themselves when they were younger or they're even advice um uh tips on how to create the best selfie of the best angle that will maximally, you know, enhance what you look like. What happens with internet dating is that the physic the photograph tends to overwhelm all the other cues and all the other cues are written statements and we weren't really evolved to process written statements um but we were evolved to respond to physical cues and men tend to attend to the visual cues much more than women. So, women in their mate selection, they have olfactory cues. So, what does the guy sound like? His vocal qualities. Uh uh that's uh auditory cues. Uh but olfactory cues, what does he smell like? If the guy doesn't smell right, even if he embodies all these other qualities women want, that's a deal breaker. Uh and 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 and and then of course some qualities you can't assess even with a with a half hour interaction. You can tell a lot, but things like emotional stability, which is absolutely critical in long-term mating, uh is to do something like go on a trip together. Take take a vacation and where you're even in a unfamiliar environment where you're you have to cope with things that you're not familiar with and one of the hallmarks of emotional instability is uh how they respond to stress. And so, this is the sort of information you can't get on a coffee date. You know, you can only get by assessing it over time. You said 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. The overt display that hey, I'm interested in just a short-term hookup. I'm interested in sex, so I want to have sex right now. Uh let's just go back to my apartment. These are very ineffective tactics. 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. And I think that's probably an evolutionarily uh recurrent form of deception that women have defenses against. We talked a little bit about mate choice. But um in terms of sexual partner choice, are there is there are there any good studies exploring what people are selecting for? We know uh something about how the preferences for a sex partner differ from preference for a long-term mate. Uh there is overlap uh of course, but uh one thing is um physical appearance. So, physical appearance for women becomes more important in short-term mating. So, those physical attributes are more important for women. Um they are 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 uh if it's low commitment, low risk, uh just sex, um you know, without entangling commitments. Women are more likely to prioritize um what I call a bad boy qualities, guys who are a little arrogant, guys who are risk-taking. Women are more attracted to those guys in short-term mating than long-term mating. Whereas in long-term mating, they go more for the good dad qualities. Is this guy dependable? Is he going to be a good father to my children? In short-term mating, women use that mate copying um uh heuristic that is uh if there are thousands of other women who find him attractive, women find him attractive. And so, that's why you have the groupie phenomenon. 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 showed the thousands of women screaming uh at him, they judge him entirely differently. This is just an illustration of how circumstance-dependent women's attract mate attraction is for guys. It depends on, you know, his his status, the number of women that are attracted to him, uh the attention structure, is he how how he interacts with a puppy. Whereas for men, it almost doesn't matter. You know, context is more irrelevant. They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues that the woman is displaying and context be damned. What's known about jealousy in men versus women? And I mean, we hear, or I've heard at some point that uh a large fraction of homicides are the consequence of jealous lovers. Um that's the darkest angle of all this, but um in evolutionary psychology context, uh what is jealousy? Jealousy is an evolved emotion that serves several adaptive functions, okay? Uh once you have long-term mating, you need a uh a defense to prevent or preserve the investment that you've made and are making in long-term mateship. And so, jealousy serves this um mate guarding function, if you will, or mate retention function. And so, jealousy gets activated when there are threats to that romantic relationship. The threats come from many sources. So, they could be you detect cues to your partner's infidelity or cues of uh lack of an emotional distance between you and your partner. So, that's one set of cues. Uh but then there's another set of interested mate poachers. So, you know, if you're mated to someone who's desirable, um which many people are, other people still desire them. So, jealousy motivates people to be attentive to potential mate poachers, even if there are no mate poachers and no cues to infidelity. If um a mate value discrepancy opens up in a relationship. So, colloquially people say things like um he's not good enough for you, you know, or I think you you could do better. Um so, people I mean, implicitly have a notion of relative mate value and discrepancies therein. Okay, but discrepancies can open up where none previously existed. 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. But you go 6 months, 8 months, people start having problems. Or someone's career takes off. Let's say a woman becomes um a famous singer or actress or or or a man does. Uh career takes off. All of a sudden there's a mate value discrepancy where you have access to a larger pool of potential mates and higher mate value potential mates. So, so people are attentive to mate value discrepancies 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 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. And then what people do about it depends on what their options are. And people do things that I in my published scientific work I say range from vigilance to violence. And that can include stalking, following, hacking into iPhones or computers, um um monitoring, um the behavior of mate poachers, looking at eye contact between other men and your partner. Uh there's a whole suite of things that you know, involve is involved in in vigilance. And then at the other extreme is violence. In America, something like 28 to 30% of all people who are married will experience intimate partner violence in their in their relationship. So, it's not a trivial percentage. >> Could you tell us about the dark triad? Yeah. So, the dark triad, so we've been talking about sex differences on average, but there are critical within sex individual differences. And the dark triad is one of the most important ones. The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics. So, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. If you combine these qualities, you have some very bad dudes. And I say bad dudes cuz men tend to score higher in these things than women. Why is this important? Well, it's important in the mating context because uh those who are high on dark triad traits tend to be uh uh sexual deceivers for one. So, they're very often very charming, uh very good at seducing women and then abandoning them. They're very good at um at the art of seduction. Uh they are also tend to be serial sexual harassers and sexual coercers. And so, if you combine dark dark triad traits with the dispositional pursuit of a short-term mating strategy, that's an especially deadly combination. That's when you get sexual harassment, sexual coercion. It's a subset of men who commit the vast majority of these acts of sexual violence. You mentioned stalking briefly. Maybe we could just talk about some of the less known features about stalking. I I think I once heard you give a lecture where you said that um one of the scariest things about stalking is that sometimes it works. Yes. Yeah. So, well, stalking um has multiple motivations, but one of the most frequent motivations is uh a mating motivation where either the uh there's a breakup and the woman dumps the guy and the guy doesn't want to get dumped. He wants to maintain a relationship with her. And I should say that in when it comes to criminal stalking, there's a huge sex difference. About 80% of the stalkers tend to be men, about 20% women. So, there's So, there are women stalkers, but they're um um you know, about a fourth the number compared to to men. 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 or and/or to interfere with her future mating prospects. Uh and it works in in some of the time in two senses. One is it does interfere with her attempts to remate. So, in fact, it scares off some guys. So, like you show up and pick up a her apartment for a date and her her ex is sitting out there glaring at you. And 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 mate of equivalent mate value. Uh or or in some cases in any mate. You know, it's like, well, she she was with me once, maybe she I can get her back with me again. And the another thing we found, we did a study of 2,500 victims of stalking. This is with Josh Duntley, a former student of mine who's now a professor in a criminology department. And what we found is there were large sex diff- large differences between the stalker and the victim of the stalker where where the stalker tends to be much lower in mate value uh than the victim. And so basically the it's typically the woman who realizes she can do a lot better on the mating market and the guy realizes uh I am never going to be able to replace her uh with a with a woman of equivalent mate value. And so I'm going to use this last-ditch desperate measure to try to get her back. And occasionally it works. 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. Is there anything interesting about uh that uh about childhood attachment strategies vis-à-vis stability of long-term partner choice, or is that too big of a leap for us to make here? Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer some sort of informed speculation uh about it. You know, a secure attachment style, if both partners have a secure attachment style, that's conducive to a long-term mateship. Um avoidant uh attachment styles, avoidant people tend to uh have more difficulty with intimacy and also higher probability of infidelity. Um and um anxious attachment style, uh I I don't know, can uh create problems of its own, you know, in the overly clingy, dependent, you know, absorbing, what what I call high relationship load. What is the baggage that someone brings to the relationship? How should one frame all this? So I imagine a number of people listening are in relationships or or would would hope to be in a relationship. Um you know, in terms of understanding what we are selecting for consciously or subconsciously, um it seems like there are common themes. It's uh people want to feel um attractive and attracted. Um uh people want to make sure that there's stability of the relationship. So, when we hear about security, often times I think of this kind of warm oxytocin serotonin uh like thing, but but this mate value and seems so powerful in all this, assessing mate value. So, how objective are people about assessing their own um value in terms of finding securing and over time maintaining a relationship. Securing is dynamic because people age at different rates. >> Right. Um Is there a uh uh an objective metric of this stuff? I guess you get a lot of statistics about somebody's image. And you find come up with a val an average value based on the population. But how should people assess themselves because it seems like one of the features that would be very powerful for leading to happiness uh of good partner selection with that stable would be to be very honest with oneself. And how does one do that? A couple things. So, one is that I think people are generally pretty good at self-assessing mate value. Um and even uh self-esteem has been hypothesized to be one internal uh monitoring device that tracks mate value. So, we get a promotion at work or we get a rise in status, we feel an elevated sense of self-esteem. We get fired, we get rejected, we get ostracized, our self-esteem plummets. So, um so, our self-evaluation I think does track mate value to some extent. There are people who overestimate their mate value. People high on narcissism are particular in particular and some people underestimate their mate value. Another important element is that there's consensual mate value. So that is if you ask the group of 100 people, you know, there's 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 the other 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. So there are these individual differences in components of mate value, which is good cuz 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. So so both are important, the consensual aspects and the individually different differentiated components of mate value. Um but in terms of accuracy of assessment, it it's there are no no good measures scientifically to do this because it's a very complicated endeavor to assess accurately. But I think people have a good intuitive sense of people's relative mate value, especially if you've you're in a group and you've been able to interact with them for a long time 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. I I find the work that you do incredibly interesting. I think this field of evolutionary psychology is fascinating and and I hope I'll get I said it before but I'll say it again. I feel like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are are nudging towards one another. Yeah. >> you're absolutely right and and I think it it will happen. I think it's starting to happen and and it will happen because getting at the neuroscience is getting at the underlying mechanisms that are driving the process. So, you know, what an evolutionary perspective brings to bear is is evolved function and ultimate explanation, 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. I'm certain that people are going to want to learn more about your work. Certainly, we will give them links to your social media and other sites. You've written a tremendous number of really interesting books. Um 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. Sure. Uh okay, so well, my most recent book is is called when men behave badly, the hidden roots of sexual deception, harassment, and assault. And that book deals with conflict between the sexes, sexual conflict. And so, it deals with um uh both in what what what what I call mating market conflicts, some of the topics we've been talking about deception in internet dating and things like that. Second is conflict that occurs within mating relationships of the sort that we've been talking about as well, financial infidelity, emotional infidelity, sexual infidelity, coping with conflict within a relationship. And I actually have some suggestions for strategies for coping with conflict within a relationship, coping in the after dealing with the aftermath of breakups. So often there's an asymmetry, one person wants to break up, the other doesn't. So, I talk about coping in the aftermath. 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, um stalking, sexual harassment, sexual coercion. So, that's what that book's about and I think it um, you know, it's gotten well reviewed and people find it very useful in understanding what is otherwise, uh, a lot of baffling phenomena. You know, why do men and women seem at odds with each other in so many domains? Why do some of these recurrent forms of sexual conflict occur? So, that's what that book's about. Uh, my previous books on my my first book, which I've had the good fortune to be able to revise a couple times, uh, deals more broadly with human mating strategies. It's called The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and gives people a broad overview of what people want in a mate, uh, tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention, uh, and so forth throughout the whole mating process, serial mating, causes of divorce, and so forth. Uh, and then, um, even more broadly, I have a textbook called Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, which, uh, is in its sixth edition right now and it's it's the most widely used textbook in evolutionary psychology around, uh, North America and Europe and and and actually it's been translated even into Arabic and other countries. So, that deals somewhat with mating, but also deals with survival problems, our evolved fears and phobias, uh, uh, issues about kin and family, extended family, friendships, social hierarchies, status hierarchies, um, uh, warfare and other topics. So, the Evolutionary Psychology textbook is the broadest book and then maybe the second broadest is The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mi- uh, mating and then for those interested in conflict between the sexes, the latest book, When Men Behave Badly. Fantastic. Uh, I love your work. I I'm so grateful for the clarity and depth and rigor with which you do it and you and you convey it to us. I know um I speak for many people when I I just want to say thank you. This is a tremendously informative conversation.