Modern Wisdom - #319 - David Buss - The Hidden Psychology Of Sexual Conflict

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

David Buss is one of the founders of the field of Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas and an author. The topic of sexual deception, harassment and assault are an emotive, highly charged conversation. Men are accused and women are afraid. But why do these conflicts even arise? Why is it that men and women's sexual desires diverge? David's new book opens Pandora's Box to this murky world. Expect to learn the key differences to men & women's sexual desires, how the over-perception bias explains much of why we are confused, why women are attracted to bad boys, how men are mentally hardwired to objectify women, how mate-value discrepancy can cause all manner of catastrophes, whether all men are rapists and much more... Sponsors: Get 19% discount, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/profdavidbuss Buy When Men Behave Badly - https://amzn.to/3vFH7FO  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, you beautiful people. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Busch. He's one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, professor of psychology at the University of Texas and an author. We are talking about the hidden psychology of sexual conflict. The topic of sexual deception, harassment and assault are an emotive, highly charged conversation. Men are accused and women are afraid, but why do these conflicts even arise? Why is it that men and women's sexual desires diverge? David's new book opens Pandora's Box to this complete hell of a murky world and we're going to try and navigate through it today without getting cancelled or upsetting too many people. Expect to learn the key differences to men and women's sexual desires,

how the over-perception bias explains much of why we are confused, why women are attracted to bad boys, how men are mentally hardwired to objectify women, how mate-value discrepancy can cause all manner of catastrophes, whether all men are rapists and much more. God, I adore this conversation. If you liked the 15 harsh psychology truths with Adam Lane Smith a couple of weeks ago,

you will love this one. Evolutionary psychology to me is endlessly fascinating. It allows us to peer under the hood and work out why we are the way we are. And David is one of the Godfathers of that field. Again, you have the opportunity today, as you're listening to this conversation unfold, to notice any emotional reactions that arise inside of yourself. And question, why are they there? What is it about this insight that's causing you to feel that way? For men, there are lots of uncomfortable

truths that come up in this around some of the reprehensible things that men have done to women over the ages, and to women as well, there are some things that make it sound like, perhaps David's giving men a pass, or perhaps the hashtag not all men actually might be true. All of these things should give you pause. They should give you reason to think, okay, how can I assess my assumptions around this? How can I have a more balanced viewpoint on what is perhaps one of the most charged conversations of the last decade?

If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to hit the subscribe. In fact, before you even listen, it's awesome. Just go and hit the subscribe button now for me. Navigate to your little podcast app and make sure that it's been pressed and it means that you will never miss an episode when they are uploaded every Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Now please give it up for the wise and wonderful.

David Bus, welcome to the show. Thank you. Hey, delighted to be here talking to you. It's happy book release day. Yes, it is. It's hugely exciting. I've been getting a ton of email. People are tweeting about it and, you know, Facebooking about it. So there 30 years of research on and off, not not continuous research. So it is a true labor of love and so it's nice to see this thing finally hatched. Well deserved, really, really well deserved. I said to you before we started, I absolutely

love this. How would you characterize what evolutionary psychology is and why it's interesting and useful? Oh boy, that's a big question, so that I will try to be succinct on that. Evolutionary psychology is simply psychology. Look at through the lens of evolutionary theory, and it basically is a adds important ingredients such as functionality. So whereas most psychologists, they don't look at, what is the, they don't ask the question, what is the function of whatever psychological mechanisms

we have, they just say, you know, here's a phenomenon, cognitive dissonance or obedience to authority or attribution bias or evolutionary psychologist ask, well, what is the evolved function? or attribution bias or evolutionary psychologists ask, well, what is the evolved function if any of the psychological mechanisms we have be they food preferences, be they made preferences, habitat preferences, coalition formation, friendship formation, navigating kinships

and navigating social hierarchies, and that functional lens, just posing that question adds a layer of depth to our understanding of psychology that has been missing prior to an evolutionary perspective. And so I think it brings quite a lot to the table. And I remember early on in the field of evolutionary psychology lead to cosmeties, a friend and one of the founders of the field told me that there's no such thing as a non evolutionary psychology. And at that time, I was a little skeptical,

but I've kind of come around to her view in the sense that there's no other causal process that we know about that could have fashioned whatever psychological mechanisms we have, how it's in our brain, which of course isn't evolved organ. That's perfect. One answer. This book in the US is Why Men Behave Badly, and in the UK it's Bad Men. Yes, yeah, that's right.

I'll tell you the story about that. Well, first off, why men behave badly at all? Why not men and women behave badly? Well, so first of all, the book is about sexual conflict and the co-evolution of conflict between males and females, which goes back about 1.3 billion years. So sexual back to sexual reproduction. But I titled the book, When Men Behave Badly,

The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault, for a very particular reason. And that is that when I started, I thought I was going to give equal treatment to men and women. And there's a sense in which I do. So the first five chapters are so are equally bad stuff men do and bad stuff women do. So for example, deception and internet dating is a prime example. But when you get to the more high cost-inflicting

behaviors, so intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual coercion, sexual harassment, sexual assault, the more extreme you get men tend to have a more of a monopoly on these more dramatic and cost-inflicting behaviors. And so over the last four chapters of the book, I focus more and more heavily on men as perpetrators and women's co-evolved defenses to prevent becoming a victim of these horrendous, generically, forms of sexual violence. And so that's why I call it when men behave bad. It's not a book about male bashing because I specifically talk about it's not all men

is some men are more prone to these forms of sexual violence than others and we can get into that in in detail. And also when men behavior badly even men who do it don't do it all the time. I mean it's one of the interesting things is you can have a man who's happily married has a loving relationship with his wife, loving relationship with his kids, but then engages in some really bad stuff on the side. And so the book tries to identify not only which men do this, but what are the circumstances in which men are most likely to do it? And so, so anyway, so that's the title for the US. The UK, what happened was here, here's the twist on that. My UK publisher told me that a while back there was a UK sitcom called, you can clarify it, it's called Men Behaving Badly.

Yeah, with Martin Clunes, yes. Yeah, and so it's a sitcom, and so my publisher, my UK publisher, is worried that people would, in the UK, would have that association and think it was... Some sort of biopic of the men behaving badly sitcom series written by David Bus. Right, right, right. So that's the change in title to bad men in the UK edition, but the content is identical. And the subtitle, the hidden roots of sexual deception harassment of assault is identical. So the book is identical, except for that main title in the UK. Cool. Yeah. Well, at least Martin Clunes isn't knocking on your door asking for royalty

or usage or something like that. That'll be a bad idea. So before we get into it, what do we need to know about sex differences and male, female, make preferences before we can kind of get into this discussion? Okay. Well, that's an important topic because sex differences in mating strategies and in sexual psychology, these are the root causes of conflict between the sexes. And so if you don't understand those, you can't understand why men and women get into conflict. And this is in the context of, you know, this is kind of surprising to me in the broader field of psychology.

And that is that in psychology we have a replication crisis, which you and your listeners probably are familiar with. But these sex differences are among the most robust and replicable findings in the entire field of psychology. While everyone else is having a crisis, these are replicable and they're solid and they're not trivial and in magnitude either. So, to get into just a few of them, one, a key critical one is sex differences in desire for sexual variety. And what I mean is the sex differences in desire for a variety of sex partners.

And so this is measured in many different ways. So how many sex partners would you ideally like to have over the next year, five years, 10 years? You know, men say, well, over the life of men say about 18 sex partners would be about right women say four to five. Many just say one. So sexual fantasy is a studies of sexual fantasy and another indication. So how often do you have sexual fantasies and about whom do you have sexual fantasies?

And men tend to have sexual fantasies about a wider variety of different women, if they're heterosexual. And they also do more partner switching during the course of a single sexual fantasy episode. So, just to give you one example, so in studies of sexual fantasy, one man said, my fantasy is I'm the mayor of the town, so high status, and all the women down Main Street have no clothes on. And every day I get up and I stroll down Main Street and decide which woman I want to have sex with that day

Well, the second inverse like an inverse of the Emperor has no clothes It's like the town's the town's people have no clothes and they're all female Right and they're all female so but so that's just kind of an illustration and female. So, but so that's just kind of an illustration and then there's like how often you think about sex, how often do you fantasize about sex with someone who just a woman who just passes you on the street. If you've known a person for a particular length of time and find them attractive, how much the time would elapse before you were willing to have sex with them, and for men it's close to zero, you know, one second, you know, and women typically need a lot more

information. So there are many different sources of evidence that all converge on this key sex difference in desire for sexual variety. And this is one of the things that, now of course, one of the things that you were kind enough to ask about evolutionary psychology, one of the things that evolutionary psychology does is it distinguishes between underlying psychology and its expression and manifest behavior. And so many men have these desires, but they don't just act on them. Fortunately, these would be disastrous if men just walk

down the street and had a desire for sex with a woman and just like lunged. That would be total disaster in chaos. And in fact, men probably don't, they might act on one out of a thousand of these sexual, these forms of sexual ideation. And so, a lot of men, and so even this includes men who are married or men who are already mated, they might have sexual attractions to women other than their partner, which they often do. And women do as well, men just have them more frequently, but they may choose not to act on them for a variety of reasons that have to do

with other components of our evolved psychology, our concern with reputation, our concern with preserving our long-term may chip, our concern with not damaging our social opinion in the eyes of our family, our peers, our work colleagues, and so forth. And so that's why some people, I think mistakenly, divide up the world into two causal forces, like there are social cultural forces and then there are evolutionary forces. And what evolutionary psychology does is it breaks down this false dichotomy, as we call it, because our evolved psychology is designed to be responsive to these social and cultural conditions including social norms and social reputation. How so? Well we evolved in small groups and

the small groups had status hierarchies all groups have status hierarchies informal or formal and you were positioned within the status hierarchy, influences a whole raft of things, like who wants to be your friend or ally and who's willing to mate with you. So specifically for men, more than women. Well, for both.

So I've studied status and reputation, the things that lead to increases and decreases in status and reputation. Both sexes are very, very concerned about reputation, including importantly, in this context, sexual reputation. So you have a reputation as a cheater or as a guy who uses women or as a guy who cheats on his wife and that's going to damage your reputation Which is why men who do act on their

Married men or men in relationships who do act on their sexual attractions to other women Go to great effort to try to conceal it, you know, so they try to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak so they want to deal it. They try to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak. So they want to engage in the sexual activity, but not incur the social costs of that being none. So, yeah. So, anyway, so that's a big sex difference. Other sex differences include sex differences in mate preferences. So for example, and I demonstrated this early on, quite a while ago, in my study of 37 cultures that men and women, they share many mate preferences. So both sexes want partners who are intelligent, kind, healthy, dependable, and so forth.

No one wants a mean, stupid disease-ridden department, but there are some sex differences that are universal and men tend to prioritize relative youth and physical appearance, physical attractiveness, in potential mates. Women also value physical appearance and this is one of the mistakes people make. They think that women up here about it, they care about it a lot. They just don't care about it as much as men do. Men, it's kind of like it overwhelms a lot of other things in the male brain, the physical appearance, and women tend to prioritize financial resources.

And even more important, the personality characteristics and social characteristics that lead to resources over time. So things like, is the man ambitious? Does just that women like men who have some drive and also social status. So social status, as I mentioned, that's a key correlate of access to reproductively relevant resources. And so, in all groups,

resources are heavily concentrated toward the top and then get less and less as you move toward the bottom of the barrel of social status wise. And so those are some sex differences in mate preferences. And they also can create conflict between the sexes. So for example, violation of those things is a key cause of divorce in relationship. So if the guy loses his job, and this is the top of maybe we get into a little bit later, because during the pandemic, there's been a spike in the intimate partner violence.

And one of the predictors of intimate partner violence is guys who don't have the benefits to provide women. And so they inflict costs on the woman in an effort to try to keep her to adjust the mate value discrepancy. Yeah to adjust the perceived mate value discrepancy. So yeah so and this is a horrendous thing and people might be very upset by this but I think there's good evidence that one of the intimate partner violence as abhorrent as it is, it actually has a function. And the function is a desperate measure to hold on to a woman who wants to leave. She wants to defect from the relationship or, you know, depertoe in the water with an

infidelity to see if there might be a better made out there for And so one of the things that these Violent guys do guys who are violent toward their romantic partners is they try to cut off their their friendships they try to cut off their kin ties their relationships with their family their genetic relatives in an effort to strip them of bodyguards and this is this is one of the things I talk about in the book also that is women's defenses against some of these forms of male, bad behavior is bodyguards. And bodyguards are absolutely critical. And so if the woman doesn't have the father around, the brother, the sisters, the mother,

the friends, male and female friends Very difficult for an abuser to abuse someone if they if the woman has these social allies the bodyguards And so it's a critical defense which is why these abusive men try to cut off those bodyguards from from the woman so off those bodyguards from the one. So, anyway, I don't know quite how we got under that track. I do it a whole chapter to intimate partner violence. And I think it's a really important topic because even in the most, like we might think about it as, you know, horrendously worse in some cultures and others, and it is. But even in the most sexually egalitarian cultures, such as say the Scandinavian cultures, Denmark, Sweden,

Norway, the Netherlands, rates of indomapartner violence are around 27 to 30 percent in terms of lifetime incidents. That is, the percentage of women who will experience intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. So that, as you're talking about close to a third of women who are subject to this. So I think it's a very important topic and has been relatively neglected. It's certainly, relatively neglected by evolutionary

psychologists and that's why I devote a whole chapter to it. It's a form of sexual violence in that, even if the male doesn't rape his partner, which is another topic that I talk about, the physical violence is basically an effort to control her sexuality. And that's why I put it under the umbrella of sexual violence. Mitigating that sexual access is something that you talk about in detail to do with mate guarding and jealousy. And it seems to me like the effects that you're saying there where you have an incredibly controlling, mostly usually male

partner in a relationship. It feels like that mate guarding turned up to 11. We feel that the partner that we're with is slipping away from us. We are concerned that you talk about creating a small bridge back into the dating pool rather than jumping in feet first and getting cold. I think you say, or you can create backup mates or you can trade up in value, there's all of these different tactics that both men and women use. And it feels like the situation you've just described there with the men is when it gets turned right up to 11. Some of the things that I went through this book, the number of photos I've taken and sent to my buddy Rob Henderson, who we are mutual friends with, and he's a past guest on this. I think one of the most interesting insights that I took from your book was the understanding

of the over perception and the under perception bias. I think it's a cure for so many problems between men and women and how they don't understand each other. Can you explain that? Yes, that's a great question and that's another important sex difference. So the kind of classic case is, man and woman are interacting, woman smiles at the man or casually touches his arm or incidentally brushes up against him and he infers sexual interest on her part or romantic interest when it may not be there at all. So, and this is very robust finding that,

women often say, well, it's just being friendly. And in fact, a smile is one of those inherently ambiguous cues, you know, a could signal friendly. It's a could signal sexual interest. It could signal nervousness if they, she think the guy's a creep, but men tend to over and for sexual interest when it's not there. And we think that they do, this is work that I initially developed with Marty Hazelton,

whose former graduate student now, a professor at UCLA, and what we argue is that it's an adaptive bias. So there's a reason that men have this, and that is that it's an adaptive bias. So there's a reason that men have this and that is that missing out on sexual opportunities was extremely costly over evolutionary time. And so men have this, not a lot, over perception bias to err on the side of not missing out on anything,

even if there are, it results in many false alarms. Turns out no, the one was not interested. Although we also argue, and this is an interesting thing that the fact that they think she's interested could actually be functional in converting her from initially uninterested to being interested. So. Because it encourages behavior in the mail, which is more likely to signal that he is

interested, which can cause reciprocal interest from the female. Yes, that and confidence. So if the man thinks he's interested, he's going to be more confident. And women value confidence and interpret it as a sign of status. Even if it's unwarranted in reality, but then manifests from the mail. Yeah, but that's why, like, if he thinks, oh, she's not interested at all,

and but I wanna try to approach her, he's not gonna be yourself confident in that approach. But if he thinks, oh, she's genuinely interested, even as it was a false belief, he's gonna feel more confident in his approach toward her. And then on the flip side, we also found this is work that I did with Karen Parallel, another former student, now a professor.

And we did a kind of like a speed dating paradigm in our lab where we brought men and women into the lab and had them interact with each other. And then afterwards, say, do you think this person was sexually interested in you, how interested are you in them, et cetera, then kind of rotate? And what we found is that women under perceived men's sexual interest. That is, women thought, no, this guy's, he's not interested in me, when in fact, the guys are saying, yes,

I'm very interested in her. And so they tended to under perceive. Now, this is an interesting thing. This was the first time that's ever been documented. And we have a couple hypotheses about why that's the case. So one is that men who are genuinely sexually interested try to eliminate expressing the sexual components of their interest,

because in fact, it backfire. So, and we know this, and there are studies that have documented this. I did one in the MyLab as well, where the more overtly sexual the approach, the less effective it is. So men, in essence, fame, genuine interest, long-term interest, caring about what she thinks, how she feels, and so forth, and disguises any sexual interest at all. And so

maybe the women are sort of, well, he displayed no cues of sexual interest. So, you know, I don't think he's interested in the guys. They're saying, yes, I've been thinking about her constantly. I don't think he's interested in the guys they're saying, yes, I've been thinking about her constantly. So, but what this does though, is especially the male sexual overperception bias results in sexual conflict. Because what it means is that guys are hitting on women and approaching women who are genuinely not interested.

And so that creates this problem, especially in the workplace, but let's talk about the workplace, for example, in that he thinks she's interested in him. So he approaches her and she is in a work context, so she might be a co-worker, she might, the guy whose, approach might be her boss.

And so she has to deflect this sexual attention in a way that doesn't cause resentment on the part of the guy. Because if it's a coworker or a boss, they can do reputational damage to her. They can knock over promotions. They can undermine her in various ways and so women do things like oh, I Can't I can't go out with you. I have a boyfriend or I can't go out with you I'm Vis I'm seeing my girlfriends for glass of wine tonight And so they try to deflect it rather than saying look I don't find you attractive at all

I'm not interested at all. Please don't ever ask me again for anything. They can't do that. So they try to basically what sometimes is called a soft rejection. So, but it puts women in this really difficult dilemma. Because then sometimes the guys come back and say, well, get rid of your boyfriend.

Or is your boyfriend in town now? If not, let's go out. Or you're busy tonight. How about next Wednesday? What it turns out is with sexual harassment that in the workplace, a subset of men tend to be serial sexual harassers. So it's not all men who do this. It's not all bosses who do this.

It's not all men in positions of power who do this. It's a subset that engage in multiple harasses harassment. So women often know who these guys are. They'll sometimes tell a new female worker, like watch, don't be, you know, alone with this guy in the supply room or whatever, because he's got wandering hands or whatever. But again, part of that is the sexual overperception bias can lead to or contribute to sexual harassment. And that's why I think one of the key things is we have to understand at a deep level,

the underlying sexual psychology of men and women, how they differ in order to get the root causes of sexual conflict in order to eliminate or at best, eliminate at best or minimize the sexual conflicts that occur. Because these are pervasive forms of conflict. They occur in many different species and they occur in all human cultures. One of the things that if I could jump in and stop and ask, but you ask a question here since I'm just kind of rambling.

And I borrowed this quote. I kind of was reading Steve Pinker's book, one of his excellent books. And he noted that sexual violence against women is perhaps the most widespread human rights of violation in the world. And the more I thought about it, the more I think that he's right. And it's one of the things I argue in this book in that what you have is these forms of sexual conflict, they transcend culture, they transcend ethnicity,

they transcend religious groups. It doesn't matter. It's like an equal opportunity destroyer, if you will. And so, it affects chaff of the population, who are women, and it affects even more than that. So, it affects all those who are primary victims, primary victims of sexual harassment, assault, intimate partner violence, partner rape, or stalking. And in addition, it affects all those women who have to engage in defensive maneuvers to avoid becoming a victim.

So women sometimes they can't go out at night, or they can't go out at night or they can't go out at night alone or they have to take various precautions and do things to prevent becoming a victim. So there's the primary victims who are victims and then there's the secondary victims and then there are all the people who care deeply about the women who are victims. So the partners, the fathers, the brothers, the mothers, the sisters, the female friends, the male friends, who all care about this. And then they are also traumatized by their loved one

being sexually abused in one of these ways. And so that's why I say the most widespread human rights violation is sexual violence toward women and getting back to the evolutionary angle on it. So we have is it basically violates freedom of sexual choice? So we have at least in most Western cultures. We have freedom of speech, we have freedom of the cultures. We have freedom of speech. We have freedom of the press. We have freedom of peaceable assembly.

We have these freedoms that are granted to us. But one of the freedoms that I think should be an international human right is freedom of sexual choice. It's basically Darwin 1871, who with his theory of sexual selection, where he observed that throughout the animal kingdom, females tended to be more discriminating or choosy

or discerning about who they had sex with, who they made it with. And that's why women have adaptations to avoid that bypassing female choice and adaptations to be extremely upset about attempts or enactments of that. So this is something that everybody should care about. And one of the goals of my book, and this is perhaps revealing of my arrogance or former arrogance, throughout my career, I've always kind of fancied myself as a basic researcher. Like, I only, I'm pure science, I just study human nature. Not a major stuff.

Yeah, not applying stuff. And then, but then I realized, as I was writing this book, that this is tremendously important information to reducing sexual violence and reducing these abhorrent costs that are inflicted on women. And so I've become more applied, and I think that this information is extremely useful in reducing the harms that are inflicted on women as a result of male sexual psychology.

So anyway, this along with the diet drive there, but so all of you pause on what you ask a question or make a comment. Well, I think so much of what you've gone through and reading the book, I have to confess, and this will be the same for a lot of men that read it. It's uncomfortable as a man to read the book. I think that you do a good job of easing us in

and explaining the lay of the land with what is to begin with a relatively balanced viewpoint. But as you say, as we get towards the more extreme ends of sexual violence, there simply isn't the research and presumably the data to underpin the research of women doing it to men. There are certain occurrences that happen, but when you get to the extreme ends, when you get to the rape, when you get to the the violence, the intimate part of violence and the stalking and stuff like that, it is disproportionately caused by men, and it's very difficult as someone who hasn't done that. To read it and think, well, this isn't me, and then when we see

overbearing and overstepping act coming from the women's empowerment movement that again blame men for toxic masculinity and for the patriarchy being that it is difficult to read and yet at the same time learning something like the under perception and the over-perception bias helps me to understand not only the dynamic generally of the mating world, but it also helps me to understand other men that aren't me and myself. So I think that's something that is super important. Yes, the insights that you have around evolutionary psychology and how they inform our understanding of sexual conflict can help women to Understand the risks to get past them if it has occurred and to also deal with them sort of during the process as well if they are occurring But I think it also helps men if

People understand if men understand the fact that the woman is probably less interested in you than she seems and That you to her seem less interested than you seem. If you simply understand that, there is so much more transparency around, and this is, it's the same as learning a cognitive bias, right? It's like a mating bias. When you learn fundamental attribution error, you actually realize, oh, God, that's not necessarily the way the world works. He's not an asshole,

because he cut me up in traffic, he might just be late. Like, because I've done it before. But it is uncomfortable to read. And I think that's a good practice for both men and women to do. I enjoy delivering uncomfortable and harsh truths on the show as much as possible. And the reason is, it gives us the opportunity to observe what rises inside of us.

It's mindful in this exercise, right? You observe the emotion that occurs as you hear something, as you hear X number of percent of women have gone through sexual harassment and you just want to scream out as a man, well, yeah, but not me, that's not me. And you go, we weren't saying it was. And that's the compulsion, that knee jerk reaction because of a lot of most recent popular culture that has been a lot of finger pointing and given the stats, that makes sense. But also the indignation of a huge swath of men is also understandable, but only with the data and the understanding can we actually work out why that's the case. Yes, I think that's very eloquently put.

And I feel very much the same way that I mean, I don't, to my knowledge, I haven't engaged in sexual harassment or sexual coercion. But that's, I think, why title the book When Men Behave Badly, because as I said at the beginning, it's not all men. And so I think it's, that's an erroneous thing. I think most men, you know, hold their desires in check for a variety of reasons that we talk about. But some men don't. It's the some men that are really a danger, not just to women, but also to men in the form that you just alluded to, which is that men get a bad rap and get blamed

for things sort of as a generic half of the species when that's not appropriate. Because, you know, there are men who would never dream of engaging, for example, in sexual harassment or intimate partner violence and wouldn't do it even if you put them in the most conducive conditions for doing it. That's why some of these stable personality characteristics are critical.

So, in the book, for example, I talk about the dark triad as being critical. So the dark triad is a constellation of personality traits that is narcissism, psychopathy and macchiavellingism. Narcissism being characterized, a hallmark is a sense of entitlement. So high narcissists guys, they think that they're great, they think they're entitled to more than their fair share, a bigger slice of the pie, and as they overestimate their brilliance and attractive as they think they're hot, but they're not, at least they're not on average, more attractive than people lower on narcissism. Psychopathy is basically the empathy circuit that most normal humans have is severed.

So these guys, a dog gets run over by a car and they laugh. You know, they have no empathy for animals or other humans. So I actually have some litmus tests for diagnosing some of these things. So ask a guy, how he feels about pets, you know, dogs or cats or whatever. Watch him interact with them. We or watch him interact with a child. Watch how he treats waiters and waitresses. That's another indication. And then Machiavellianism is basically people who pursue an exploitative social strategy.

So these are people who sometimes come off as cooperators and then defect and cheat. They view other people as instruments or pawns to be manipulated and toyed with and moved around to a lot of like chess pieces so that they can obtain maximal benefit with least effort. And so this constellation, this dark triad, especially when you combine it with a short-term mating strategy, these guys are most likely to engage in these bad forms of behavior like sexual harassment, sexual coercion. So it is a subset of guys. And as I mentioned,

a subset of guys who are doing the harassing, that are, and this is why also I think your point is a good one that men and women need to be aware of these things. So there are these biases in cross-sex mind reading that if we understand them, we can make appropriate corrections as you most eloquently put it. Why are women attracted to bad boys then?

If you have this particular dark triad of traits, why do women get attracted towards those sort of things? Yeah, well, often, well, there are two things. So one is that they do often have characteristics that women do find attractive in mates. So these guys are often very self-confident, if you're high on narcissism, and you think you're great,

and you think everyone else should think you're great. And as animals, we interpret each other at our own word, so to speak. If you have high self-confidence, people think, oh, he must have something going for him. And they're often risk-taking. And so women find guys who are willing to who are brave in the face of danger are willing to take risks, physical risks,

or social risks, like telling a joke to an entire room at a party is a social risk, but also physical risk, driving motorcycles and parachute jumping, ski jumping, other things. So these guys often have traits that are attractive to women, but they're especially attractive to younger women. Why is that so? I think part of it is inexperience. So these guys, the high dark triad guys are disastrous as long term mates, but they can

be sometimes very exciting as short term mates. And sometimes younger women engage in, they're the new in the mating market, the engage in experimentation, some sexual experimentation, you know, mates switching and so forth. As they mature, get some more experience, they want to settle down typically, not always, but typically into a long-term committed nature. And these guys, the high-dark triad guys can be very exciting in short-term mates, but disastrous as long-term mates. And presumably the young women will have found that out, and you only probably learn that lesson a few times before you think there's a pattern occurring here. Yes, exactly. Why wouldn't that have managed to become adaptive?

Why isn't that evolved? Why aren't all women sort of born with that? Is it just that if it is a short-term mating strategy, then it probably would be adaptive because he's got excess fitness and excess reputation, therefore, good genes, sexy son hypotheses, etc. Yeah, possibly. That's one hypothesis about it. Another is that we live in a, this is under the rubric

of evolutionary mismatches. We live in a pretty bizarre modern world that is very different from the world in which we evolved. So we evolved in small groups where you would have had perhaps exposure to a few dozen potential mates in your entire lifespan. And in the modern world, we have access to thousands or millions of potential mates in large cities or through internet dating. And so these men also can engage in behavior and escape the reputational consequences that would

have occurred, ancestrally. So in small group living, everybody knows everyone else, and you start doing bad stuff, like abusing women, you're going to get a reputation, they're going to either kill you or ostracize you from the group. The modern environment, we don't have that. So, internet dating, you're meeting total strangers, you don't know who they're going to either kill you or ostracize you from the group. The modern environment, we don't have that. So, internet dating, you're meeting total strangers. You don't know who their social group is. You don't know what their reputation is.

So, with a larger urban settings and also geographic mobility, these guys can escape what formerly would have been reputational damage, which would have been extremely costly. It's like a sexual snake oil salesman moving, proverbially moving from the from town to town, but it's just from from girl to girl. Yeah, I don't know if you're aware of this, but there is a subsection of the meninism world or the the red pill movement world for men's rights, actively working to create dark triad traits. So they coach men on how to develop the dark triad traits.

It's something which is actually aspirational. I'll send you some articles. Once we're done, it is a fascinating corner of the internet. And some of the stuff that these guys write about, these bloggers, they're incredibly proficient writers, very, very erudite, incredibly articulate. And some of the things that they talk about are fantastic bits of advice for men. And then some of the other parts talk about how to cultivate this entire series of how to cultivate your dark triad personality. Because presumably from their side, my theory is that these are often men who have either had no success with women or have had success with women and then been scorned, and their strategy to now deal with the inevitable or perceived inevitable

pain of the dating market is to never care, is to develop that lack of empathy, is to see people as tools to be used, so on and so forth. So it almost becomes a defensive strategy that they can wrap around themselves. And then also to create this bravado, this excess fitness, which doesn't actually signal excess fitness, this excess reputation, which doesn't actually signal excess reputation. And to use that, because they know they will get the success with the women from that, plus they will inoculate themselves by never caring, by not having the empathy, they can never be hurt. And yeah, it's a. Wow, that's frightening.

Terrifying, terrifying. And yet, for short short term mating strategies successful. So you can imagine that in a world where that was the, that was the outcome metric that a man was optimizing for, that he might actually see what he was doing as successful and then see it as so successful that he would coach other men on how to do it and write a blog about it that was very articulate. So yeah, God, I mean, that whole world is especially from an evolutionary psychology perspective, it is fascinating. I want to talk about how men and women differ in their motivations for stalking, because that is something, I think, culturally, especially among young people, we talk about young girls sort of stalking their partners profile, seeing the other girls that he's liking and stuff like that, but you mean something a little bit different here.

You don't just mean kind of distance-mate guarding and kind of checking up on jealousy stuff. You mean seeing a little bit more intense? Yeah, so what you just described, I would call information gathering. Stalking, when I talk about stalking, I'm really referring to criminal stalking. So it's a, it's really a fascinating phenomenon. And so when it comes to criminal stalking,

at least in the, I'm not sure what the UK laws, but I think they're similar to the US laws where they're written in a way. So it has to be a pattern of conduct such as following repeated phone calls, repeated, you know, tracking of someone in a way that instills fear in the victim, and instilling fear is a critical part of the definition of criminal stalking. And so a woman who's googling a guy she's interested in or checking up on his Facebook to see if he's partying with other women, that's not criminal stalking because the guy, presumably she's doing it, he's

not even aware. She's doing it covertly, yeah. Yeah, so I would separate that activity from the criminal stalking that instills fear in the victim. And when you get to criminal stalking, you have about 80% of the perpetrators are men and about 20% are women. So men do tend to have a monopoly, but not exclusive. So there are women who do stock. I don't know if you ever saw the movie

fatal attraction. Yes. With Michael Douglas has a brief fling with Glenn Close. He's married, has a brief affair with his co-worker, and she just proceeds to make his life absolutely miserable, like boils his pet rabid. And it's like a disaster. There was after that movie came, I think it's like this old, this 1989, I think. After this came out, there was like a ramp and epidemic of sexual fidelity. So guys were terrified of having a virus. No way, they'd been scared straight. Yeah, they hit the bed.

How funny. Yeah, well, when you think through, I mean, that's the thing about infidelity is one of the things the, the, the, the quote, benefits of it in terms of sexual gratification and so forth are in the here and now the risks and the costs are they're uncertain so they're probabilistic we don't have to all occur or not and they're somewhere in the distant future and so but this movie made a very salient this is what those costs can be. How funny. What about unwanted sexual attention? Why do men do that? Is it just, is it explained heavily

by the differences in perceived interest? Well, there are a couple of things there, and I talk about that in the chapter on sexual coercion. So one is that a phenomenon that John Maynard talks about and did some cool lab work on called attentional adhesion. So basically, it has like a computer screen. And what he says is an image is going to come up. And when that, and then somewhere else on the screen there will be an X appearing either in one of the four quadrants of the screen. When that X appears, I want you to disengage from the image you're watching and then focus

on that X. And so basically in a nutshell, what you found is that when the images of an attractive woman men have trouble disengaging their attention. So they do, you know, where is that? Finally all disengaged, so he attentional adhesion. So men have it and it's linked to, when that occurs, it's linked to a brain circuit and it's the nucleus accumbens.

And the nucleus accumbens is one of the pleasure centers of the brain. So men literally feel pleasure from looking at attractive women. And there have been songs written about this, you know, I'm a girl watcher, etc., etc. So men are basically, they have evolved mechanisms to attend to physically attractive women and find it very rewarding to look at attractive women. That leads, that's also one of the background causal conditions for things like leering or auguling or cat calling or staring. I talked to, for example example one woman told me that when

in her workplace she had to tell guys they kept staring at her breasts and she had to like say say look my eyes are here like I like bring their attention away from her breasts and and so you know men have these brain circuits that are attuned to these features of women. These are part of the causal background for leading to things. You can buy that with a sexual over-perception bias, desire for sexual variety. The importance of physical appearance in men's sexual arousal, where men see the woman, they're attracted to where they feel pleasure looking at her, and they feel sexually aroused, and they can't imagine that she doesn't feel the same way about them,

and they don't. And this actually gets to another sex difference, which is absolutely fascinating. I talk about it this in the book as well, that on average, men find women more attractive than women find that. And this one of the things this leads to is in the internet dating world, the top 10 to 20% of men get the overwhelming out of the inch of interest. It's a perfect perito, isn't it? It's the top 20% of men for the top 80% of men get the overwhelming out of the amount of Interest. It's a perfect perito, isn't it? It's the top 20% of men for the top 80% of women, the bottom 20% of men for the bottom 20% at bottom 80% of women. Right, right. But it is, but yeah, exactly. So it's fascinating. So it plays out in the internet dating world, but it's fascinating to think that, you know, women just don't find men as attractive on average as men find women. So, and what that means is that men will find a larger array of women attractive in that attraction is not reciprocated. And then when it's not reciprocated, men do get resentful.

So, I don't know if there's this old band that I love, it's part of my generation but called the Doors, Jim Morrison of the Doors. I think some young people know about it. But anyway, Jim Morrison has a lyric in one of these songs which is, women seem wicked when you're unwanted. And it's kind of captures that resentment, that men feel. And you were alluding to this, I don't know if it's a movement or a...

With men and it's immense rights. Yeah, but there's a related one which is the in cells, acronym for involuntarily celibate, and these are men who are extremely resentful that they're attracted to women, they're sexually aroused by women, and that attraction is not reciprocated by these women. And so they're involuntarily celibate. And sometimes it shows up in extreme cases like the shooter out at Santa Barbara, the Isle of VISTA shooter, where he wrote in his, I don't know, was a Facebooker in his diary that said, he's on this day I'm tired. I'm going to punish all these people, you know, because I'm tired of being, you know, sexually rejected.

Ever since I hit adolescents, I've won a women and they don't want me. And so the insults they even have terms for guys that women are attracted to, they call them chads and then the women they call stasis, you know, the, you know, why stasis, I don't know. But you know, the the origin of insult actually came from a female. So the person that first posted about it was a female college student in a blog. I tracked this back last year. Again, I'll find you, I'll find you the article for that. So let's just kind of try and recap that men undertaking unwanted sexual attention thing, right? So we have a preclivity, men have a preclivity, a particular brain circuit which encourages them to look at women that are attractive or look at them in a sexual manner, which is,

I guess, what would be classed as objectifying now in some sort of a way, sexualizing, objectifying them. So that's hardwired into us, not only that, but we get a reward for it. We get some sense of pleasure, which is there to encourage us to do it. Must have been evolutionarily adaptive. Again, it makes sense if there is the potential, if there's a 1% chance of having sex with this woman, you'd better be on your, on your haunches, sort of, on alert to do it, just in case.

On top of that, we have the over perception bias. We think that she is probably as interested as us. And I mean, that explains so much. That explains so much, especially it explains why men act that way and it should make women, I mean, I might be biased, but that makes me feel compassion toward the men as well as the women because it makes me think you are at the mercy of your programming here. Yeah, well, desperately trying to wrangle your nature under control to be societally acceptable.

Yes. And you combine that with the desire for sexual variety. That was the one I forgot. And the high sex drive, what that means is, and with respect to feeling sorry for a man, I think there's a way in which that means is, and with respect to feeling sorry for men, I think there's a way in which that's correct in that men are saddled with these desires that can never be met. You know, that is... A more women than you want to have sex with than you can have sex with.

Yeah, and now I guess, you know, if you were a small percentage of men who are at the top of the heap, so I don't know if you're a famous rock star, a famous athlete, they do. And often fulfill their desire for hundreds and hundreds of sex partners. But for most men, for the vast majority of men, they can't. They live these lives of proverbial quiet desperation, where they have desires that will never be met and they just have to live with them. What are the differences in the motivations for stranger rape and acquaintance rape?

Difference in motivations. Well, yeah, stranger rape. So first, Zayabob, as you know, a whole chapter, two chapters devoted to rape or sexual assault. One, dealing with the psychology of the perpetrator, the perpetrators, and one dealing with psychology of the victims, the defenses that women have

to prevent becoming a victim were fend off the assault or deal with the aftermath. And this surprises some people, but the vast majority of rapes are not stranger rapes. They're actually a minority, 10, 15 percent or so. Most rapes occur, they're date rapes or acquaintance rapes and even partner rates. And this is an interesting historical fact that marital rape used to be an incoherent concept that is, people, if you say marital rape, the husband raped his wife,

they say, what are you talking about? They can't occur. And at least in the United States and most Western cultures, there is now a law that, so the law used to mean, if you raped a stranger, that was criminal activity. If you raped your partner, your romantic partner, your spouse, that was not criminal activity. And so, now who created these laws,

is interesting that these laws are a reflection of a male sexual psychology. Well, this is my partner. I am entitled to sexual access to her whenever I want. So you combine those with the quaint rates and date rates and then things like, I don't know, it's the stereotype, but it has some truth, fraternity parties on college campuses, where the guys spike the drinks, typically with high amounts of alcohol, so that you don't taste the alcohol in this kind of sweet punch that they serve. they serve. And one of the stereotypes is that the guys who rape are these kind of ugly, low-mate value, drooling strangers who are jumping out of the woman from a dark alley.

And that's not true. And one of the things I talk about in the book is, so this is one, it's kind of a cool example of an evolutionary hypothesis that I think has been largely falsified or at least is not correct in its original form. And that's what's called the make deprivation hypothesis. That is, that it's the loser males, basically, who can't- These in cells that we talked about earlier on back. Yeah, who can't attract a woman through normal means resort to rape as a last age strategy. And it turns out that that it's almost the reverse. That is the best predictors of who does the raping is the guys who are actually successful.

They have a short term mating strategy, high-sex drive, high desire for sexual variety, and they can get away with it. So in the modern environment, the guys that have made the news, Bill Cosby Harvey Weinstein, even the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, less more sexual harassment than Ray von His side, Jeffrey Epstein, be another one. These guys are often very wealthy, very high in social status, but they're able to get away with it because of their power, because of their wealth, and they can pay off victims. So for example, and this occurs in deviating a little bit

from your exact question, sexual harassment that occurred on Fox News, for example, by Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes and everything. It turned out these guys were able to pay off the women with large monetary settlements that had non-disclosure agreements. So it wears guys who are at the low end of the resource and status

total pool, they can't get away with it as much. And so if you talk about people who have been convicted of rape, yes, they do fall at the lower end, this is the total pool, but that's not a reflection of the guys who actually do it and get away with it. What that suggests is that most men have a desire to do it and only those who have the faculty to be able to get away with it with limited costs or are sufficiently motivated actually end up committing it. And this is something that you talk about here in the book about our all-men potential rapists. Right, right. And I think that the answer to that is

unknown, but it's probably no. I think that, you know, to do the experiment, what you'd have to do is put men in a low-cost situation where there would be zero penalties for engaging in a rape. And the closest proximity we have to that would be a warfare context where you're in a group that has just killed all the males in this group and there's this group of helpless females with no defenders. And rape and warfare, of course, is very common, but not all men do it. And I think that there are men, and we don't know what percentage who would never, even under the most, quote, optimal circumstances, would never engage in rape. And I think it's, you know, your earlier reflection that, you know, these, you know, when they

say, all men are doing these things, you say, well, no, that I'm not doing those things. And I think so, I think that the answer is no, I think that the, the, the all men, we can't say definitively. So obviously we can't do the study where we put men in these situations. Okay, we're going to slaughter all the bodyguards of these women and put you in this no-cost situation. We obviously can't run experiments like that. But, you know, if I were in the armed services as a psychologist doing studies,

I would look at, well, what are the characteristics of the men who do rape in the circumstances and characteristics of the men who do not? And circumstances and characteristic of men who do not. And I think, again, the dark triad is probably going to play a big role in which men do and which men do not. How do you think men can protect themselves from enacting sexual assault of all types? I think deep knowledge of our evolved sexual psychology is key. And we covered some of these bases earlier. I think that it really, we really have to understand that we do have this sexual overperception bias.

And I'll tell you a very brief story on that that caused me to correct my sexual perception bias to the degree that I can't. So some of these things are more easily correctable than others. So I was, I teach a course in human mating strategies, psychology of human mating. And I was, this was a a while back and I was teaching about the sexual over perception bias. So this is, we're talking a long time ago. And as I was describing the sexual over perception bias, there was a woman in the class who

was like kind of lit up like a light bulb. And I thought something I just said, really struck NURB with her. And sure enough, class N that she comes up to me afterwards, she's very attractive, woman, very kind of a smiley disposition. And she said that this perfectly explained why her relationship with a boyfriend ended. And it ended because they would go to parties, they would go to bars together. She and her boyfriend and other guys would just be hitting up on her right and left. And so she was attractive, but also she was very smiley, very friendly. And the boyfin was like constantly jealous.

And so he couldn't take it and she couldn't take it. And here's the thing. So I had just been teaching out the sexual overperception bias. I thought she was trying to hit on me. Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha. So it was like, I still with that knowledge had difficulty turning it off. Now of course, you know, then I go back to my office and then I have the meta cognition

that no, you know, is my exception bias. But I think that knowledge about these things has to help to reduce conflict between the sexes. Because if we're unaware, for example, there's also this movement now, what I call sex difference denialism. And there's this worry that somehow, if we admit that there are any fundamentally evolved sex differences, then this will be disastrous

and result in discrimination against women. And I think the opposite is true. I think recognizing these fundamental sex differences in our sexual psychology is critical to not harming women. So I think the sex difference denial is actually harms women because it makes us ignorant to the causal processes that are resulting in sexual violence. What's your opinion of the term toxic masculinity

as it's used in 2021? Well, I think there are, I mean, masculinity, there are toxic elements to it. So, I think that if it's used precisely to describe those bad elements like what I would call dark triad type elements, but then it's perfectly appropriate. But I don't think that it captures all elements of masculinity. So at least, you know, now versions of masculinity have changed across cultures and over time, but some are quite noble, you know, sacrificing, protecting the woman, showing bravery in the face of danger,

you know, and historically even a man, you know, providing and protecting his family, providing for and protecting his family, his wife, his children. So I think there are, you know, you don't want to take a broad brush stroke of the word toxic and, you know, slap it on all things that are male-related. Well you also don't want to neuter that and this is one of the interesting things that we see. The front-brain stuff, the things that we can rationalize and cerebraly come up with an understanding for. Those are the ones that we can tweet about and we can have social movements about. But when it comes to the more base stuff, when it comes to things like attraction, there

is not a chance in hell that the person that misuses toxic masculinity and wants to tear down the way that men are constructed would not look to date a male, if it was a female, or even a male, who wasn't higher in mate value than them and how was able to get resources, you don't want to date a shorter man, a man that's less educated or a man that's got less money than you. So, what we can do in the front of the brain and what our biology and our psychology still wants to enact are in this sort of constant battle. And I think that you're right. What we need to do is only through complete transparency, can we get those two things to align and say, okay, this is how we are. This is why we act through the things that we do. And good Lord, if this book is not a very uncomfortable way to arrive at that. David, I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. I'm very, very glad that you've

joined me. Either bad men or when men behaving badly will be available on Amazon. Everybody that's been interested in this conversation should go and check out a fantastic book. I know it's your first return to solo authoring in a decade, maybe over a decade, something like that. Yeah, yeah. So I've revised some of my previous books, but this is my first new new book, my first new new solo author book. Yeah, I'm very happy to get back previous books, but this is my first new new book, my first new new soul author book. Yeah, I'm very happy to get back to it. And this is, as I said, a labor of love.

And I really do hope that it helps. I hope that it helps men. I hope that it helps women. And I hope that it helps to reduce conflict between the sexes because we have to understand each other's sexual psychology. And that applies to both women and men. So I think that's the key to reducing sexual conflict. I love it. And DavidBus.com to look at research papers and check out the rest of your stuff.

Yeah, yeah, just my name. So DavidBus.com will take you right to my website. That'll have links to my books, links to my scientific articles, which can be downloaded for free, and links to other things. So yeah, DavidBuzz.com. Just go and get this. Go and get men, when men behaving badly, behave badly, when men behave badly, go and get that. Get whatever it is.

It's in the show notes below. Go and buy it. David, thank you so much for today. Thank you, Chris. Been great chatting with you. It's been a lot of fun.