The Joe Rogan Experience - #1959 - David Buss

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

David Buss, PhD, is a founding figure in the field of evolutionary psychology, and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary research focuses are on human mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, and the psychology of prestige, status, and reputation. He is the author of several books, among them "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating", and "When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault". www.davidbuss.com

the Joe Rogan experience all right Dave thank you very much for being here man appreciate it thank you that I'm delighted to be here and it's a great honor to be here talking to you man well it's very nice to meet you with Jordan he speaks so highly of you and we had such a fun conversation at dinner that I said, well, we definitely should do this publicly. Yeah, yeah. It's terrific. And I've been catching up on your podcast.

You have so many that it's nearly impossible. But I watched the recent one you did with Jordan when he was here in Austin. And also the one that you did with Russell Brand. And I was on his podcast. And I was just saying, man, he talks so fast. I know. That it's like, glad you were kind of a calming influence. It slowed him down a little bit.

And he's sober. The guy's completely clean and sober. You would imagine that he's definitely on Adderall or something. Yeah. He just ran on off. That's what I was thinking. Maybe when he was on heroin, maybe it cal calming him down a little bit or slowed him down. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe that's why he was interested in that stuff. So what we started talking about

was your life's work, which was your life's work is human mating strategies. Yes. As a psychologist, like why? First of all, why was that so appealing to you? Why did you choose that as a field of study? Yeah, well, it wasn't a field of study when I did choose it. And it wasn't like I had a plan going in. But a little bit of backstory on this is I'm a psychologist by training. so trained at UC Berkeley, PhD. And there was nothing of this sort going on there or the research. But I started reading because I have fairly broad interests. I started reading in different areas like evolutionary biology.

And I was reading in evolutionary biology. I came across these amazing theories of evolution like Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, Trivers' theory of parental investment, of course, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. That's really the one that blew me away, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. And then I realized, man, these theories have so much applicability to humans, but nobody is studying them. And they lead to, at least the then theories, lead to some pretty clear predictions that could be tested.

And so I was trained as an empirical scientist where, you know, you take the hypotheses, generate predictions, do the studies, and if the studies, if the empirical findings support the predictions, then you say, okay, this looks promising. We'll go further. And so I did some initial studies of human mate preferences. So one of the core things, maybe to back up just a second, if I could, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. So this is Darwin, 1871. And it's one of the most brilliant and then unrecognized evolutionary theories in existence. So most people when they think about evolution, they think about survival of the fittest, you know, nature red in tooth and claw.

And of course that's really what Darwin's first book on the origin of species was all about, survival, adaptations to survival. And he came up with this brilliant phrase called the hostile forces of nature, and that organisms have these adaptations to deal with these hostile forces of nature in order to survive. So there were basically threats from the environment, things like you fall off a cliff, you drown in the ocean, food shortages, threats from predators, the lions and tigers and bears, threats from parasites that can eat you from within. And so that's really what his first book was all about.

And so people equated natural selection with survival selection. But there were, in fact, phenomena that Darwin could not explain on this theory. And he was very troubled by them. He noticed that something that all scientists do, scientists develop funds for their pet hypotheses, right, their pet theories. And so, but he noticed that he had a tendency to forget facts that were inconsistent with his theory of natural selection. And so he forced himself to write them down in a separate notebook because he didn't want to forget them. He was, you know, so one was like the brilliant plumage of peacocks. And he asked, how could this weird structure possibly lead to a survival

advantage? It's like, first of all, metabolically expensive. And it's like a neon sign to predators advertising fast food. How could this weird structure possibly have evolved? He even said in his notebook that the sight of a peacock gives me nightmares. He couldn't explain it on his theory of natural selection. And he also noticed other phenomena, sexual dimorphism, differences in the size, shape, morphology of males and females of the same species. And the reason this troubled him was because he thought,

well, both sexes face the same survival problems, right? Both sexes have to eat. Both sexes have to fend off predators. Both sexes have to fend off parasites. So why would they differ in morphology, size, strength, et cetera? And moreover, why would different species vary so dramatically? So you have like elephant seals, for example. Males are four times the size of females. Chimpanzees, less so, twice the size of females. Humans, it's complicated because it depends on

which aspect of morphology you're talking about. So men are only, say, 10%, 11% taller than women, but things like upper body strength, it's like monumentally powerful sex differences there. And so all this is a long-winded way of saying that in response to these anomalies, you know, things like the brilliant plumage of peacocks, the elaborate bird song and so forth, and the sex differences, he came up with a theory of sexual selection. And sexual selection deals not with the evolution of characteristics that lead to survival advantage, but rather those characteristics that lead to a mating advantage. And he identified two causal pathways. Sorry for monologuing here. No, no, please. I'll get to a pause here. Don't pause if you don't want to. In a second. So mating advantage. So he identified two causal pathways, which are still the pillars of sexual selection theory, by which mating advantage could occur. Okay, one is intrasexual competition or same-sex competition.

So battles, the stereotype is two stags locking horns in combat, and the victor gains sexual access to the female. combat and the victor gained sexual access to the female. A loser ambles off with a broken antler, dejected, suffering low self-esteem and needing psychotherapy from some of my clinical psychology colleagues, mate value rehabilitation therapy or something like that. And so the logic was very simple but very clear. And that is that qualities that led to success in these same-sex battles, what biologists call contest competition, those got passed on in greater numbers because of the sexual access that the victors gained. Qualities associated with losing the competition basically bit the evolutionary dust. And the logic of that intrsexual competition is actually more general. So what I've described is what's called contest competition, where there's a little physical battle, but it's more general in that, for example, with humans, we sometimes do contest

competition. In fact, there's somewhat of a long evolutionary history of males doing these physical contests in warfare and sometimes within groups. But we also compete for status. And for competing for status, status gives you a mating advantage. But we don't necessarily have to fight. So I always say, like I've been – I teach at University of Texas and all the time, and I previously taught at University of Michigan, Harvard University, Berkeley. In all my years in academia, I've never walked across campus and one time seen two guys duking it out in public, surrounded by a ring of females who are watching to see who's going to be the winner, and then having sex with the winner. Not once have I observed this. Maybe they do it in private, but I haven't seen that. So that's the first component is same-sex competition. Second process is intersexual selection, which is intermediate between sexual, the sexes. So it's basically

preferential mate choice. And there, the issue is what are the qualities that men and women or males and females desire in the opposite sex? And the logic there is that you need some variability in those qualities. And so they could be anything. They could be physical appearance. They could be sense of humor. They could be intelligence. They could be personality characteristics. So first, there has to be variability.

Second, there has to be some heritable heritability to the variability. And then third, there has to be some consensus. It doesn't have to be total, but some agreement on what qualities are desired. And so, for example, just hypothetically, if it were the case that all women preferred to mate with men who had red hair, okay, it actually doesn't occur. Red-headed is not typically a dominant preference. But if they did, then over time, you'd see an increase in the frequency of red-headedness in the population because those with red hair would have a mating advantage. They would be selectively chosen. Those lacking red hair would be kind of banished or do less well on the mating market. And so again, you can see evolution, which simply means change over time, either due

to qualities that lead to same success in same sex battles or due to possessing qualities that are valued by the opposite sex. Okay. So let's talk about peacocks then. Yeah. What could possibly have caused a peacock to develop that insane plumage and how would that be preferential and why would that be preferential to the opposite sex? Yeah, it's a great question, Joe. And it basically, we know that it is preferred by the opposite sex. So the more brilliant the plumage, the more luminescent the plumage, the more females like it. And there are a couple different hypotheses that have been put forward to explain it.

We don't know totally the answer to it. But one is that it has to do with parasite load. So parasites decrease the luminescence of the plumage. So a peacock that had a high parasite load would be less healthy. And so one hypothesis is that females are queuing into a health queue. Another hypothesis was put forward by an Israeli biologist named Zahavi called the handicap hypothesis. And the idea there is that the peacocks are saying, I am so big and strong and fit that I can carry around this massive structure and still survive and still thrive. And so I must have pretty good genes. And so we don't know. And it could, of course, be some combination of those

or a third factor. But we do know females prefer it and probably linked to a health cue, possibly linked to a handicap. Well, it's interesting because it exists in turkeys as well. Like turkeys have that big plumage that they puff out when they're trying to attract the ladies. Yeah. Have you seen that? Yeah, I have. Yeah, many species do.

You see the, and you raise an interesting issue that having to do with the sex difference in this. So why is, why does it seem to be the males who are always doing this and not the females? Which is interesting because in our species, if you ask which sex devotes the most attention to changing their physical appearance, it's actually females. So women, for example, spend nine times more money on cosmetic enhancements, makeup and so forth compared to men. The sex difference in who does the choosing, who does the competing was so pronounced that Darwin

even called the preferential mate choice component female choice simply because he observed that it seemed to be the females who were more choosy about who they mated with and the males were more indiscriminate. They would basically mate with almost any female who would have them. But what's interesting is when we get to humans, we find that both components of sexual selection apply to both sexes. So that is, in our species, both males compete with other males for access to females, and females compete with other females for access to desirable males. And both men and

women have preferential mate choice. And I know this for a fact, not just from the empirical studies, but in my undergraduate courses, I have a couple hundred students, and I ask them, how many males, how many of you guys have no preferences, and we just mate with any female no matter what? And typically, it's like one smart-ass guy at the back of the room who raises his hand, but men have strong preferences. Now, they differ in some ways from the preferences of women, and there is the very important issue of whether you're going for a short-term mate, you know, a one-night stand, a casual sex partner, or a hookup as they call it on college campuses, or you're going for a long-term, committed, pair-bonded partner because the qualities that people prefer differ dramatically. So bottom line here is both components of sexual selection operate within both sexes. So when you're talking about the difference between what someone's attracted to for a one-night hookup versus what someone's attracted to in a relationship,

in a relationship, that has to do with the whole concept of having the opportunity to spread your genes without any commitment, right? So like someone who is what you would call hot and promiscuous, the attractiveness to that is that this is an opportunity for the male to spread their genetics without having to work too hard? Yeah. The way I would phrase it is that that is the result, so to speak. Men don't think about that consciously, right? You know, they're just – Right. It's a natural cycle.

They find this woman attractive and they want to have sex with her. Right. And they're not thinking – just like when you eat food, you're not thinking – although some may now, but most people don't think, oh, what is the underlying nutritive logic that led to my survival? They just say, oh, this smells good. It tastes good. I'm going to eat it. Right. And so we're not conscious of the underlying logic that drove the evolution of these attractions in this case. But your question

also raises the interesting issue of males versus females. So, and this gets to a fundamental sex difference in our reproductive biology, which is referred to as, it's kind of a clunky phrase, but which is referred to as, it's kind of a clunky phrase, but obligatory parental investment. So in other words, what is the minimum obligatory parental investment that a man versus a woman has to put in to produce one child? And for men, the minimum, the absolute bare minimum is one act of sex. And that can result in a child. For women, the minimum is that nine months of given that asymmetry in investment, we know that it has been beneficial in the currency of reproductive success for men to have sex with a variety of women.

Okay, that's fairly straightforward. But why do women do it? Because we know women also engage in short-term mating. They engage in affair mating. We know women also engage in short-term mating. They engage in affair mating. So estimates vary, but say somewhere between say 20 and 35, 40 percent of women have affairs even if they're in a committed long-term relationship. Interesting issue.

Well, what do they get out of it? They don't increase their direct reproductive success and never could have. Unless their partner happened to be infertile, the most they can have is basically one kid a year. And so adding additional sex partners doesn't do anything for their reproductive success. Okay, and so it's been a puzzle. And there have been, you know, maybe four or five leading hypotheses about why women do it. And this is one area where I've changed my mind on pretty dramatically. So early on, a former student of mine, Marty Hazleton, who's now a professor at UCLA and other friends and colleagues like Steve Gangestead and Randy Thornton put

forward this idea that the reason that women do it is that they're pursuing a dual mating strategy. That is they're trying to get investment from one guy, like the good dads, but good genes from another guy. Oh, wow. And so it's... But is there any research done on what type of mate a woman is likely to cheat on? Well, that's a good question.

So there's been some, and it's not conclusive. But basically the only way this could work, and I have to back up just a second on that. We know that affairs are very costly for women. So if discovered, they result in infidels, result in violence. Sometimes they result in killing, you know, getting to the killing. I don't know if we want to get into that maybe later in our conversation. You wrote a whole book on murder. I wrote a whole book on murder, yeah. You know, the murderer next door.

I wrote a whole book on murder, yeah. You know, the murderer next door. But also women suffer more than men if an infidelity is discovered. They suffer reputational damage. They suffer sometimes social ostracism. It's cataclysmic for their relationship. So, you know, in fact, it's one of the leading causes of divorce worldwide across cultures is if there's a female infidelity. And so the issue is what benefit could be so great to a woman that she's willing to risk all these costs if it's discovered. And so the good genes dual mating strategy argument

could work in principle. And it could work if there were no costs. And this is, you know, one of the reasons why men and women commit infidelities in secret. You know, it's been driven underground. People don't go on Twitter and say, hey, I just had an affair on my partner. It's driven underground. People try to keep it under wraps so they don't experience the cost. And of course, there are costs to men as well by being discovered. They're just not as cataclysmic as they are for women. So the only way it would work, though, is if the, getting back to your original question, is if there's a large discrepancy between the woman's regular partner and her affair partner in terms of the quality of his genes. And so what these good genes dual mating strategy

theorists proposed is that there are certain markers of good genetic quality. They hypothesized masculine features, and there's a logic behind that. They hypothesized symmetrical features. So we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, so normal development. Our hands, our arms, our legs grow more or less symmetrically, but there are things that cause deviations from symmetry. So mutations, so genetic mutations can cause deviations. Diseases can cause asymmetries and environmental insults in a variety of ways. And so what the good genes theorists argue is that if the male is very symmetrical, then that's a marker that he's not experienced a history of disease or environmental

insults or a high mutation load or has what they call a developmental system that's very kind of impervious to these insults. So even though they've suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they still maintain that symmetry. Well, I think there are problems with that. But anyway, back to backtrack a second, why it changed my mind. So I used to advocate this. Well, it's logically plausible. But I started to doubt it. And I started to doubt it for two reasons. One is some replication, some larger scale replications of the work started to fail to replicate the original findings. So what they did is, how did they test this? What they looked at is, do women change their preferences when they're ovulating?

So because it's only in that narrow window of ovulation that she's going to be getting the good genes. So what they looked at is women's normal mate preferences, and they tracked them over the ovulation cycle cycle and do they change to prefer more masculine, more symmetrical features when they're ovulating and then go back to their normal preferences. And the initial study suggested, yes, they do. Initial study suggested that when women have affairs, it tends to coincide with when they're ovulating and some other things like that. How do they gather this data? Well, it's very difficult and time-consuming data, but it started out with crude methods

such as estimating the woman's time of ovulation through a backward counting method. Right, but I mean, how do they get people to even become a part of a study where they admit that they have cheated on their husbands? Oh, well, so that's a different question. These studies just looked at changes in mate preferences. Right, but you're talking about affairs. It's not just changes in mate preferences. It's a decision to have intercourse with someone other than your husband.

How do you run a study like that? Right, and they haven't run studies like that. So they haven't said, okay. They haven't? No, no. So how do they know? They don't. It's just, do the mate preferences change at ovulation

in the predicted, in the ways predicted by the theory? Okay, so how would they find that out? How would they find out if a woman's mate strategies changed and if her preferences changed based on ovulation? So they basically get women and then they track them throughout the cycle. And they can do this. Now they can do it through hormonal assays. So there are ovulation kits that they can assess.

So what do they have, like a survey they fill out? Like, who are you attracted to today? Harry Styles. What about tomorrow? Something like that. Jason Momoa, I must be ovulating. Right, right. Or basically they show photographic images.

And so women just rate, oh, how attractive is this guy? And then independently they can assess masculinity like like jason how do you pronounce the name momoa aquaman uh yeah he's uh like super masculine i remember him i don't think i saw aquaman but i remember him from uh game of thrones yeah um and uh yeah when conan the barbarian too yeah uh yeah, he would be a perfect example. Yeah. Highly masculine features, you know, the square jaw, heavy brow ridges, you know, a good shoulder to hip ratio. So, you know, typically masculine features.

typically masculine features. And so they would look at, do women rate the photos of these masculine and symmetrical guys more attractive when they're ovulating than when they're not ovulating? That's basically what they did. And the bottom line, so there are some conceptual problems with that of, you know, does symmetry and masculinity, why are these the sole features that mark good genes? Because there are also a lot of things that have moderate heritability. It's one of the things we know from the heritability studies. A zillion things show moderate heritability. But here's what really convinced me so so one is the failures to replicate those studies so the larger scale studies failed to find those preference shifts at ovulation but when you started to when i started to look at the literature about women who were having affairs

and the reasons that they're having affairs and the nature of the affairs, there are things that cropped up like this. One study found 79% of women fell in love with or became emotionally involved with her affair partner. And to me, this is exactly the opposite of what you'd want if you're trying to pursue that dual mating strategy idea. You want to get the good genes and then forget about the guy so as not to jeopardize your investment from the regular partner. And so it's really – it's a design feature that's counter to that notion. Can I stop you here? design feature that's counter to that notion. Can I stop you here? But it seems to me that you're pursuing this as if it's a logical endeavor that's based on trying to achieve an outcome. And I think it's far more likely you're dealing with mental illness, alcohol,

emotional imbalance, extreme desire for attention, narcissism, which leads people to seek out exorbitant amounts of attention from other people. Like you have to take that into account, don't you? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So it's a fair point and those things aren't necessarily inconsistent if you ask like who has affairs and what are their personality characteristics. has affairs and what are their personality characteristics. Okay. But affairs happen in all cultures or virtually all cultures unless the women are extremely cloistered as they are in some cultures where they're like they cannot leave the home without

a male bodyguard. Right. But affairs happen in all cultures. Would you like some coffee? Sure. I'd love some. All right. Thank you. No problem. So affairs happen in all cultures. Would you like some coffee? Sure, I'd love some. Thank you.

So fairs happen in all cultures. Yeah, fairs happen in all cultures. And so a competing hypothesis about why, and this is the one I'm currently putting my money on if there's a horse race, is what I call the mate-switching hypothesis. And this is the notion that women who are in relationships, where the relationship is going south, perhaps the partner starts out looking promising, but has failed to live up to his promise. Perhaps he becomes an alcoholic or a drug addict or loses his job or starts abusing her, starts beating her up. That women use affairs as a mate-switching device either to divest herself of her regular partner and or to trade up in the mating market to someone who's more desirable or to make it easier to transition back into the mating market on the notion,

on the assumption that she'll be able to find someone more desirable out there. And so there's at least a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that supports the mate-switching hypothesis, like the one I just mentioned. Women, with 79% of women becoming emotionally involved or falling in love with their partner, this suggests, you know, it's not just, oh, I'm seeking transient attention, as you mentioned. Some women might do it for that, of course. But it suggests that they're forming a long-term attachment to this other guy rather than their regular partner. So here's another one. and this may seem like super, super obvious, is that women who are unhappy with their regular relationship, either sexually unhappy or generally unhappy with their overall relationship, they're more likely to have affairs.

Now, this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, right? Yeah, sure. Tell me something your grandmother couldn't tell you. You're unhappy in the relationship, you're more likely to have an affair. But it turns out the same is not true for men. That is, there are at least some studies that show that if you compare men who have affairs with men who don't, there's no difference in how happy they are with the relationship. And that's why you can have men, and just to bring up, I don't know, movie star examples, And just to bring up, I don't know, movie star examples, like this is an older one, but Hugh Grant was involved with Elizabeth Hurley. I don't know if you remember that one. And he's like having sex with a prostitute in L.A.

Why is he cheating with Elizabeth Hurley? Kind of crazy. Elizabeth Hurley, kind of crazy. Now, in his case, in that case, the male motivation for affairs differs on average substantially from the female motivation. And that is that men have this tremendous desire for sexual variety, meaning a variety of sex partners. Men tend to have a higher sex drive in general, on average. And so they try to satisfy. So even men who are involved with or married to classically beautiful, beautiful women sometimes have affairs. And people are very puzzled by this. But that desire for sexual variety is what drives most men into affairs.

And so there's a dramatic sex difference in why men have affairs with desire for sexual variety pushing most men into it. You know, it's like I think it was Chris Rock said, you know, men are only as faithful as their opportunity. You get a low cost opportunity. A lot of men act on it. You know, if you're like an academic, you're away at a conference, you're in a different town, you know, some fall into bed with someone else. One night stand, a brief affair, and that's that. But women, it's really different. Of course, some women do it just for sexual variety, too.

But that's a minority. Of course, some women do it just for sexual variety, too. But that's a minority. If you ask the question, why do most women have an affair? I think that's the mate switching notion. So what they're trying to do is get out of a committed relationship that they're in that's not promising. It's not working out. And so one of the ways to do that is to introduce new partners to just sabotage their original relationship. So even if it's not someone that they would seek a long-term relationship with other than their partner, they would have sex with that person just to sort of poison the water of whatever committed relationship they have and that would aid in them getting out of it.

Yeah, that's one variant of it. aid in them getting out of it? Yeah, that's one variant of it. Or it could be that they genuinely have found another guy that they want to trade up to. Right. I still don't understand peacocks. I'm still struggling. I'm still struggling with the feathers. How did that become a thing? But back to people. But there's people are also, there's people that have like severe mental illnesses, right? Like there's, I think a lot of people that are very promiscuous, there's some sort of a lack of attention in their development cycle as they were young, like maybe lack of male attention that's leading them to desire constant and consistent male attention. Yeah, yeah.

There are, in fact, personality characteristics and developmental characteristics that are correlated with who's more likely to have an affair, and you pointed to one of them. So narcissism is indeed one of the predictors of affairs. So narcissism also, and actually Jordan Peterson mentioned this on his podcast with you, the dark triad traits of narcissism, maculonism, and psychopathy. He mentioned sadism.

I don't think that really plays into infidelity so much. But the dark triad is a good predictor of who, both males and females, which ones are likely to have affairs. So but but there's a big sex difference there because men tend to be much higher on these dark triad traits than women. And so it's a, you know, smaller minority of women who are inclined in that direction. Now, why are men more inclined towards those traits? Does that have to do with some sort of survival strategy? Does it have to do with a success strategy that would lead to more mating?

Like if you encourage psychopathy or narcissism or not even courage, but if somehow or another, those behavior traits are rewarded by success because you have this ability to do things that other people might find reprehensible or immoral or, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. Immoral. Yeah. Yeah. And what I would say is you have to break it down by each of those dark triad traits because I think each one has a somewhat different origin. So with respect to psychopathy, psychopathy, these are – one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy. And so these are very bad dudes and where they pursue an exploitative strategy where they feign cooperation.

So most people are cooperators. So, you know, you give me a cup of coffee. I'm grateful for that, you know, and I see you're thirsty for some water and I give that. So most people are cooperative by nature. Those high in psychopathy feign cooperation and then basically fuck people over the long run. It's kind of like a bait and switch type strategy, which can work except there are huge costs associated with it, in small group living where we evolve. And that's why I think my hypothesis is that there's been an increase in psychopathy over the last 10,000 years as people started living in towns and cities and as migration

became more common where you could move from place to place without incurring that reputational damage because people, you know, you fuck people over, word gets around and then people might ostracize you from the group or kill you or whatever or if the victims were members of your family or your friends, you'd incur a lot of costs associated with that strategy. But in the modern environment, you can get away with that strategy much more easily. I mean, we are being preyed upon by people online from in different continents that we never even encounter that are high on these psychopathic traits. So it's a psychopathy.

psychopathic traits. So it says psychopathy. Narcissism is attractive to women. And this is one of the questions I get asked a lot is, why are women attracted to bad boys? You know, guys who seem like they're assholes who don't respect them, you know, etc. But there are reasons, and one is they exhibit a lot of confidence, and confidence people often interpret as a cue to status. Why would you be confident if you didn't have somebody to back up your confidence? Those high on narcissism also like to be the center of attention, and as humans, we use the attention structure as a cue to status. That is, the high status people are the ones to whom the most people pay the most attention. And so if someone's paying you a lot of attention and nurses put themselves, you know, at the center of the party, at the center of attention, and so women interpret, oh, that's a status cue. And so women interpret that as a status cue. And so the confidence and status are known. We know that these are attractive to women.

But over time, with experience, women become less and less attracted to these bad boy characteristics. That is, it's primarily young, relatively inexperienced women who are drawn to these guys. That makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. So over time, women would recognize like, oh, I've seen this before. Yeah. Yeah. And then the Machiavellianism, to just close the loop on the dark triad, these are exploiters.

These are the manipulators. This actually came from, originally from the book The Prince, which is one of these classic books where there's an advisor to the prince who's advising him on all these, you know, kind of underground strategies to manipulate other people and manipulate and maintaining power and so forth. And these highly manipulative people, well, sometimes they rise to the top. Sometimes they maneuver themselves by out-competing others and they become CEOs or whatever. And so it kind of depends on the environment. whatever. And so it kind of depends on the environment. High Machiavellians tend to thrive more in a kind of free for all environment where there aren't very strict rules of engagement,

you know, so probably more difficult to do it, say, in the military where they're very regimented, they're very rule oriented. High Mach people, as they're called,ed, they're very rule-oriented. High-mac people, as they're called, they wouldn't thrive in those environments typically. But more free-floating environment, maybe— Day trading. Day trading, yeah. Or even business entrepreneurs who are wheeling and dealing. That makes sense.

And you do meet a lot of psychos that are doing that. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people that have great aspirations about starting big businesses. And, you know, you meet them and you're like, oh, you're kind of fucking crazy. You know? Like there's a lot of those guys that are like hopped up on Adderall

and very aggressive. Yeah. It makes sense that they're attracted to that. Yeah. And sometimes talk a good game. it makes sense that they're attracted to that. Yeah. And sometimes talk a good game. Yes. And women would be attracted to them because of the potential access to resources? Yes. Yeah. Women are very tuned in. This is one of the sex differences and people don't like it, but it's a universal that women value financial resources and even more important, the qualities that lead to financial resources over time. So does the guy have drive?

Does he have ambition? Does he have goals? Is he going places? Is he well-respected by his peers? So that's even more important than the actual resources themselves? It kind of depends on the age. Right, for potential, right? Yeah, that's right.

That's right. So like, I don't know, if you're an undergraduate at UT, a woman might find a pre-med student to be very attractive, not because he has a thick pocketbook now, but because he's going to be a doctor, he's going to be making a lot of money down the line. It's an investment. Yeah. Older women tend to want to see the goods right now. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, because by the time you hit, you know, 30, 40, 50, if you're still kind of trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, probably not a good sign on that dimension. How difficult is it with you with this lifetime of resource, lifetime of resource, research rather, and you know, this field of study that you've chosen to exist in this world

where there's this denial, this current world where there's a denial of the differences between males and females when you're a guy who studied this long-standing history of the variabilities and like yeah yeah well it's almost like a denial of all your work like oh you're this is nonsense there is no difference yeah yeah well it's it is it is kind of odd. And it's, in some ways, something I never really expected because... I don't think anybody expected it. You know, as an empirical scientist, I always, and this is maybe my naivete, is I thought, well, you know, you do the studies. And, you know, one of the hallmarks of our science is you want to see independent replication of the results. And if you're claiming a sex difference, say, in mate preferences or mating strategies, you want to see it replicated by other researchers.

And you also want to see it cross-culturally. So does it occur in Venezuela, in China, in Swahili, in all cultures. And we've done the studies. We've done these. My first study on the mate preferences had 37 cultures with over 10,000 participants in it. And so what I thought is, because I first found these sex differences, by the way, in American samples. And I thought, when I publish these, no one's going to believe that they're evolved sex differences, you know, because it's just Americans are weird and,

you know, who knows. So that's why I did 37 different cultures until I got enough evidence that convinced me that my findings were real and that the sex differences were universal. And so I thought, oh, it's really, people will look at the data and say, okay, we're supposed to be oriented toward the science. And if the data are there and solid and independently replicated and show up cross-culturally and also show up through different methods

that don't share the same methodological problems, then surely everyone will just go, well, okay, we believe them. But to my astonishment, some of them have been challenged. And so you're absolutely right, Joe. We live in this odd time where there's a denial of sex differences. But not only do they exist, evolutionary theory provides a very powerful meta theory that can explain where and why they exist and the domains in which they exist and the domains in which they don't exist. So some people have these kind of cliches like men are from Mars, women are from Venus.

Well, that's not true. We're all from the same planet. We're all members of the same species. But the evolutionary meta-theory, which is just a fancy term for theory of theories, is simply that we expect to see similarity in male and female psychology in all domains where they face the same or similar problems, you know, like dealing with Darwinian hostile forces of nature that I mentioned earlier. It's only in domains where they face different adaptive problems, as we call them, or adaptive challenges that we expect to see sex differences. Well, as it turns out, these domains fall very heavily in the mating and sexuality domain for reasons that I mentioned, alluded to one earlier, but you start as a kind of a ground

level truth. There are sex differences in our reproductive biology. So fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men. Okay, this creates a problem for men in this parlance, an adaptive problem known as the problem of paternity uncertainty. So in other words, no woman on earth has ever, to my knowledge, given birth, and as the baby is coming out of her body, look down and wonder, gee, is this kid really mine? Maybe Rosemary's baby. So that one.

But men can never be sure. So maternity is 100 percent certain. Men can never be sure. Some cultures use the phrase mama's baby, papa's maybe to kind of capture that asymmetry. pop as maybe to kind of capture that asymmetry. And we actually know there are estimates of the rates of paternity uncertainty because we have the genetic data, the molecular genetic data to do that now. And they, of course, vary from culture to culture. But what this means is this is an example of a feature of our reproductive biology, a sex difference in our reproductive biology, that has created a problem, in this case a sexually asymmetrical problem, a problem for men, not for women, aids of his resources in an offspring in the mistaken belief that it was his own,

when in fact it was a rival's offspring, well, he's actually benefiting the rival's reproductive success at a tremendous cost to his own. And so solving this paternity uncertainty problem is so critical and so dramatic that it accounts for why long-term high-investing males are so rare in the mammalian kingdom. So if you look at all mammals, there are about a ballpark of 5,000 plus species of mammals. Only somewhere around 3% or 4% have anything resembling a long-term pair-bonded strategy, and even fewer where males invest. So even like our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA, the males don't do anything. They have sex with the female when she's ovulating. She has these bright red genital swellings and they're very interested in her at that time. And then after that, they just ignore the females and they don't do much, if anything, for the infants or the offspring. huge male parental investment where not all the time, of course, we have deadbeat dads and men who don't do anything. But a lot of men do invest tremendous resources in feeding their kids, protecting their kids, socializing their kids, paying for them to go off to school,

making sure that they develop the right skills, etc. We're an extraordinary species in that sense, but we couldn't do that unless men had some way of solving that paternity uncertainty problem. So this is a long... But up until genetic testing, up until this ability to find out by, you know, taking a sample from the child whether or not the child actually is yours. It was just based on looking at the child. Yeah. Well, there are a couple of things there. So one is – so the question that you raised, Joe, is a really good one.

The issue is what adaptations have been evolved to solve this problem? Because obviously they couldn't involve testing DNA because that's a very recent technology. So they could do a couple of things. One is mate guarding. So the emotion of jealousy, for example, is one of these emotions. And I'd be very curious about your thoughts on that because I know in a previous podcast, I think you talked – I can't remember if you talked about jealousy or envy as being a very negative emotion, which they are. Jealousy and envy are both – I think that was not in regard to mating preferences.

Yeah. That was really in regard to other people's success. Yeah. So other people have stuff that you don't have and so you feel envious. Not even stuff. It was accomplishments. Accomplishments. Yeah.

Yeah. which motivates mate guarding, which involves an array of behaviors from – I've identified 19 clusters that range from vigilance to violence, where men want to monitor their partners if they're investing. They want to see – watch their interactions with other men very carefully, see potential signs of flirtation. And then in extreme, in the modern environment, they hack into their computers and cell phones or put tracking devices on them and so forth, this increase in vigilance, all the way up through things like ramping up the benefits they bestow on the woman. So, well, if she's

maybe looking at other men, maybe I better ramp up my investment in her and show her that I'm really the guy she wants to stay with. All the way up to really horrible things like abuse, where if there's the threat of infidelity or defection from the relationship, some men beat up their partners. And infidelity or suspicion of infidelity or suspicion that the woman is thinking about leaving, these are the triggers of the more violent male tactics. And the kind of uncomfortable, I want to say, truth of the matter, uncomfortable, I'll call it a hypothesis though, which is going to sound horrible, but that this abuse is sometimes functional in the sense that it is designed to dissuade the woman from an infidelity and from leaving the relationship. And one of the mechanisms by which it works is, A, the threat. If you leave me, I will track you down to the ends of the earth and kill you in extreme cases.

But if you leave me, I will inflict a lot of costs on you. Of course, they don't use that kind of language. But the other way that it works is psychologically where it lowers the woman's self-esteem. So no woman feels good about herself if her husband's beat her up. She feels bad about herself. And self-esteem is partly a monitoring device that monitors your mate value. That is how desirable you are on the mating market. And so if you feel bad about yourself, then a woman might think, well, no one else is going to like me.

And so I better stick with this guy even though he's abusive because I'm never going to find anyone else. And he claims that he loves me and he's apologetic about it and says he's never going to do it again. But, of course, as we know, abuse tends to escalate over time. Why do we think that is? That's a good question. I've never thought about that one. I could speculate on it. One is that by the time it occurs, so it often starts as verbal abuse.

So with the guy putting the woman down or insulting her appearance, you know, and then what we found in our studies of couples is that it can sometimes escalate. The verbal abuse predicts it escalating to physical abuse, and that could start very mild. He pushes her, slaps her, or whatever, and then gets increasingly severe over time, partly because the monitor forms might cease to work. And by the time the abuse is happening, she's probably already thinking, oh, I'm in a bad relationship. I better exit or, yeah, exit from the relationship. And this is one of these things we've gotten really, this is a tangent on the tangent, which is totally fine. But I think one of the things that happens and this is also a

speculation is that older men sometimes snap up younger women before they have sufficient experience to understand their own mate value their own desirability on the mating market. And then so they get in a relationship with this older guy who's convinced her that he's the world's greatest guy. But then over time, she starts to realize her mate value and a mate value discrepancy, that is that she can do better on the mating market than the guy that she's with. A classic example, this is an old old example, but you might remember this. So there was this guy, this evolved Playboy magazine, but there was this guy, Paul Snyder, It involved Playboy magazine, but there was this guy, Paul Snyder, who picked up Dorothy Stratton.

She was like working at a burger flipping joint up in – I think it was Vancouver. And anyway, he thought she could be on Playboy, and so he brought her down to L.A. And it turned out she was. She was. But anyway, at the Playboy Mansion, she met other people who were higher in mate value. And let's see, what is that director, he was the example of the dark triad guys. He was kind of left in the dust. But part of the reason is that he kind of snapped her up when she was super young before she had a good understanding of her desirability on the mating market. so anyway to I wanted to

close the loop before before I before I forget my digression on a digression but that tangent the reason why you went on it

is because you were talking about violence and abuse well does that relate to that story well yeah he ended up killing her

okay you didn't you left that part out yeah I left that part out sorry yeah yeah he ended up I didn. Okay. You left that part out. Yeah. I left that part out. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. He ended up killing her. I didn't understand where you were going with that. Yeah. It just sounded like she left him.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, she did. And he convinced her to meet with him one last time for old time's sake. And he killed her and then killed himself. So extreme, extreme case. and he killed her and then killed himself. So extreme, extreme case. But actually the point of departure was the meta-theory of sex differences. And so I've mentioned so far two elements of sex differences in our reproductive biology. One is much earlier in our conversation where I mentioned this asymmetry and obligatory parental investment. And then the second that I mentioned is the fact that fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men. And these are two huge differences in our reproductive biology.

And then there are others. So, for example, women, but not men, breastfeed. They lactate. And ancestrally, infant would live or die depending on whether the woman could successfully lactate. In the modern environment, you can go by formula, but ancestrally, there was no formula around. And so this was another two to three, some cultures, four-year investment by the woman. Again, metabolically costly, because she has to be consuming more calories. But so, and then I'll mention one other one.

Well, maybe I'll stop there. So the notion is that when you have these fundamental sex differences in our reproductive biology, it would be astonishing and defy all logic and defy everything that we know about the way evolution by selection works if there were not corresponding sex differences in our psychology, in our behavior, and in our mating strategies. And what we do find is that it is precisely in those domains where we see these large psychological sex differences, psychological, behavioral, and strategic sex differences.

And so it's not a theory that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. It's a very precise theory. And even just a quick example, So men's and women's taste preferences tend to be very similar to each other. We both like things that are high in sugar, fat, salt, and protein, the sugar being ripe fruit ancestrally. But when do their taste preferences change? They change suddenly when a woman becomes pregnant. And all of a sudden, she has two problems that she's never faced before and that men never face. One is she's eating for two rather than one. But the other is she has to avoid ingesting what are called teratogenic substances. That is toxins that in minute quantities are not dangerous to the adult

woman or man, but can, if they pass the placental barrier, can be dangerous to the fetus. And so even things like all of a sudden they don't want to eat broccoli. Why broccoli? Well, broccoli turns out to contain these minute toxins that could be damaging to the fetus. And same with other things like coffee and other sorts of things. And so people attribute women's taste preferences. They say she wants pickles and ice cream and she's kind of just become wacky because she's pregnant. But there's actually a logic to the shift in taste preferences. And so the point is that her taste preferences diverge from those of men's when she's facing this different suite of adaptive problems that no man has ever faced. And then after that, after the breastfeeding,

her taste preferences return to be very similar to those of men. And so where we expect to see the sex differences, as I said, fall very heavily in the mating and sexuality domain. But that domain, just to finish that long-winded sentence, and I apologize for monologuing about this, but that domain is much larger than most people think. much larger than most people think. And that is because mating is related to so many other things. It's related to status. It's related to warfare. It's related to kinship, like family relations. I mean, how in the world is it related to family relations? Well, it turns out parents have a very strong interest in the mating lives of their offspring, but especially the mating lives and sex lives of their daughters. So we've developed what I call with my former students the daughter guarding hypothesis where – and this is true in all cultures – parents are more restrictive about their daughter's sexuality and mating.

They want to meet the guy she's going out with. They impose stronger curfews on their daughters compared to their sons. They allow the sons more freedom, more latitude. They engage in this daughter guarding behavior. And part of the reason for that is that women are an extraordinarily valuable reproductive resource. Men are expendable, so to speak. Is that really the strategy? Or is the strategy is you're concerned that your daughter is going to get pregnant, you're not concerned that your son is going to get pregnant i think that's very simplified well well yeah no of course yeah and and i apologize for oversimplifying in that way

but the daughter getting pregnant yes at the wrong time with the wrong guy well at the wrong time with the wrong guy. Well, at the wrong time specifically when they're young, right? When you're imposing curfews, you're assuming that this is not an adult, right? So you don't want your child to get pregnant. So you're imposing curfews and keeping an eye on them also because you understand men. So you understand like the more they're around men, the later it is at night or males, I should say, the more chance they have of running into trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

You're not worried about the man. You're worried about the man getting someone else in trouble more than you worry about them physically being in trouble. Yeah. Absolutely. physically being in trouble. Yeah, absolutely. And so, but what this does is it kind of highlights in what we call the difference between proximate explanations and ultimate explanations. So, there's the psychology that's driving this, which is exactly as you describe, and there's the evolutionary forces that have created that psychology. And so both are important.

They're kind of complementary forms of explanation. So, you know, analogous to if I ask you, well, why did you eat that plate of food? You might say, well, I was hungry and it smelled good and I knew from my history it tasted good, so I ate it. That's approximate mechanism. Or why did you have sex with that person? Well, I found them attractive. We're not aware of the underlying adaptations that led to the qualities that you find tasty or attractive. Of course.

But you're literally talking about your child when you're talking about curfews. Right. So I would imagine the primary concern is your child getting pregnant at an early age. It's not whether or not she's this fantastic resource for reproductive. Right. Right. But in fact, they are these fantastic resources. Sure. Of course.

And if you look cross-culturally, the people who try to control them, it's mainly the father, but also some other kin members. They often use the daughters as a form of... Bartering. Yeah, bartering an alliance formation. And they're much more valuable in that sense than they are for sons. Yeah. Here's something I really wanted to talk to you about today because I think it's a new thing in the world, and it is social media. And social media's effect on relationships and the way people are marketing themselves. people are marketing themselves because you know I have seen friends that have these relationships with people that they like their significant other has a Instagram page for example where every single pose is sexually suggestive. They're in a committed relationship, but every single pose

is them of their ass, their butt in the air, their arched back, they're covered in sweat, you know, they're wearing lingerie, they're wearing a very small outfit, they're in these suggestive poses i'm like you're signaling to try to get more mates you're you're you're putting out this very clear signal that you're available and that you are you're you're looking for a romantic partner in fact you're you're horny and you're ready and you're willing. And there's not even anybody there with you, right? Which is kind of wild. I would imagine that would put a tremendous strain on a committed relationship. If you are committed to someone and then you're like, well, let me see what my wife is up

to. And you go to her Instagram page, like Jesus Christ, woman. Like every day she's essentially throwing the bat signal up for for more men yeah yeah yeah no i imagine most men in committed relations who would be rather alarmed at discovering that but it's happening a lot like i have friends more than one whose wife or girlfriend does this. And what's your guess? Why are they doing that?

Well, I think it's what we talked about before. There's narcissism. There's some sort of a lack of attention, a fundamental lack of attention in the development cycle that's led them to desire an exorbitant amount of male attention as they get older um you know it's just it's almost like their cycle was interrupted as they were young they never fully matured whether their father wasn't around or their father was abusive either physically or sexually like whatever it is that's causing them to desire an exorbitant amount of male attention. Yeah, yeah.

And then it becomes, and then the other part of the problem is it becomes a business. You know, because a lot of these women, they will then start, do you know what an OnlyFans is? Yeah, so they'll then start an OnlyFans. And so men will subscribe to get small messages from them or, you know, to get individualized photos or videos from them. And these women make an extraordinary amount of money. And it's really quite shocking. So they're making, you know, way more than they've ever made in their life doing this, but yet they're in a committed relationship with man. And so the man has to deal with the fact that not only is his

woman out there, like on display, but she's signaling that she's desiring better mates. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and, um, I think your point about some developmental issue is relevant. We do have empirical data on attachment styles. So basically, they call them three different attachment styles, which is an oversimplification, but securely attached. So do you tend to trust other people? You feel confident in a stable relationship. There's anxious attached, which is you're always worried your partner is going to leave you or cheat on you. Or maybe you have a history of partners leaving you or cheating on you. And then there's what's called ambivalent attachment style where there are people, both men and women, who they don't really want an intimate romantic relationship.

They kind of avoid it. If someone gets too close, they kind of push them away. And in studies of infidelity, the securely attached have the lowest rates of infidelity, and my guess, probably the lowest rates of these Instagram posts or OnlyFans vocations. And then the second is the anxious attached, but the most is, in terms of infidelity rate, is the avoidant attachment style. And so women with that avoidant attachment style are also likely to be high on narcissism and probably engage in that behavior. And also— Could you please explain avoidant attachment? Yeah. So these are people who don't like close, intimate relationships.

And so they avoid them and try to be, if it gets too close, they push them away. They want to maintain their independence. And so even if they're married, there's this distance. There's always this pushing away of the other person and of intimacy, psychological intimacy with that other person. And so these are women who are more likely to engage in short-term mating and more likely to have affairs if they're in a long-term mateship. Now, has there been studies done on those type of people? Is that because those women have experienced abusive relationships in the past and they're worried

about being committed to someone because that person then starts to put restrictions on them and gets very jealous and very mean to them? Yeah. It's a good question and we don't know. So there is some speculation. So the dominant thinking, which I don't necessarily subscribe to, is that it really stems from the mother-infant attachment bond. So if you have like a mother or other parental figure who wasn't there for you, who is erratic and so you couldn't rely on them, then the notion is that the infant learners, they can't rely on other people. So they better do stuff by themselves or on their own. That makes sense.

And the idea is that that attachment style, which some claim gets fixed in infancy, then carries over into adulthood when you form romantic relations and so the anxious or secure or ambivalent attachment style in infancy gets transported into adulthood. That's the theory anyway. That completely makes sense. If your parents were never around or they weren't reliable or they're shitty to you, yeah. Yeah. The reason I just want to add a note of an asterisk by that is that, yeah, there is a correlation. They do find a correlation between the infant attachment style and the later adult attachment style.

But parents are also contributing genes as well as environment. And so it might be that the parents who themselves are kind of inconsistent, not there for the kids or whatever, and are off maybe having affairs on their own or whatever, transmit genes to their children that dispose them toward those styles as well as an environment. And so studies haven't been done to try to disentangle the genetic effects versus these parental effects on attachment style. Interesting. If you were going to study social media and its impact on dating strategies, one of the things that would be really fascinating is the amount of options. Like if you're a single person today and you have an Instagram page where you're trying to present yourself as an attractive mate, you know, one of the weirder things today is manipulation, right? Like people are using

filters and they're using these deceptive tactics that change the shape of their body, change the shape of their face, the tone of their skin. I mean, it's really pretty extraordinary when you see what can be done with these filters. And so there's that, which is to signal to others that they're more attractive than they actually are physically. Then there's, you know, virtue signaling in the term, in the form of what they write in their posts, you know, whether they're proclaiming their support for climate change or Black Lives Matter or whatever. They're trying to put themselves into a moral high ground position. And then there's the sexually suggestive poses that go along with that. And hilariously enough, oftentimes you have all three of those

things combined. Like they're trying to go for the coup de grace. They're in their underwear with their butt up in the air talking about social issues while they're using a filter. And it's, I would imagine that just this platform, whichever one you're talking about,

whether it's TikTok or Instagram, whatever, these platforms are fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of pathologies, narcissism, sociopathy, like all sorts of bizarre behavioral characteristics that are encouraged by these social media applications and the impact that it has on people. Like oftentimes, like I'll just randomly

scroll through my search can I grab some coffee yes please here thank you and I will find some person just of average human being who you know takes photos in their underwear and they have four million followers which is insane yeah That's a lot of people. That's never been achieved before. Like no one just hanging around like working at the post office has ever gotten four million Instagrams. But if you have a nice butt and you work out a lot and you take pictures of yourself, you can get four million followers. And so then you have direct messages from who knows how many thousands of men who are trying to hook up with this person and link up with them. And so that kind of interaction and that amount of dating options, it's like, this is an unheard of experience.

This is an unheard of situation for a young woman to try to navigate. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the question you raise is really a big and important question. And to put it in an evolutionary context is, ancestrally, you would have been exposed to maybe a few dozen potential mates in your lifetime. You know, we lived in small groups. There was very limited geographic mobility. You couldn't say, I'm going to up and move to a different town. You know, you were basically limited by how far you could walk. So we were exposed to very, very few people. And so now in this weird modern environment, we have, as you mentioned, Instagram, OnlyFans, online dating apps, pornography is another one, which is massively consumed heavily by men. And so these inputs into our mating psychology, we don't know fully

what they are at this point. There hasn't been long enough and we don't know, there haven't been enough studies. But there have been some studies that show, for example, that men who are exposed repeatedly to images like the ones you describe on Instagram, repeatedly exposed to images of attractive and sexually attractive women, decrease their commitment to their regular partner if they're in a regular mateship. And so it actually has the effect of undermining long-term committed relationships. It also, I think, gives people the illusion that sometimes it's called, you know, if you talk about single people, it's called decision paralysis, where, you know, they show this in stores where if you present six jams

and say you taste six jams and people go, oh, I like this one, they buy a jar of jam. You present 24 samples of jams, people go, I can't decide, I'm not going to buy anything. And I think a similar thing is happening in the mating domain is where people see these thousands or millions of potential mates out there or think that they're potential mates out there. And I think it's caused a decrease in committed relationships. And we know, I can't definitively trace it to that, but we know very certainly that there has been a diminution of relationships, a diminution of relationships, romantic relationships, marriage, offspring production, where a lot of people are sitting in front of their screen getting presumably some of their needs met through these online forums rather than in real life. And I think that these are likely to have

fairly detrimental and possibly catastrophic effects long term. Because even things like from a male perspective, what it means if you're spending all your time in front of a computer screen looking at Instagram photos of women with butts in the air or pornography, you're not out there interacting with real women in real life. And so you're not developing the kinds of social skills you need to attract a real woman in real life. And then also, I think the other thing that this creates is different forms of anxiety. So we know, for example, that a lot

of men suffer from dating anxiety. You know, that is they fear rejection. And so they don't want to approach women. And so it actually is the narcissists and the psychopaths who don't fear any rejection. They boldly go. But a lot of men do have what I would call dating anxiety. And so they get intimidated by women. And then furthermore, even – and this is a speculation, but watching porn I think can have a detrimental effect on both women and men in the following sense of is that we are a species that engages in social comparison. It's one of the things that we do. And I guess maybe when you were talking about envy earlier of envy of other people's accomplishments, that's one facet of that. We compare ourselves to others. And it's a human nature kind of thing. How well am I doing compared to my neighbor or whatever?

But if people are comparing themselves to what they're seeing on porn, then from a woman's perspective, she thinks, well, men are expecting me to be a sexual acrobat in real life. And so it's creating these perhaps detrimental expectations from women. And then men see these guys who can go for 45 minutes and who have schlongs that are actually some recent research is the average male penis is about five and a half inches erect. The average porn star is eight inches long

with the 2002 record top porn star guy, 13 inches. 2002? Sorry, 2022. I was like, bet that someone's beat that guy yeah yeah 2022 yeah yeah the current the current porn star record holder is 13 inches so um so but even if you just take the average eight inches compared to the average guy. So guys, you can imagine looking at this, well, I'm going to feel inadequate, you know, compared to this guy. And maybe women expect this kind of performance and this level of genital size and are going to be intimidated.

And so I think that's going to create what I would call sexual anxiety. So even if they can overcome the dating anxiety, they might have anxiety about turning the dating relationship into a sexual encounter where they might feel, due to watching porn, sexually inadequate or unsure of their abilities. And so these things we know, anxiety tends to cause people to avoid the things that they're anxious about, which of course is the worst thing that you can do. I mean, we know one of the most effective therapies for anxiety problems is cognitive behavior therapy and causes people both to psychologically reframe the issue but also expose themselves to the things they're afraid of. So if you have snake phobia, the best way to

conquer that is you do this successive approximations and then you get to the point where you actually can handle a snake and you don't feel fear. And these specific types of anxiety are they're very curable i mean there's something that we can't cure like schizophrenia we can deal with symptoms but we can't cure them but the specific anxiety is they've had very good success at curing but the worst thing you can do is avoid the things you're afraid of and so i think that these media exposures like Instagram and pornography and even the online dating sites where the similar forms of deception, you mentioned, you know, the filters and, you know, the images that are presented that are totally unrepresentative of what the person looks like, that they occur rampantly on online dating

sites as well. Yeah, of course. The other thing about online dating sites, and I've often thought about this with single people, is the amount of options that you have. It's so extraordinary that it's probably very difficult to get to truly know someone and just get to know them as an individual because you're constantly fielding all of these requests from other people. And so if someone just annoys you even slightly, you're like, on to the next. And you're just swiping back and forth and trying to find someone else. Yeah. I mean, that's a, it's an, on one hand, I would say it's better because you have more

options. So there's the potential of finding that one person who really is a perfect mate for you. But on the other hand, the idea that you would just abandon someone at the slightest bad joke or the slightest weird tick, weird thing. Oh, this guy's not for me. And then what else I got? I have 1400 requests coming in on my dating app. Why would I spend some time with this guy? You know, who only makes X amount of money when this guy makes twice as much. And this guy looks like he's taller and this guy's a better car. And this guy, look at his house. I'm going to talk to this guy. This guy's standing in front of his driveway of this gorgeous house.

That kind of stuff is so unusual for a human being who's a single person in the dating world to have this kind of data, this kind of input, and this kind of stimuli coming your way. There's really never been anything like that. And I am very curious, I mean, as a father of daughters and as a man who grew up without the internet, I'm like, I can't imagine what it's like for someone to try to navigate this world because no one's done it before. It's not like anyone successfully become an instagram hoe and and then went on to raise families and showed you it has zero impact on

the happiness of my relationship like no there's no never been anybody like you before yeah like there's never been a person who has seven million instagram followers just because they have a nice ass. Yeah. It's really never existed before. So, like, those people have to kind of navigate this extraordinary new thing on their own. Without any guidance. Yeah. Yeah, because it is. Yeah. And it's evolutionarily unprecedented.

Yeah. And it's what evolutionists would call a mismatch. There's this phenomenal mismatch between ancestral and modern environments that, as you point out, I think has some positive effects. Like, you know, now you can meet someone. Maybe there's someone – we live in Austin, Texas, but maybe there's someone in San Antonio or Dallas or whatever that would be the perfect mate for us. And then we have that accessible now where we wouldn't in the past. But at the same time, then, it produces this decision paralysis and the psychological stance that there's always someone a little bit better out there,

which is why when people ask me for advice, and I'm not actually, I'm basically a research psychologist, so I'm not primarily in the advice-giving business, but I say meet the person in real life. You know, don't stop, you know, DMing or messaging them, you know, week after week after week, because you have to meet the person in real life before you really know. And you have to meet them, I would imagine, more than one time before their act gets tired. Absolutely. Because people put on an act. Well, yeah.

Not only that, many of the qualities that are critical for long-term mating success, you can't assess in one snapshot like that. So things like emotional stability. How does this person handle stress? Are they moody or are they resilient? Many of these things require exposure over a long period of time and usually in different situations. That's why one other random piece of advice, which everyone should take with a grain of salt, is I sometimes encourage people, if they're getting serious about someone, to go on vacation. Like go to a foreign country where they don't know anybody, where maybe even they don't

speak the language. And so they're kind of forced to experience some stresses, some ambiguities, some novelty, and then you can get a better gauge of how the person responds to the stress and to the novelty as opposed to if you're just always, you know, meeting in, you know, at Cafe Medici. Right. Some glamorous place. You're having cocktails together and everything's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Go to Guatemala.

Yeah. Go backpacking. Yeah. Stay in a hostel together. Yeah, yeah. Go backpacking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stay in a hostel together. Yeah, yeah. Well, and yeah, you want to curate exactly where you go. And so I've been to Guatemala, and there are some dangerous places there, as there are everywhere, of course.

Yes, of course. I mean, Guatemala, as you probably know, I mean there's like extreme economic inequality there. And it's – as a consequence, I think it produced some high crime rates. And people have zero money and they're kind of forced into criminal activity. Great place to test out a new relationship. Yeah, yeah. At a risk. And the woman would find out very clearly how well this guy's going to be a good bodyguard. Yes. Because that's one thing women select on is

not only the physical qualities, is he going to be a good protector, but also is he psychologically, does he have courage and boldness to be a good protector? Even if he has the physical capability of it, is he going to be able to face down someone who's uncomfortably accosting his girlfriend? Right, right. Yeah, that's a giant factor for women that people want to deny exists. There's a lot of weird cultural influences on the denial of these basic premises that you're discussing about why women are attracted to certain men and men are attracted to certain women. That's what's disturbing to me is this sort of wholesale acceptance of this denial where we're, you know, we're deciding that there is no difference. And that, you know, these differences are cultural.

These differences are purely brought upon by the patriarchal society to try to suppress members of the opposite sex. And it's just, it doesn't back up with science. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And even, you know, patriarchy is an interesting one that I've written about in my most recent book where it's kind of bizarre because – and people won't like this either. So talking about scientifically uncomfortable truths. So one is that if you ask the question, historically, it has been true that men have more than women tended to control resources and power. Okay. And that's been true of most cultures, you know, throughout history as far as we know. But then the issue is why?

Well, if you go back to sexual selection theory that we were talking about earlier, part of the causal chain boils down to women's mate preferences. Part of the causal chain boils down to women's mate preferences. So women preferentially select men who have the ability and willingness to acquire and control resources. And so that in turn selects for men who have the motivation to do precisely those things. And so if you ask the question, what is the origin of this thing we call patriarchy, which is usually invoked when you say, what do you mean by patriarchy? We go, oh, I don't know. Everyone knows what it means.

Well, no, it means different things. So one aspect of it is resource control. But, of course, there know, I mean, I'm a scientist. And so you go with the data. object to and find abhorrent the infusion of ideology into the science. And this is indeed happening, as you allude to, it's happening more and more. And I think that I'm hoping that there will be a swing back in the other direction when people will say, hey, look, no, wait, let's keep ideology out of this. Yes.

Because it doesn't have a belonging in science. Isn't that a recent thing, the injection of ideology into science? Well, I don't know. I think it's gotten worse. I think that it's always existed in American psychology to some degree, in American social science anyway, which is, you know... What examples have existed before this era?

And this may not exactly fall in ideology, but I'm sure... Have you had Steve Pinker on your show? Okay, well... A couple times. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm a big fan of his. I've been... As am I. A couple times. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm a big fan of his.

I've been friends with him for many, many years. And his book, The Blank Slate, lays all this out. I'll tell you a story kind of about The Blank Slate when I was in graduate school. So when I was in graduate school, I had multiple mentors, which is a good thing, something I always recommend to my students. things, something I always recommend to my students. But one of these mentors was a woman who her theory is that the reason that you see any sex differences at all when you see them is because socialization. So they dress, parents dress girls in pink, they dress boys in blue, and that's why you see sex differences. They give boys Tonka trucks and baseball bats, and they give girls Barbie dolls. And she even published in the top journals. There was a science documentary literally called The Pinks and the Blues that kind of captures that whole thing.

And I was skeptical as a graduate student. You know, really? So the notion that people come into this world as blank slates makes absolutely no evolutionary sense. You know, the notion that we are just these passive receptacles of whatever, you know, the culture our parents happen to put in there, it can't be. We evolved to be active strategists that pick and choose. Well, no, that doesn't make sense to me or I'm going to follow this person rather than that person. You know, we're not passive receptacle. And that's sort of the implicit notion of the blank slate, is that humans are just these passive absorbers of whatever happened, they happen to be exposed to.

And so weirdly, I had this mentor who believed in the blank slate and that there were no evolved sex differences, no fundamental cross-culturally universal evolved sex differences. And then, you know, here I am many years later studying precisely that, evolved sex differences. And I would say that the science denialism and the ideological denialism will become increasingly difficult because as you undoubtedly know, Joe, there's been what's called the replication crisis in the social sciences and also in medicine as well where people – the payoffs are – you publish high-impact surprising findings and sometimes they don't replicate and often they don't replicate. And so the sex differences that we've been talking about, sex differences in mate preferences, in desire for sexual variety, et cetera, in motivations for having affairs, these are among the largest, most replicable findings in the whole field of

psychology. You know, most, you know, for those of your listeners who are statistically inclined, most effect sizes are, in psychology, are very, very small. You know, there's an effect, you know, but it just barely reaches statistical significance and, you know, translates into like a D statistic of 0.3, 0.25. These are the sex differences that we're talking about are large. You don't even have to – I can show you a graph of them and you don't even have to run the statistics to see, yes, there's something fundamentally wrong.

The bars for men are here. The bars for women are there, or reversed. And so these are large replicable sex differences. And so you really have to be really severely ideologically driven to deny them. And so I like to think that over the long run, the empirical facts of the science will prevail. empirical fact of the science will prevail. But that's why it's been surprising to me that, I mean, some of these have been demonstrated for the last 20, 30 years. And then now we live in this weird time of sex difference denialism, which doesn't make sense. It's not just that we live in a world of sex difference denialism but it's become the primary philosophy it's it's it's not it's not rare it's it's actually promoted in mainstream media it's promoted in television

and print journalism and it's promoted as if it's a fact yeah and by and by some uh social scientists as well or claim to be scientists, yeah. Well, they're leaning into the same sort of ideology that's on campuses. Yeah. And they get captured by it and then they're saying these things so that they're accepted by the Klan. Right, right. By the group. Right, right.

And deviation from those narratives, you know, sometimes comes at some peril. Yes. Very serious social consequences. But, Joe, let me just give an example of how misguided that ideological stance is for women. And this is something I also talk about in my most recent book, sexual harassment. So sexual harassment laws are written in a gender-neutral manner of what's called the reasonable person standard. And the notion is, would a reasonable person view this pattern of conduct, like say making lewd jokes, commenting on someone's physical appearance, asking them out in the workplace, making sexual innuendos, etc., would a reasonable person find this to be sexual harassment?

Well, it turns out, in studies that I've done and other people have done, men and women differ. So women view exactly that same pattern of conduct to be more sexually harassing than men do. Men go, oh, that doesn't seem pretty innocuous to me. By the man or from a woman? Well, both. So if you just say if a man is doing this to a woman, how harassing is that?

Men and women judge that differently. Okay. And the reason that's important is because there is no generic reasonable person. And so we know that in terms of sexual harassment, about 90% of the victims are women, of legitimate sexual harassment are women. And the 10% that are not, they're typically harassed by men. So that is males are the primary perpetrators of sexual harassment. Women are the primary victims. So when you're saying the 10%, you're talking about a male sexually harassing another male. Yes.

But what about women that sexually harass men? Like what percentage of that is like bosses that sexually harass a male? That occurs but at a much lower rate. Right. So less than 1%? Yeah. I would give it a few percent perhaps. But it's statistically pretty rare.

That's interesting though. The primary – even the 10% where it's not men sexually harassing women. It's men sexually harassing men. Right, right. We're gross. Men are disgusting. Yeah, well, that's that desire for sexual variety, which has negative consequences. But so then you go, though, so to the judge and the jury, if the judge and jury are composed of reasonable men, the outcome is going to be

very different than if they're composed of reasonable women. And so this is an example of where adopting a generic reasonable person standard, which implicitly denies that there exist any sex differences, that harms women, at least in cases where the reasonable people doing the judging are men. Right. So if you have a jury of your peers, but your peers happen to only be male, and they're judging whether or not you've been sexually harassed, they might be inclined to deny it. Right, right. Exactly.

And I'll give you like one extreme case. This is an extreme case and not representative, but there was a while back a Texas politician that said, if a woman's going to be raped and it's inevitable, she might as well just lie back and enjoy it. Someone said that? Yeah, this is a politician, a Texas politician. When was this?

This was a while back. I don't remember the exact year. But now, of course, he got a lot of flack for that. But what's astonishing is it also reveals to me this fundamental gap between male and female sexual psychology where men don't understand. psychology where men don't understand. They know that women differ, but they don't sufficiently recalibrate for how different they are. And so I think this is actually a generic problem that my lab is focusing on now. Some of my graduate students like Will Costello and Becca Hannell and Paolo Bacca, we're looking at what we call cross-sex mind reading, where it is a fascinating area where we are all, you, Joe, me, we're all stuck in the interior of our own psychology. That's actually, Russell Brand mentioned this, that's all the experience that he has. And so when we're trying to figure out what's going on in the minds of someone else, we have to make inferences.

Now, if those inferences, if we consult, well, how would I feel if I were in that situation? Well, maybe that's a good starting point if you're making inferences about your own sex. own sex. But if you're making inferences about the opposite sex, you're going to be miscalibrated if you use your own intuitions about your own psychology as a basis for that inference. And so we know, based on my work and other people's work, that there are indeed systematic biases where men and women are both miscalibrated about what's going on in the other sex's mind. And so I think it's very important. This is one of the ways to reduce what you alluded to as this kind of adversarial conflict between the sexes, where some women are slamming all men as part of the patriarchy,

and then there are some men who are slamming all women, you know, and misogynistic, you know, elements of the manosphere. And there's this kind of adversarial stance between the sexes. And I think one solution to bridging that is having deeper scientific knowledge about really that there are these fundamental sex differences in our mating and sexual psychology, and that if you understand those, you'll be in a better position to interact with members of the opposite sex, and you won't make so many of these errors. Interesting, only one way to do that is if you have daughters and sons. So even on those, so you mentioned you have two daughters? Three.

Three daughters. Well, congratulations. Zero sons? Zero sons. Okay. So that's interesting. So I wonder if you had sons, whether you would treat them differently? Oh, for sure. Okay. So why would you treat them? Because they're dangerous. Okay. Sons are dangerous. You have to train them to have discipline and to understand testosterone and understand their urges and not react violently and understand your frontal lobe doesn't fully form until you're 25 years old. You're going to make some shitty decisions.

Okay. Yeah. Because I've done it. I've been there. Okay. Yeah. As have we all. Yeah. I mean, I am a man. When I'm around women, I'm like, okay, I have to figure out how your brain works. I don't know how your brain works.

I'm guessing. I kind of have a rough understanding. Yeah. But it's a map of the territory. It's not lived experience. Yeah. Yeah. And that's true of all of us.

But I want to get back to this because this is what I think is so important. I don't see a path with today's current cultural climate where people are going to accept the scientific differences between the sexes because it's moving in a general direction of denial of that and not just denial of it in terms of their mating strategies, but also their physical capabilities, which is leading to transgender athletes competing as biological women or competing against biological women and dominating in sports. That's a part of this ideology, which is a willful ignorance of the actual basic biological differences between men and women, the psychological differences between men and women, and the biological differences between men and women. And there's a celebrating of ignoring those things, not just ignoring those things, but of deciding to believe a set of ideas that has no basis in science or fact, and in fact, can be refuted by science and facts. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I guess my hope is that this is a transient phase and that this infusion of that ideology into sex difference denialism will eventually collapse.

in which it might collapse is with the sort of work that I'm trying to do, which is in part showing how the sex difference denialism harms women. So an example, you don't even have to go to psychology to do that. Go to the field of medicine. And when they introduced Ambien, the generic Zolpidem, in the medical field, they typically tested these drugs, they don't so much anymore, on men, and they assumed the same thing applies to women. And so with Ambien, they were giving exactly the same doses that were appropriate for men to women. And it turns out women are much more sensitive, even correcting for body size, body weight to Ambien. And so it resulted in negative medical outcomes as a consequence of assuming that sexes were identical.

And same is happening with some other drugs like clonazepam. And so my hope is that by showing – because a lot of people are espousing this ideology, I think, because they think that any difference, if you find any sex difference, it's going to be used against women, against denying women or discriminating against women. I think that's part of what's motivating or animating the ideology. Well, why do you think there's that inclination? Why do people think that? I don't know. I think part of it has been historical. So we've seen, and this has been

a fascinating cultural change in our lifetimes, where it used to be you go back 30 years and males were dominant in almost all fields. And among undergraduates, there were more males than females, doctors, lawyers, et cetera. And so there was this view that women were discriminated against. And so there was a big movement to open the doors to the workplace and to higher education for women. Now what we've seen, and this is really remarkable, is a reversal when it comes to education and increasingly income. So for example, at University of Texas here in Austin, there's a sex ratio imbalance at the undergraduate level. It's about 54% women and about 46% men, which may not seem like a huge difference,

but it's actually a profound difference when it comes to the mating market. And this is happening not just in the United States. It's happening in all of Western Europe, as well as South Korea, Japan, etc. Women are outpacing men in education. I think I have a hypothesis about why that's the case is you take off the restraints, you make things open to everybody. Well, we know women personality-wise are more conscientious than men.

Men are more likely, they go in through the K through 12 schools. Men are more likely to have ADD. They are less likely to be able to sit still and attend to the school and whatever. And so these girls get better grades going up. And so they're better qualified to get into the elite colleges. And so you have more women represented in these colleges and universities. And then maybe combined with the sex difference in things like online gaming, you know, where many more males than females, you know, get addicted to online gaming and that sort of thing.

And then online pornography is another one, which I think might have this effect of kind of sapping men's motivation to meet women in real life. I think it might sort of take the sexual edge off, possibly. Getting back to your issue about all this modern technology that our brains are being bombarded with in the modern environment, but we're seeing this true reversal in the educational domain, and it's creating dramatic problems of mating. So I alluded to a couple before, but just to mention, I'm actually working on a book with Chris Williamson, who I think you know as well. He's here in Austin, too.

He's great. Yeah, he's a wonderful guy. And we've become friends, and our interests turn out to coincide very well. And he's an excellent communicator of science. I don't know if you've seen his podcast. Yeah, I've had him on, too. Yeah, yeah. I saw that episode. I thought that was terrific. But anyway, he and I are writing a book on this, and we're at the early stages of it. But we're trying to identify what these big problems are that are occurring in the mating domain. And one is that women are getting more educated.

And as they get educated, they advance to the higher degrees. They are also getting older. And so they're transitioning toward the latter end of their fertile window. And this is another key sex difference that we haven't talked about yet, is that women's reproductive span is compressed into a much smaller number of years compared to men's. Men can and sometimes do have kids in their 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera, whereas women don't. Their fertility drops off very sharply. The eggs have an expiration date, as it turns out.

One of the things that I talked to Chris about that I'd love to hear your perspective on is the effect that birth control pills have on women and reproduction and their reproductive strategy and the way it affects how they are attracted to different, specifically different kinds of men. Yeah. Yeah. There's some research on that. I want to see it replicated. So there's some work that shows that some of it done by Sarah Hill, by the way, a professor up at Texas Christian University, a former student of mine. And she's superb. She's written a book called Your Brain on Birth Control, which I recommend. She would be cool to have on your podcast.

Yeah, I'd love to talk to her about that. That to me is a very strange aspect of our society. Yes. That we're introducing these endogenous hormones to millions of women on a regular basis, and it's affecting their choices. Yes. Yeah. And there's some evidence for that, that women who, let's say, get married or make that commitment decision when they're on birth control and then get off it, all of a sudden find themselves unhappy with their regular relationship. So we'll have to see.

As I said, I want to see this work replicated a bit more before I believe it. But I think there's clearly something there. And Sarah Hill would be the perfect person to talk to about that. But, yeah, that's another example of how we're introducing these novel, evolutionarily novel technologies into our system, and we don't really know what the collateral effects are. When you're talking about the effects of birth control on the choices that you make in a relationship, and that the women, when they get off birth control, that

they're no longer interested in their current mate. Like, what are the characteristics that lead them to be dissatisfied when they get off birth control that allowed them when they're on birth control to be attracted? Yeah, I wish I could answer that question, but it's been a while since I've read Sarah's book, and so I would defer to her on that. But it is one of many things that people have to deal with, particularly women have to deal with, right? Because a male birth control pill, there was one that they were developing, but it radically reduced testosterone, which I think is going to be very unattractive to men. And I have a suspicion that most men are not going to want to take that. But the birth control pill for women has had a very bizarre change in the way women see men, are attracted to men, the type of men they're attracted to when they're on that.

Right. And there's some evidence that these hormonal contraceptives can also influence in a negative way sexual desire and orgasmic ability. So again, perhaps collateral damage that no one anticipated. Do you think that the differences in the sexes, is that the area of your work that has had the most pushback because of this ideological argument that people have that there is no difference and it's all cultural? Yeah, absolutely. Have you had debates with people about this? Yes, I have. Yeah, in scientific meetings. So there was one with a woman named Alice Egli, who has long promoted what she male. We're going to put you in this role. And, you know, your daughters, they're females. We're going to put them in a different role and that all sex differences are a product of these, quote, role assignments, you know, which is, I think, turned out to be, I think, I guess it's inherently a blank slate kind of theory that has been pretty soundly refuted by, again, another former student of mine. Apologize for keep mentioning former students, but this is David Schmidt, who's at Brunel University. And he's done massive cross-cultural

studies and finds that these sex differences are, in fact fact larger in gender egalitarian countries. She'd go to Norway and Sweden, Denmark, Finland, where there's an even more explicit sort of gender neutral and no sex difference ideology and finds that the sex differences are larger there than in the countries that are supposedly more gender inegalitarian. And so it flatly contradicts the social rule theory because it says, no, you eliminate these – you create gender equality in the culture and the sex differences will disappear. And it turns out, no, they don't. And in some cases, they get larger. What is the hypothesis in terms of why they get larger?

Well, that's unclear. It might be, and this is speculation, it might be that in where you have greater freedom for each sex to do what they're naturally inclined to do, then the sex differences emerge more strongly, the natural sex differences. That makes sense. But I don't know. No one's really pinned down the why they get larger. And so when this argument is presented to people like that woman who believes that these behavior characteristics are just because of roles that you're assigned. How does she respond to that?

She hasn't so far, as far as I'm aware, to these data. These are data that have come in the last five years or so, and they keep, you know, study after study after study. And if it was just one study, you could say, okay, I'm going to ignore that. But now there's a whole raft of studies that show exactly the same thing. So my guess is that the history of science when it's written will not look kindly on that. But maybe you've heard this, there's this cliche that scientists don't ever change their mind. They just die and are replaced by younger people who don't grow up with the same belief system. So for a person like that who has this belief system that seems to be contradicted by facts, what is the encouragement for someone like that to exist? Like why is that type of person who is giving out this incorrect data and espousing this easily provable ideology?

Like what is the motivation? In cases like hers, the woman I just mentioned, they've built their entire reputation, their entire careers on this theory. And so kind of admitting to the fact that the theory doesn't hold any water. They have no career. Yeah. It basically causes their status and prestige to plummet. So what do they do? They just dig their head in the sand and just – Yeah, most of them just cling to the theories and very few change their mind.

And how do they get away with that? I would imagine that if you're talking about academics, that they would want to find out what is true, what is provable, and what should be taught. find out what is true, what is provable, and what should be taught. And in this circumstance, I would imagine they would be challenged by their peers. And they would say, your work is bullshit. Like what you're doing is muddying the water and making it far more difficult for people like us, who are actually looking at the data objectively and trying to come to a conclusion that's beneficial for our understanding of human beings. What you're doing is grifting, and we can't have that. Right, right. So that's a great point, and I think there are a couple answers to that, and I'll just mention two elements that I think

are contributing to that bad outcome. Okay, one is that these people, and the one that I just mentioned, they're self replicating. So they produce students who then get jobs and espouse the same theories that they do. So there's part of that, that's one. But I think there's even a deeper answer to your question. And that is that I don't think we evolved to be dispassionate scientists who just look at the data and judge and then change our minds accordingly. I think we evolved, and there are some people like Dan Sperber and others who argue this, I think persuasively, that we evolved to be persuaders. We evolved to influence other people, to be manipulators, if you will, and then to use a more negative term on it. And that it's almost you have to get outside of your own

psychology to be a dispassionate scientist and say, okay, look, I'm willing to, I'm going to look at the facts. And I like to think, and maybe I'm self-delusional, that I'm one of these people that will change minds. And as I mentioned, I mentioned one that I have changed my mind on, which is that dual mating good genes hypothesis where I used to, you know, talk about it. This is why women have affairs, and the data don't support it now in my view. But I think that it requires getting out of our own psychology and maybe even changing the reward structure. And that's going to be very, very, very difficult. So in other words, rewarding people for being willing to accept data that contradicts their ideology.

And so normally, I mean, that's why I think science is a good method. You know, normally – I mean, that's why I think, you know, science is a good – it's a method. And it's not a perfect method, but it's a good method in the sense that it's supposed to be self-correcting. So if, Joe, you have a theory that proposes X and I have a theory that proposes Y, then other people will get into the fray and independent researchers will do research and then they will discover, you know, well, do the data support Joe or David's theory? And then so there's a self-correcting nature to the science ideally. But that ideal is rarely achieved and it's especially difficult to achieve when it comes to talking about humans. If you're talking about quarks or muons or some details of chemistry or something, people are able to be more dispassionate. Also, if you're talking about other species, if you're talking about peacocks, people are willing to be, okay, I can objectively look at peacocks and try to figure out what's going on. But when it comes to humans, all bets are off on that.

What a messy creature we are. Yes. But an interesting creature, I think. Oh, fascinating. Beyond fascinating. But it's just, to me, it's so curious when these bizarre, messy characteristics, they interfere with our understanding of reality. Because I think that what you're outlining is positive, negative, interesting, fascinating, disturbing characteristics of males and females. And I think these are this is very important to study and understand when that hits the wall of ideology. And then all of a sudden you're no longer allowed to look at those things because they are sexist or because they are misogynistic or because they have been labeled in a very certain way and that looking at things and framing things through the eyes of science and just using data becomes problematic and that these people are

actually academics who are promoting this idea yeah and that, like you said, self-replicate. So they self-replicate, excuse me, self-replicate. They have now students who are also promoting these ideas and those students go on to become professors who are promoting these same ideas. None of them were based in reality and it's all funded and people are paying money to send their children to school so their children come back and say well mom and dad i don't know if you know this but there are no differences between men and women and everything is cultural and this is all bullshit and this is all the patriarchy and you're like what the fuck am i paying for my kids brains getting broken yeah and and And strangely enough, I think

there's almost an inverse correlation between number of years of higher education and ability to kind of see reality. So like, yes, if you stop just people on the street, the average man or woman, you know, and said, are there sex differences? They would say, well, yeah, sure. And they could probably even tell you what many of them are. But it's like this, yeah, inculcation of ideology, which has unfortunately infected universities in ways that I find appalling and have gotten worse in my lifetime. And I always, I got into this field precisely for the reason that you allude to, because I'm interested in finding out about human nature, wherever that leads me, what makes people tick, what motivates people, what gets people out of bed in the morning. I have no interest in maintaining a position that is empirically incorrect.

Right. Well, but it's because you're not a grifter. But unfortunately, academics encourages grifting in a way that you don't have to exist in the real world. And you go from being a student in the university to eventually teaching at a university. And you will spend no time in the real world outside of that. And then your very existence and everything that you get from validation from your peers and your students, it's all based on this grift that you have been taught and are now teaching and that you will argue against empirical reality. You will argue against science and data because it does not support your grift. And that grift is being supported by a university. Right, right.

Which is wild. supported by a university. Right, right. Which is wild. Yeah, but that's why I hope that there will be a swing back of the pendulum. How is that going to happen, though? Because it doesn't seem like that's moving in any direction. Yeah, well- Remotely similar to that right now.

I think it is, though. Really? Yeah, there are some universities, University of Chicago, MIT, there are some universities that are starting to push back against this ideology and get back to the business. How are they doing that? Well, one, for example, is reinstating the standardized testing like SATs and GREs. So many universities throughout the country, and this happened very recently, eliminated them. And one of the problems with eliminating them is that you cut off one of the primary paths by which lower socioeconomic kids can advance. Because you have kids who grew up in lower SES groups in poverty and slums or whatever,

but they score high on these tests. That provides an elevator for them to get ahead in the world. And you take away those tests. You eliminate what is now known to be one of the primary routes by which people can become upwardly mobile from those groups. And it was eliminated on, I think, ideological grounds because it was purported to show that the tests are biased. And there's been a kind of anti-testing movement period. And there's been a kind of anti-testing movement period. But now there's some university, I think MIT is one, that said, OK, well, we eliminated it.

Actually, now we're reinstating it because we realized that was a mistake. So I think there are at least some signs that there is pushback against this ideology. But maybe I'm being in two rose-colored glasses and maybe I'm overly optimistic about it. I like to think that reality kind of has a tether on people's belief systems in the long run, even if they're distorted by the ideology in the short run. This sort of ideology that you're seeing from kids today, it's very infectious. And it seems like it's a bit of a mind virus. And it's something that if you don't espouse to these ideas, if you don't agree with these ideas, you're ostracized from the community. the community and in academic circles in in universities and with a lot of young people that are trying to establish themselves as being a person of moral high ground who is doing the right thing is on the right side of history like this is a very compelling narrative that people are going along with and it has

to do with gender identity it has to do with politics it has to do with their thoughts on the climate change crisis. There's so many different factors that are all tied in to this one very specific and very aggressive ideology. And I don't see any pushback against it. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, I, you know, I, of course, teach the science in my courses. I teach a large undergrad. Do people complain? We've gotten very few complaints.

So I teach pretty large classes. So I have literally hundreds of students. I teach one online class that's simultaneously broadcast. The students have to have their computer open. And then one in-person class has about 120 or so. But every semester, I teach, say, 500 to 600 students, and there are always a couple of complaints. But before I taught at this last time, precisely because of the ideological swings that you

have mentioned that we've been talking about, I went to the chair of my department, and I said, look, I've been teaching this course now, co-teaching it with a colleague of mine, Dr. Cindy Meston, which is great because having a male and female saying the same things basically is very effective. We teach a course on human sexuality. And I went to my chair and I said, look, there's been this ideological shift of sex difference denial. I said, but as a professor, I am obligated to teach the science. And I said, I'm not going to deviate from that. And I'm going to be teaching about sex, biological sex, which has a very clear definition having to do with size of the gamete, size of the sex cells, where males are the ones with the small ones, females are the ones with the large ones. It's one of the true binaries in nature, if you will, from a biological standpoint.

It's different from identity and gender identity. And I said, I'm going to be teaching about this, and I'm going to be teaching about sex differences that exist and that the science supported. And I said, but I'm not going to do it unless I know I have your backing and the backing of the dean. And he assured me, chair of my department, which I give him great credit for, he assured me that absolutely. Because I said, look, the odds of me teaching this stuff, which I've been doing for many years now, the odds of me teaching this stuff and not getting any complaints is about zero, given I'm teaching multiple hundreds of people. So he said, look, if we get 2%, 3% or a dozen complaints or half a dozen or whatever, he said he's totally fine with that.

And he supports my adherence to the science without the infusion of ideology. So I felt comforted by that. But I wanted to get that assurance. And it may be a reflection of how much the ideology has infected universities that I felt for the first time in my career compelled to go to him and say, look, I want your backing on this. Otherwise, I'm not going to teach it. You know, and I can teach something else. That is interesting when you consider how long you've been teaching. Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, this stage of the game, you're like, hey, I'm going to teach facts. Is that okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. It's crazy. It's crazy because that should be, of course, David, that's what you do. You teach facts. Right.

And that's what I thought universities were supposed to be about. Not only facts but the free exchange of ideas, you know, that there aren't ideas that are, you know, can't be discussed openly and rationally and then the freedom of – I thought that's what universities were all about. Have you had notable exchanges with students where they, like, confronted you and did not believe that what you're saying was true or should be taught? Yeah, I haven't. Really? Yeah, I haven't. And I'm pretty open with the students up front. If you have arguments or evidence that contradicts what I'm saying, then I want to hear about them. But so far, that's not the case.

But I'm pretty careful in what I teach and I'm pretty careful also to label things as well-established or some evidence for – or this is a speculation. Yes. So to mark my assertions appropriately, cautiously. Well, it's so unfortunate there is pushback against it because all this data and all this science is really fascinating. It's so interesting to see because, of course, we like to think of ourselves as something different than animals. We like to think of ourselves as a higher, more evolved being. But when you see the evolutionary influences and the reasons why people of, you know, who are male tend to do this and females tend to do that and the differences in their mating strategies,

it's very, very interesting. Yeah. And it resonates. Like when you're saying these things, I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And in the real world, in a real world application, it is very interesting. So it's very unfortunate that there is any pushback against it. Yeah.

But, you know, on the positive side, and maybe this is my overly optimistic nature, I mean, I do feel blessed in a certain way that, you know, I get to do this for a living. I get to study these fascinating topics for a living and to teach them and to develop my program of research, you know, in this domain. And there are, throughout history, very few societies that could support people who were able to do this. But I think it's so important because the things that I'm studying are so central because we are a sexually reproducing species. And what that means is everything we do has to ultimately go through this bottleneck of sex and reproduction. Not that reproduction is necessarily a goal or a conscious goal that we have, but we are the end results of a long and unbroken chain of ancestors,

each of whom succeeded in the mating game. They succeeded in selecting a fertile partner, in attracting that fertile partner, in being reciprocally chosen by that partner, in having successful sex with that partner. And since we're a high parental investment species, typically investing heavily in the offspring so that they survive. And as descendants of this chain of successful ancestors, we are the beneficiaries. We've inherited the adaptations that led to their success. And to me, it's a fascinating scientific endeavor to try to uncover those dimensions of human nature that are absolutely critical. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I'm so happy that people like you are out there writing these books.

Yeah. You know, to spend that much time studying it and the fact that it's just – it's so – it's just so interesting. It's such a fascinating aspect of being a human being and to recognize these motivations in yourself and in other people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's – I mean mating affects everybody. Yeah. You know, even if you decide

I'm going to opt out of the mating market and be single for the rest of my life, I mean, mating affects everybody. Yeah, it does. Now, you've written so many different books on mating. The Dangerous Passion, Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex. Yes, yeah, yeah.

That one focuses on jealousy and infidelity. Well, yeah. For the reason that I mentioned before of paternity uncertainty, that unless men or ancestors were able to solve that problem, or at least solve it to a reasonable degree, we wouldn't have the mating system we would have, which is, you know, we have a long-term pair-bonded high investment mating strategy. That strategy would not exist if that problem had not been solved. And jealousy has been a key to solving that. Yeah. It's interesting because we only think of that as a character flaw. That's what we think of when we think of jealousy. Yeah. Well, this book,

and that's the rap that it's gotten. And I mean, of course, jealousy has tremendous negative effects. It feels psychologically terrible. It leads to violence. It leads to even suicidal thoughts. It's an unpleasant emotion, but it's necessary. So the way that I liken it, and this is maybe an inapt metaphor, but to a smoke alarm. So we have smoke alarms because even if there's a low probability of a fire, we want to know about it so that we can put it out, we won't lose our house. And jealousy is like that. It won't lose our house. And jealousy is like that. It's like a smoke alarm. It says, hey, I'm getting signals that my partner might be unfaithful. Jealousy. So the idea that it's a part of the natural sort of process to make sure that you are, your investment is being protected in the mate, that you are not being deceived, that like, this is what the motivation is. This is where it all

comes from. Yeah. Yeah. And, and women as well as men have it. Now men have to solve the paternity uncertainty problem, but women have to solve the problem of mate retention that is keeping a guy investing in her and her children over the long term as opposed to him deciding, I'm going to do mate switching and go off with thy neighbor's wife. Right, right, right. physical pain. Physical pain is extremely unpleasant to experience, but without it, we would expose our bodies to damaging situations. We keep putting our hand on the hot stove or getting stabbed by sharp objects, et cetera. And so painful emotions are not necessarily maladaptive emotions. And I would put jealousy as one of those. That's why it's interesting when you just think about all the things that motivate people and all the various ticks and weird aspects of our psychology,

that it's really all these systems that have evolved over time to ensure reproductive success and ensure a good collection of resources and that you can provide and you stay safe. And, you know, we just think of it as being a person. But when you break it down to the core elements and the motivations for these things and the evolutionary advantages of these things, it's so interesting to think of us as almost like a piece of code. Yeah, yeah. Well, I find it interesting as well.

And I feel fortunate to study humans, which I think are the most interesting species. Well, they're the only ones who will push back on the studies. Yeah, that's right. Um, so, uh, they're the only ones who will push back on the studies. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. If you study rats or whatever, you're not going to get pushed back. They don't seem to care at all about whatever the science is. Yeah. That is weird about us, right?

Like we are, we're not just are deeply in denial, but we're also find other people who agree with that denial so that we can like form off these little echo chambers and argue against the data. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think part of that, we haven't talked about this dimension, but part of it is I think we're a coalitional species. That is, we want tribes, you know, and we want our tribes to predominate or dominate.

We want our tribes to increase in number. And so people – that's why people are always trying to recruit people to their tribe, which is often or at least sometimes an ideologically-based tribe. And that's why I say that we're – I mean we're coalitional animals designed to influence and manipulate and persuade others more than we are dispassionate scientists. I mean it's a weird thing. Now, I think that there are some features of our psychology that are scientific. Like if you were oblivious, if you failed to keep track of where the berries were blooming or where the game was available for hunting, I mean, you would have been in bad shape. There is a reality out there that we had to keep track of. But with these social manipulations, I don't know, for some reason it can become untethered from reality. reality yeah that is uh well i guess it's

just we don't want to admit the reality sometimes for whatever reason because if it doesn't doesn't it doesn't align with whatever belief system you have whatever view you have of yourself whatever this uh i mean it just just in terms of physical equality it doesn't align like the the reality of life is that it's not necessarily that fair there's some people that have a much better genetic role of the dice than you and there's some people that are born into an extraordinary circumstance and there's some people that are very feminine there's some people that are very masculine and the idea that this is sort of like even playing field is just preposterous yeah yeah yeah absolutely and i mean i would say that the you know in the history of science there has been a

denial of the science in many fields so even like you know then as you know the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, that the earth was flat. You know, there have been these kind of mistaken views that people clung to. But as I said, when it comes to humans and our psychology, there's somehow that gets ramped up exponentially. Yeah. It's ideology and psychology combined and they go to war. Right. Yeah. psychologists. This is with someone you also had on a while back, Bill Von Hippel.

He's down in Australia now. But he and I published this article where we studied, it was about 400 social psychologists as part of an elite psychology organization. And we asked them, like, what if we discovered that men were better at X than women, like say better at spatial rotation ability? Or what if we discovered that women were better than men? And people wrote that they were comfortable, much more comfortable when women were superior to men. Yeah. And even gave kind of contradictory statements and said – and even self-reflective some of them. It said like, I find it odd that I find the notion that women are superior to men, say, at verbal ability much more comfortable than the men are superior to women at spatial rotation

ability. And this seems odd in my own psychology. So they were having themselves trouble kind of reconciling. But also we asked them questions like, well, would it be good or bad if it turned out that there were sex differences in domains X, Y, or Z? And a lot of them said, well, it would really be bad. It would be horrible for humanity if somehow these sex differences turned out to exist. And so, again, that's – Well, clearly that's coming from something they're being taught. Well, and ideology, you know, where, you know, and I can see, you know, if I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, historically, there was discrimination against women. And I know this,

you know, because I've been friends with many women in academia. And early on in my career, I had a good friend who she was at the same career stage as me. We were both assistant professors at Harvard. And then she went on to another job and I went on to another job. And she said that she told me the story about her. look, I'm giving you a lower pay raise than a guy who's equally qualified in the department because he has a family and they're on a single income, whereas you have a husband who also works, and so I'm giving you a lower pay raise. Well, that's discrimination based on sex. She should not be discriminated against, salaried.

And so there has been at least some history of discrimination against women on grounds like that and beliefs that women were inferior to men in certain domains. And so I think part of the motivation for the sex difference denial is that history. history. And I think getting back to the pushback notion, I think that there are younger women, and I see this, who are pushing back against this notion. They're saying, well, yeah, this is the view. This is our mothers and grandmothers experience this, but we're not experiencing this kind of discrimination. So those battles no longer need to be fought. And so, I don't know, I'm cautiously optimistic that things will improve on that front well i think ultimately things always improve over time with information and with the evolution of society in general and i think our society is clearly at least moving in

a way that's evolving my concern about all this stuff is always that while it's moving in a good direction that grifters get involved and there's there is this natural inclination to try to acquire an exorbitant amount of praise and attention for your positions on things yeah and you know you're seeing this because of social media it's very much accentuated. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, where self-promoters are being rewarded at the expense of scientists who are not necessarily great self-promoters. Well, if you want good data, David's your man. He's got a bunch of books.

You've got The Evolution of Desire, The Murderer Next Door, The Dangerous Passion, and When Men Behave Badly. All of it. And so all of it primarily about sexual strategies for mating, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So mating is you can run, but you can't hide from mating. It affects just about everything that humans do.

And if I thank you for mentioning my books, Joe, if I were to alert your listeners to one, I would say the first one to start with would be The Evolution of Desire because that gives a broad overview of human mating strategies.

Strategies of Human Mating, David M. Buss. It's available. Did you do the audio version of it? I didn't do the audio version. There is an audio version out there, though. Why didn't you do it? I didn't do it because, I don't know, I don't think my voice is that good. And they gave me the option to. But when I listened to some professional readers, I thought, actually, they're doing a better job than I am. So I ceded that to them. Okay. But those books are available and it's really fun to talk to you. And I really appreciate what you're doing because I think, especially in this confusing day and age, it's very important

to hear the actual science and the actual data behind these things. Yeah. Thank you, Joe. And thank you. It's been an honor to talk to you and to have such an interesting conversation. You know, we need more of these in the world. I agree. I think we do. And thank you. Really appreciate you. All right.

Bye, everybody. Thank you.