David McRaney : Journalist

David McRaney | Journalist

David Buss and the Mating Game

David Buss knows what women want, but then again, he also knows what men want, and it's something else entirely.

It isn't often a new scientific discipline arises which can claim to explain in detail just what Fergie means when she sings, "They want my treasure so they get their pleasures from my photo," or the deeper evolutionary mechanisms behind Chris Rock's observation that no man would ever buy a house if women were willing to get it on in a cardboard box.

A professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Buss is the world's leading evolutionary psychologist, and he visited the University of Southern Mississippi Friday at the Fourth Annual Hildman Colloquium in Psychology to talk about human sexuality and mating practices, the focus of much of his research.

As with Freud and Skinner before him, Buss is making waves beyond the academic community by explaining our behavior in a way some are hesitant to accept.

The idea behind evolutionary psychology is this: human beings have been evolving on this planet for a long time, and we have adapted behaviors to deal with all the situations we have been most likely to encounter over millennia. Our strongest and oldest behaviors deal with problems our ancestors faced concerning survival and reproduction.

This leads to all sorts of problems because our modern lives are so far removed from the kind of lives our ancestors led. Our brains were forged during thousands of years in the harsh elements where fat and calories were scarce. Now, all of the sudden, fat and calories are plentiful and easy to obtain. The result? People eat too much, get fat and die of heart attacks.

"An evolutionary perspective will ultimately inform all of the social sciences," said Buss. "Everything that involves human behavior is driven by evolved psychological mechanisms in combination with modern inputs. It sounds bold or brash or arrogant to make such a statement, but to me the logic is inescapable."

It's an easy concept to fall in love with. Just like birds fly south and spiders spin webs without having to be taught, human beings have a great deal of innate behaviors designed to help us survive, thrive and reproduce.

Buss' presentation at USM, titled "Sexual Conflict in Human Mating," dealt with what much of his research deals with - what do we want in our mates, and how do we go about getting it?

As a former professor at both Harvard and The University of Michigan, his primary interests include human mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, prestige, status and social reputation, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and stalking.

He is the author of four books on those subjects, each brimming with cross-cultural research.

In "The Evolution of Desire," Buss writes about how both men and women want to pass on their genes to the next generation. But, there are substantial differences between what men and women must invest. As a result, women and men have completely different strategies for both the long-term and short-term when it comes to mating.

For women, an obligatory nine months will be spent carrying the child. After that, breastfeeding and child rearing will likely follow. For our ancestors, living in the state of nature, this meant a great deal of danger and loss of productivity. A lot can go wrong in the wild, and being pregnant is no picnic. So, women must invest a great deal into mating and be particularly selective when choosing with whom to mate.

Women look for men with resources or a lot of potential to acquire them. But, they also need to make sure a mate will share those resources and be willing to stick around to help rear the child. The higher his status in the social group, the more likely he is to have resources. The older he is, the more likely he is to have status. The more able to defend against attackers and the less likely he is to move his resources over to another woman or harm her or her children, the better a mate he is. Buss notes "evolution favored women who were highly selective about their mates."

For men, a minimum of a few seconds will be spent creating the child. After that, they can go about their business. So, statistically it's a better strategy for men to mate as often as possible with as many women as possible. Men look for signs of youth, health and fertility. Hip-to-waist ratio, lustrous hair, unblemished skin, supple breasts, good teeth, healthy weight and youth are all good indicators of the overall fecundity of a female.

But, men also know to be successful at mating they need to at least appear as though they fit all the characteristics women are looking for. So men actively seek resources and display them as well as offering commitment. Women too, change their appearance and advertise their fertility.

You can see the results of these strategies all around us and in every culture and era. Women do tend to go for older men with money or the potential to earn it. Men likewise go for young, attractive women regardless of their social status.

Among homosexuals, these strategies are turned on members of the same sex, according to Buss. "Whereas male homosexuals frequently search for new and varied sex partners lesbians are far more likely to settle into intimate, lasting, committed relationships," wrote Buss in "The Evolution of Desire."

Throughout his work, Buss stresses we still have a lot of control over how our evolved mechanisms are expressed. Just as we can choose to avoid cheeseburgers and fries despite our evolved desires for fatty food, we too can choose how we seek out the opposite sex and treat long-term mates. Of course, we can also adapt those strategies to match our new circumstances - think about Anna Nicole Smith marrying a decrepit billionaire or Bill Clinton cheating with an intern.

A report issued Monday by the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, goes into detail just how these evolved mechanisms are changing the way our nation's girls are dressing and behaving.

Images of youthful and attractive females are overflowing in every medium, from television shows to magazines to the Internet. According to Buss' work, women of all ages see these as competitors and adjust their appearance accordingly. Men see them as potential mates, and adjust their expectations. The APA report suggests the age at which girls begin attempting to attract boys is plummeting.

According to the APA, the three most common mental health problems among young girls and women are "eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression."

Most shocking is a quote from one expert in the Washington Post who said the average age a girl begins to dress to attract "begins by 4 now."

Buss' research would seem to point to these problems arising from friction between our evolved mechanisms and our resulting behavior.

Buss' work is not without criticism. Some feminists, scientists and philosophers have openly objected to his research as being either too andocentric, apologetic to unethical behavior or caustic towards the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. Alternative theories abound in other disciplines to explain many of the behaviors evolutionary psychology claims to understand. Some see Buss' work as an overly reductionist way of viewing human behavior. Buss has countered these ideas in many interviews, often explaining he is simply pointing out the way things are, not how they ought to be.

"We're not lumbering robots, insensitive and oblivious to the environment, as some people mistakenly believe," Buss told the Evolutionist in 1996, adding "people are worried about anything that threatens to predict their behavior, because if you can predict someone's behavior you can control it."

According to Buss, the great benefit of evolutionary psychology is the way it could allow us to better control our negative and harmful behaviors.

"People think it's genetic determinism but it's not; they think human behavior is intractable or unchangeable, whereas the opposite is true, the more knowledge you have the more you'll be able to change it," Buss told the Evolutionist.

The application of Buss' work is seeping into many areas of behavioral research. In a recent L.A. Times guest column, Buss spoke of the buzz surrounding the astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak who drove nearly 1,000 miles to attack a rival for the man she loved. He referred to jealousy as "possibly the most destructive emotion housed in the human brain."

He added, "It's the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide, according to analyses I did of data over the last century."

We already take pills for depression and weight loss notes Buss, but he wonders about a future when humans might take pills for jealousy or stalking - and he wonders if it would be a good idea.

All of our unwanted behavior is likely rooted in some sort of evolved mechanism, according to evolutionary psychologists. People diet and abstain from extra-marital sex even if the desire to overeat and cheat lingers in the bottom of their brains.

Psychologists like Buss are exploring one of our oldest struggles - the duality of man. They aren't saying we always return to the roots of our behavior where powerful carnal desires roam, but sometimes we do.

"We still don't know what all of our evolved psychological mechanisms are yet," said Buss. Tampering with one of them, like depression, has a cascading effect on many of our other behaviors.

According to evolutionary psychologists, understanding our animal side, our instincts, and being able to predict them promises to give us all a particularly human advantage - control.

Originally published in The Student Printz on February 22, 2007