David M. Buss > Quotes

“Sincerity in personal advertisements is a code word for commitment, used by women to screen out men seeking casual sex without any commitment.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Moodiness also functions as an assessment device to test the strength of the bond.17 Women use moodiness to impose small costs on their mates and then use men’s reactions to the costs as a gauge of their degree of commitment. If a man is unwilling to tolerate these costs, it is a cue that his commitment is low. Men’s willingness to tolerate the costs and to be responsive to the increasing demands for investment signals a greater level of commitment. Either way, the woman gains valuable information about the strength of the bond.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“يتعين اعتبار تشارلز داروين كأول عالم نفس تطوري بسبب نبوءته في نهاية بحثه بعنوان "في أصل الأنواع 1859" حيث يقول:
أرى في المستقبل البعيد مجالات مفتوحة لأبحاث أكثر أهمية. وسيقوم علم النفس على أساس جديد يتمثل في ضرورة اكتساب كل قوة عقلية وكل كفاءة بالتدريج.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“The deception study found that men use several tactics to deceive women about their intentions. Men pretend to be interested in starting a relationship when they are not really interested and act as if they care about a woman even though they really do not. Most men are fully aware that feigning commitment is an effective tactic for short-term sexual attraction, and they admit to deceiving women by this means. Men using Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps admit that they pretend to be open to being in a relationship even though their real interest lies in racking up large numbers of short-term sexual conquests.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as three
years of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture were
able to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent.
This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four.”
― David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“The fact that conflicts between men and women originate from our evolved mating psychology is disturbing to some people, partly because it contradicts widely held beliefs. Many of us have learned the traditional view that these conflicts are reflections of a particular culture whose practices perturb the natural harmony of human nature. But the anger that women feel when sexually coerced and the rage that men feel when cuckolded arise from our evolved mating strategies, not from capitalism, culture, patriarchy, or socialization. Evolution operates by the ruthless criterion of reproductive success, no matter how repugnant we may find the strategies produced by that process, and no matter how abhorrent the consequences of those strategies may be.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Feminist scholars rightly stress the importance of power in sexual conflict. It must be recognized, however, that men’s motivations for power, status, and resources exist in part because women have preferred to mate with men who possess power, status, and resources. Neglecting this part of the causal origins of sexual conflict will impede efforts to alter it.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“The consequences of women’s attractiveness for a man’s social status are critical. Everyday folklore tells us that our mate is a reflection of ourselves. Men are particularly concerned about status, reputation, and hierarchies because elevated rank has always been an important means of acquiring the resources that make men attractive to women. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect that a man will be concerned about the effect that his mate has on his social status”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Emotional support is yet another facet of commitment, revealed by behavior such as being available in times of trouble and listening to the partner’s problems.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Male sexual jealousy is the leading cause of the murder of adult women, accounting for between 50 and 70 percent of all such homicides.8 Police know this. When women are murdered, the prime suspects are boyfriends, husbands, ex-boyfriends, and ex-husbands. Although jealousy sometimes motivates women to murder, only 3 percent of murdered men are killed by their romantic partners or exes, and many of these female-perpetrated homicides are women defending themselves against a jealously violent man.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“First, intelligence is indeed correlated with how long individuals live. One study found that each additional IQ point, such as 107 versus 106, was linked with a 1 percent reduction in the relative risk of death (O’Toole & Stankov, 1992). This means that having an IQ 15 points above average (115 as opposed to 100) would decrease your mortality risk by 15 percent. Second, IQ is also linked with sublethal injuries, which themselves can hurt an individual’s inclusive fitness. In the modern world, those with lower IQs are more likely to drown; get into bicycle, motorcycle, and car accidents; become injured through explosions, falling objects, and knives; and even be hit by lightning (Gottfredson, 2007). Although no individual cause, considered alone, is strongly linked with IQ, when you add them all up, they cumulate to an increased risk of injury and death.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“Other exceptions occur when women mate with substantially younger men. Many of these cases occur not because of strong preferences by women for younger men but rather because both older women and younger men lack bargaining power on the mating market.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“One key to the mystery of love is found in the psychology of commitment. If a partner chooses you for rational reasons, he or she might leave you for the same rational reasons: finding someone slightly more desirable on all of the “rational” criteria. But if the person is blinded by an uncontrollable love that cannot be helped and cannot be chosen, a love for only you and no other, then commitment will not waver when you are in sickness rather than in health, when you are poorer rather than richer. Love overrides rationality.”
― David M. Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex

“Sexual dissatisfaction is linked with marital unhappiness, which is a good predictor of divorce.”
― David M. Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex

“Feminist theory sometimes portrays men as being united with all other men in their common purpose of oppressing women. But the evolution of human mating suggests that this scenario cannot be true, because men and women compete primarily against members of their own gender. Men strive to control resources mainly at the expense of other men. Men deprive other men of their resources, exclude other men from positions of status and power, and derogate other men in order to make them less desirable to women. Indeed, the fact that nearly 70 percent of all homicides are inflicted by men on other men reveals the tip of the iceberg of the cost of competition to men. The fact that men on average die years earlier than women in every culture is further testimony to the penalties men pay for this struggle with other men.
Women do not escape damage inflicted by members of their own sex. Women compete with each other for access to high-status men, have sex with other women’s husbands, and lure men away from their wives. Mate poaching is a ubiquitous sexual strategy of our species. Women slander and denigrate their rivals and are especially harsh toward women who pursue short-term sexual strategies. Women and men are both victims of the sexual strategies of their own gender and so can hardly be said to be united with their own gender for some common goal.
Moreover, both men and women benefit from the strategies of the opposite sex. Men lavish resources and protection on certain women, including their wives, their sisters, their daughters, and their mistresses. A woman’s father, brothers, and sons all benefit from her selection of a mate who is flush with abundance. Contrary to the view that men or women are united with all members of their own sex for the purpose of oppressing the other sex, each individual shares key interests with particular members of each sex and is in conflict with other members of each sex. Simple-minded views of a same-sex conspiracy have no foundation in reality.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Another clue to the evolutionary existence of casual mating comes from variations in sperm production and insemination (Baker & Bellis, 1995). In a study to determine the effect on sperm production of separating mates from each other, 35 couples agreed to provide ejaculates resulting from sexual intercourse from condoms. The partners in each couple had been separated for varying intervals of time. Men’s sperm count went up dramatically with the increasing amount of time the couple had been apart since their last sexual encounter. The more time spent apart, the more sperm the husbands inseminated in their wives when they finally did have sex. When the couples spent 100 percent of their time together, men inseminated 389 million sperm per ejaculate, on average. But when the couples spent only 5 percent of their time together, men inseminated 712 million sperm per ejaculate, almost double the amount. The number of sperm inseminated, according to the authors of the study, increases when other men’s sperm might be inside the wife’s reproductive tract at the same time due to the opportunity provided for extramarital sex. The increase in sperm insemination upon being reunited did not depend on the time since the man’s last ejaculation. Even when the man had masturbated to orgasm while away from his wife, he still inseminated more sperm on being reunited if he had been away from her a long time. The increase in sperm inseminated by the husband after prolonged separation ensures that his sperm will stand a greater chance in the race to the egg by crowding out or displacing a possible interloper’s sperm.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“Both sexes typically get extremely upset at cues to both sexual and emotional infidelity, as they should—people sometimes fall in love with those with whom they have sex and conversely have sex with those with whom they become emotionally involved. So researchers asked: What would upset you more: (A) Imagining your partner having sexual intercourse with someone else? Or (B) imagining your partner falling in love with someone else? This method revealed large sex differences, with the majority of men, roughly 60 percent, selecting sexual infidelity (A) and most women, roughly 85 percent, selecting emotional infidelity (B).”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“sexual jealousy, once considered by psychologists to be pathological or a character defect, is in fact a supremely important emotion motivating mate-retention solutions. Adaptive in the evolutionary sense of leading to greater survival and reproductive success, of course, does not mean morally good.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Psychologists Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper (1991) propose that a father’s presence or absence early in a child’s life can calibrate the kind of sexual strategy he or she adopts later in life. Individuals growing up in fatherless homes during the first 5 to 7 years of life, according to this theory, develop the expectations that parental resources will not be reliably or predictably provided and that adult pair bonds will not be enduring. These individuals adopt a sexual strategy marked by early sexual maturation, early sexual initiation, and frequent partner switching—a strategy designed to produce a large number of offspring, with little investment in each. Extraverted and impulsive personality traits might accompany this strategy. Other individuals are perceived as untrustworthy, relationships as transitory. Resources sought from brief sexual liaisons are opportunistically attained. Individuals who have a reliably investing father during their first 5 to 7 years of life, according to this theory, develop a different set of expectations about the nature and trustworthiness of others. People are seen as reliable and trustworthy, and relationships are expected to be enduring. These early environmental experiences channel individuals toward a long-term mating strategy—delayed sexual maturation, later onset of sexual activity, a search for securely attached long-term adult relationships, and heavy investment in children.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“Unrequited love is the foundation for fatal attraction.”
― David M. Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex

“A woman’s happiness increases when the man brings more economic resources to the union and shows kindness, affection, and commitment. A man’s happiness increases when the woman is more physically attractive than he is, and when she shows kindness, affection, and commitment.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Evolutionary psychologists have also hypothesized that men seeking short-term sex would prioritize women’s bodies, since a body cues provide possibly the most powerful cues to her fertility (Confer et al., 2010; Currie & Little, 2009; see Chapter 5 on WHR, BMI, and other bodily cues to fertility). In one experiment, participants viewed an image of an opposite-sex individual whose face was occluded by a “face box” and whose body was occluded by a “body box” (Confer et al., 2010). Participants then were instructed to imagine themselves having either a one-night stand or a committed relationship with the person and were then asked to decide on which box they would remove to inform their decision—they could only remove one box (see Figure 6.3). Compared to the long-term mating context in which men prioritized facial information, men considering casual sex shifted significantly in the direction of prioritizing body information—a finding also discovered by Currie and Little (2009) using a different methodology. Women, in contrast, do not show this shift and tend to prioritize a man’s face in both short-term and long-term mating contexts. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that men prioritize cues to fertility in short-term sex partners.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“Which men are most likely to be controlling? Those who are lower in mate value. These men ramp up heavy mate guarding because they believe they have lucked out in attracting a desirable woman and believe that she will be difficult or impossible to replace.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Online pornography allows individuals to explore creative sexual possibilities they never knew existed but also creates entirely unrealistic expectations for real life sexual interactions.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“According to the sex role and structural powerlessness hypothesis, women who have a lot of personal access to resources are predicted not to value resources in a mate as much as women lacking resources. This hypothesis receives no support from the existing empirical data, however. Indeed, women with high incomes value a potential mate’s income and education more, not less, than women with lower incomes.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“To maximize the chances of preserving a long-term bond, couples would do well to remain faithful; produce children together; secure ample economic resources; act kind, generous, and understanding; and attend to their mate’s sexual and emotional desires. These actions do not guarantee a successful relationship, but they increase the odds substantially.”
― David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“Evolutionary biologist John Hartung asks us to consider people who are stuck in a position that they might otherwise perceive as unfair or beneath their station (Hartung, 1987). Consider a man who holds a job that he knows does not take full advantage of his talents or a wife who knows that she is more intelligent than her husband. Acting as though your job or your spouse is beneath you could put your employment or your marriage in jeopardy. Your boss might fire you for insubordination. Your spouse might seek someone with whom he or she feels more comfortable and less threatened. The adaptive solution that Hartung proposes is called deceiving down. Deceiving down is not “playing dumb” or pretending to be less than you are. Instead, it involves an actual reduction in self-confidence to facilitate acting in a submissive, subordinate manner.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“Men need to understand the sexual over-perception bias that afflicts their mating minds. They should know that, most of the time, the women smiling at them are merely being friendly or polite, not signaling sexual interest.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Darwin hat a wonderful scientific habit of noticing facts that seemed inconsistent with his theories.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

“Selection favors mechanisms that cause individuals to seek niches in which the competition is less intense. Mating provides some clear examples. If most women pursue the man with the highest status or greatest resources, then some women would do well by seeking men outside the arenas in which competition is keenest. In a mating system in which both polygyny and monogamy are possible, for example, a woman might be better off securing all of the resources of a lower-status monogamous man rather than settling for a fraction of the resources of a high-status polygynous man.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind