David Buss || The Evolution of Sexual Conflict

And sometimes I take on too sometimes I take on too much stuff. And it's hey, no worries at all, no worries at all. I appreciate you fitting me in. Thanks David. It's really nice to meet you. You're obviously a legend in my field, and so it's pretty much an honor to talk to you. Oh, thank you, Thank you. Ida a legend loved by some, hated by others. So perhaps well we can talk about we can talk about that, you know. And it's funny. It's not like anyone like

it's not like people hate you personally. It's so funny how we as like a well maybe some do and I don't know about that, but I'm saying in terms of evolutionary psychology is like, it's like you're a symbol of It's funny how people can hate an individual because they become a symbol for someone of something. Right, It's fascinating how that happens. Well, I'm ready to jump in if you're ready. Yep, I am ready. Today, it's today. It's great to have David bust on the podcast. David

is a professor of psychology University of Texas, Austin. As one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, his primary research focus is on strategies of human meeting, particularly the dark side of human meeting nature, including conflict between the second is, jealousy, stalking, intimate partner violence, and murder,

basically the greatest hits of the dark side. David is author of a number of books on meeting, including The Evolution of Desire and most recently, Why Men Behave Badly The Hidden Roots of sexual deception, harassment and assault. David, great to chat with you today. Thank you, glad to be here in chatting with you. So I want to start off by asking you what is meeting it sounds

like a very nerdy term for sex. Yeah, Well, when I first started studying the topic, it was the only term that was sufficiently broad to capture the diverse phenomena that I was interested in. And in fact, sex is only really one part of it. An important part, of course, but it's only one part. And actually, when I first started getting into it, there is a little bit of note of historical background. And I started studying dating cup

and married couples. I actually thought it would be too intrusive to ask them about their sex lives, and so I actually didn't. I asked them about everything. I was studying everything around sex, the mate selection process, what qualities people want in a maid, tactics of attraction, tactics of mate retention. But what happened was in these early studies, as I interviewed the couples, they said, you've asked us about everything under the sun, but you haven't asked us

about our sex lives. And I had thought it would be too intrusive, And so over time I started getting more and more into the domain of sexuality per se. But of course, still a lot of what I study is not doesn't have to do with sex per se.

But everything around it, that's fair enough. Yeah, So meeting is a broad demean It's very very broad to mean yeah, yeah, yeah, and so yeah, And it includes all those things from you jumping into the mating pool, tactics of attraction, attracting a mate, all the things that go on in a relationship, including sexual stuff, and then also getting rid of a mate, made ejection tactics, mate guarding tactics, jumping back into the

mating pool after you've been out of a relationship. So there's a lot of interesting human phenomena, in particular because with humans we have long term mating as one of our strategies. We don't just mean many species they just

do essentially short term mating. Like even chimpanzees, our closest primary relative female comes into estrus, there's sex that occurs during that period, and then the sexes are pretty indifferent to each other after that, whereas in our species we sometimes engage in more prolonged mating that can last a week, a month, a year, a decade, a lifetime. Yeah, it's a very central part of the human experience, isn't it.

I would say so in that sense I lucked out by picking this topic and even after many years of studying these different aspects of mating, I thought, you know, I really want to branch out and study other things, and so I started studying homicide why people kill other people? And it turns out most of the motives for murder are related, either directly or indirectly to mating. And so what I sometimes say is you can run, but you can't hide from mating. It permeates so many facets of

our lives. Yeah, for good and bad. So why, you know, why did you go into the field of evolutionychology or even you know, you were one of the founders of it, Like take me back to the gears preceding evolutionary psychology. What were you interested in and how did that morph into this new field? Well, well that's that's a big question, so I'll have to give you a short answer, give

me a short answer. Yeah, see that, Yeah, yeah, there were When I first got into the field of psychology, there was no evolutionary psychology as you as you just mentioned. But what I was interested in was was a solid theory of human nature. That is, you know, what motivates people, what gets people out of bed in the morning, what makes people tick, why do they strive toward the goals

toward which they strive? And so I got into the field of personality psychology, which I thought was the closest to you know, developing or attempting to develop grand theories of human nature, which they did. But when I got into that, what I realized is that they different theories made certain too had certain two intuitive appeal to them, or certain facets did you know, Rogers of Freud, Young, Maslow, et cetera, But that they all lacked a solid scientific foundation.

That is, if you asked the question, well, why should we go with this theorist versus that theorist. And so it was my search for a solid scientific foundation that ultimately led me to evolutionary theory, which is a theory about the causal origins of whatever mechanisms of mind that we have that are housed in our brain and to

some degree in our bodies. And so identifying the causal origins of whatever mechanisms we have it was absolutely critical and I think it's you know, it's been one of the things that historically has been absent from the field of psychology, the causal origins of and importantly the functions

of whatever psychological mechanisms we have. And it was I remember that this is probably before you were born, but it was viewed as unscientific to even pose the question what is the function of X or y psychological mechanisms? And and I think it had to do with inadequate

theoretical clarity on what the term function meant. And within evolutionary theory, there is a very precise meaning of the term function, that is, that is what adaptive problem is this psychological mechanism designed to solve, you know, And and ultimately all mechanisms are tributary to survival or reproduction, reproduction being the more important one, but they're long and circuitous roots to get there. So, for example, you know, humans

have it's been positive. I think is reasonable that humans have motives to get ahead in status hierarchies. We evolved in small group living. All groups contain status hierarchies position and the status hierarchy is linked to access to reproductively relevant resources, and so it's reasonable that humans would have a motivation to get ahead, to maintain their position, to fight off rivals who are vying for the same position,

and so forth. But you could say, well, what does that have to do with survive on reproduction well, as it turns out that getting ahead in status hierarchies does lead to preferential access to more desirable mates and to

more mates if you have them. And even in terms of survival, like in the Ace of Paraguay, for example, a small hunter gatherer group that Kim Hill has studied extensively, the people in the group give better healthcare to the children of the high status males, so as they pick the thorns out of their feet, they are very solicitous of And so even in terms of of survival, status

translates into integrate or survival. So the key point that I was making here is that evolutionary theory provides a precise definition of what we mean when we say is this functional? And just to make one last point on this I'm rambling a little bit, is that in the field of psychology, Scott as i as I think you're probably aware, the term function or adaptive is used. It has been used, and is used very loosely in the field.

So if you read like don't social psychologist, the it's adaptive to do x, or it's adaptive to have high self esteem, or it's functional or dysfunctional, and really what many of these are are kind of informal intuitive appeals to what people feel is bad rather than a precise, clear, definite mission of what we mean by adaptive or what we mean by the evolved proper function from an evolutionary perspective.

So your point is very well taken. A lot of well, some evolutionary biologists as well as others have criticized the field of evolutionary psychology is not being up to the rigorous standards of evolutionary biology. For instance, some have criticized this they call it just so stories. What I wanted to ask you is, what are some criticisms of the field of evolutionary psychology that you think the critics get right? And which ones do you think they really get wrong? Well?

I think they get most of them wrong. So, but what I would say is, like any like any discipline, there are good practitioners and bad practitioners. There's the whole range of quality of scientific research done in the field. And is there bad work and evolutionary psycholic absolutely, is their good work? Absolutely? Is there good and bad work in cognitive psychology and cognitive science and social psychology. Yeah, you see the whole spectrum there, and I think evolutionary

psychology is no different in that respect. The field of evolutionary psychology. It's kind of ironic that you mentioned evolutionary biologists. Many practitioners of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, many of the founders are evolutionary biologists. So the first president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society was W. D. Hamilton, the founder of inclusive fitness theory, one of the most important, if not the most important evolutionary biologists of the last of

the twentieth century. Also George C. Williams, of Richard Alexander, Richard Dawkins. There are many prominent evolutionary biologists who will or evolutionary psychologists in our basically supporters of the field. You know. The the just so story issue is is in my view a kind of in some ways a silly meme and but in some ways has forced the

field to be clearer. So the notion that I mean this is a term that was coined by Steven J. Gould, you know, many many decades ago, and it was used actually in his case, not to criticize evolutionary psychology, but the field of evolutionary biology. And I think that the criticism that that you just sit around and come up with some cocktail party speculation. Of course people do that,

but that's not what gets into the scientific journals. So it's not what gets into proceedings of the National Academy of Science. So we just published an article on status there. And if I sent an article and said, oh, I was sitting around having drinks with colleagues and I offered this speculation, I'd like to publish it at PNAS, they would of course laugh me out. It would get desk rejected. So the game is really a science, pure science game.

You know, does the theory lead to precise predictions that have not yet been tested? You go out and you do the work, and you test them and they're either confirmed or not confirmed or some say falsified. And then across from multiple studies you examined the weight of the evidence.

And in fact, the field of evolutionary psychology and I would say mating has really been a success story of the field of evolutionary psychology in the sense that it has had not only predictive value, that a specific evolutionary hypopsies have led to novel discoveries about our mating mind that we did know about before. But it also has an important quality, uh, namely heuristic value. That is, it guides researchers to important domains of inquiry that no other

theoretical framework or perspective leads you to those domains. And so it's uncovered things like the importance of genetic relatedness on altruism and helping behavior. It's led to the discovery of just why women engage in short term mating. So something that that I've studied, uh, you know, which is kind of a has been a puzzle and evolutionary puzzle, and and so and so it has those qualities predictive and and heuristic value again with the qualification that they're

good and bad practitioners as in every field. Yeah there, yes, that's that's a very fair point. You know. Sometimes the media will will highlight a really shoddy evolutionary psychology stuy that legitimately does tell a justo story to explain some study that was found among forty college sophomores. And then it's says, now we have a theory of human male meeting behavior. Well, sophomore men, I'll tell you are not

necessarily generalizable to all of male human nature. But they'll blow that up and they'll say, you know, see, the field of evolutionary psychology is junk. Yeah, right, right, So but I mean you could level that you could do the same thing in every field, like any phenomenon in

the field of social psychology or cognitive science. You could say, you know, look at this, you know, I mean, in many cases in the field of social psychology, there really isn't what I would consider a proper theory behind it, you know, And as you know, I know you've I've listened to several of your really fascinating podcasts, and you've talked about the replication crisis issue, and you know, and phenomena that get are splashing and get a lot of

attention but turn out not to be real phenomena, and but often there was never any cogent theory behind those phenomena anyway. So you know, and I think you know a suite of things that we've that I'm referring to because you've talked about them on your previous podcasts. Absolutely, although I would say that the field that seems to have shown the least replication failures is the is my

field of personality psychology. And now I'm not I'm always saying that, you know, not to say that's perfect, but I would be very surprised if we find someday, oh, look, it turns out that introverts don't exist. You know, we didn't replicate that, or like, you know, like or that there is no personality variation in terms of neuroticism, you know, like, oops, we failed a replicate. There's something about the field of personal psychology which is more replical because it looks at

you know, reliability over time. I mean, that's built that's built into the measure. Social psychology is like, you know, to hold this cup, does this person feel more warmth? You know, like, and then we'll say, well, this is always going to be the case. Well that's that's riskier. It's riskier, yeah, yeah, and and and yeah and and the more counterintuitive, which has been you know, one of

the favored tendency in the field of social psychology. The more counterintuitive, the more important it seems, and more flashy. It's like your grandmother couldn't have told you this, and it's it seems like it's those counterintuitive things that seem the least replicable. But but yeah, I mean I was, as you know, I was trained, As I mentioned, I was trained in personality psychology also, and there I would the domain of mating and in particular the work that

has been most influential of mine. I've been very happy with how replicable it is. So it is even people who don't like the theory and who don't like, say, the discovery of sex differences, they're still able to replicate the results in their laboratories. And so sex differences and may preferences, sexual jealousy, predictors of retention, tactics, even some recent stuff. So there there are there's a group of evolutionary psychologists that have devoted their labs to replicating and phenomena,

and in some cases they're not replicable. But I've been very pleasantly surprised that the findings coming out of my lab are so you know, it's that's and I mean it's something I train my students on. I don't know if you you train your students on this, but is like you don't want to you don't want to go for the short term game, you know, because ultimately if you do some study and then turn you know, so

what I I've always done. I was trained at Berkeley, which was very much of an empirical tradition, where that was theory didn't matter at all. What you wanted was solid empirical findings and so and so that was kind of core to my training. And I want to do enough studies so that I am confident of the results of those studies before I publish, you know. And that's why, like one of my most well known studies, of the thirty seven Culture Study, I wanted to do it and

as many cultures as I possibly could. I didn't want to do it on forty college sophomores, you know, because I knew no one believe it, and I wanted to assure that it was solid in my mind before putting out there in the public domain. Yeah. Yeah, And when I look at that research. Also, sometimes I look at David Schmidt's research and I look and see just the broad, expansive nature of it and the attempt to replicate it.

Maybe evolution psychologists are held to a higher standard, sometimes unfairly perhaps, or maybe fairly because the stakes might be higher in terms of the topics they are studied and the implications of them. I don't know, but it does seem like sometimes, you know, it's like you can do a study where you replicate something in like virtually every culture on the earth and basically almost every human and then people like that's a just so story, you know,

it's like, what else do you want from us? Are you doing that anyway? I'm being a little bit cheeky, But do you see my point? Yeah? Yeah, No, I absolutely do see your point. I mean, I'm perfectly fine with evolutionary psychology being held to a higher standard. I mean, I think all fields should be held to high standards, but I'm perfectly fine with that. And I think that partly as a result of the criticism that is generated, it has forced people to adhere to a higher standard,

at least in many cases. So I'm quite comfortable with that. The other sort of related thing is that sometimes it's not just the theory. Sometimes people don't like the findings and so for and I don't either, you know, so, for example, the you know, the fact that men tend to prioritize physical appearance and physical attractiveness in maating more than women do, although women do as well, and that women prioritize the resource acquisition abilities. I don't necessarily like

that finding. I don't like the finding that there are sex differences in desire for sexual variety, which actually gets us into the new book. I think it's it would be nice if the sexes were identical on average in their desire for sexual variety, how many partners you want, amount of investment prior to sex, etc. So the findings coming out are not necessarily finding that I'll like, which

is sometimes what people think. They think that if you find something that somehow you think that you're endorsing it, or you think it's a good thing or morally respectable, or some kind of view that you're trying to promulgate, which is simply not the case. I mean, if that's the case, I'm in trouble because I mean I've studied sexual harassment, sexual coercion, murder, stocking and everything. If I thought these things were good, well I never would have

written the book. I mean, I study these things because I precisely the opposite. I think that there their ills. Sexual violence toward women broadly speaking, is a horrible problem that's worldwide. I actually view it as the most why it spread human rights violation period in the world, in the sense that it affects every women in every ethnic group, every culture, every political system in every culture around the

world affects half the population. And of course it affects more than half the population because it affects all those people who care about potential victims of sexual violence, which are the mother's brothers, fathers, uncles, etc. And it also affects even the women who are not who manage to avoid any kind of sexual violence, which from an evolutionary perspective,

is bypassing female choice. That it affects women because they have to engage in defensive behavior to avoid becoming a victim, and so it's very costly even for those women who

have not personally been victimized. So anyway, that's that's really sexual violence forward women is the broad umbrella of the topics that I talk about in my new book when men behave badly because things like sexual deception in the dating market, intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault, all these things are things that try to bypass female choice, strategies that mainly use to try to bypass female choice, and so they all fall under this broad rubric of

sexual violence toward women. Yeah, I was going to go piecemeal through a lot of what you just said, So but that was a good general review of your of the whole book. Yeah, you do. Know you start off and you make it very clear in the diroduction of your book, you said, my hope is that this knowledge will then if it everyone who has suffered from sexual conflict and who cares about its victims, and that it will ultimately help us to reduce the occurrence of sexual

conflict and heal the harm it creates. Was that, I mean, I don't I don't think that was the goal. Like when you originally went in the field, I mean, I feel like you were just interested in the science of this stuff and in understanding the truth. I maybe it's somewhere along the line it start you started to get more interested in uh in in in the practical aspect

of it. Yes, yeah, No, that's a that's a that's a very fair characterization, that is And in some ways this is something that I regret about myself and has to do with my own personal development in the field that I've historically used to fancying myself as a pure scientist and kind of even look down with some scorn about people who that's the David Buss I know, that's the David I saw it each Bess and then I read this book and I'm like, who's this David Bussy. Right, Well,

there's people change over time. And it was partly in the process of doing this research and writing the book that caused this shift, because I thought, well, this is these are major, major problems. Even in the United States. I think it's twenty seven to thirty percent of women will experience intimate partner violence. Just to take one example, A fifty nine percent or ballpark will experience sexual harassment

at some point. So why shouldn't the basic science inform and help to solve some of these widespread social problems. And the answer is that it should. And this is like even I've gone into I'm teaching at the University of Texas now, but I think this has occurs everywhere throughout universities. Just as an example, they have sexual harassment policies, they have sexual harassment training materials, they have a college

freshman orientation where they inform women. But when you go through all these materials, they're not at all informed by the science of these things. And I think that, I mean, I'm going to be yeah, well, I'm going to be approaching our university specifically, but we're also going to be developing websites to help victims of these things because there are a lot of misinformation out there, and we've done

this for stalking. So with a former student of Mind, Josh Duntley, we did develop a website called stalkinghelp dot org, which is basically a website that contains scientific information and then practical information about where victims of stalking can go to find help. And ideally we'll get to the point where we have these help sites for all these things in them a partner violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and

so forth. That's really great. So why are women and men so seemingly at odds with each other right now in this cultural moment? Well as you would probably argue throughout the course of human evolution, but a lot of issues that maybe have been swept under the rug are coming into white more now, I would say, in our cultural moment than ever before. What do you think is the explanation of this? And you know, what are the standard explanations, and then how do you think, like an

evolutionary approach can offer additional explanation? Yeah, well, so good questions, big questions, So to deal with them in the order in which you ask them if I can remember. So, sexual conflict originated with the origin of sexual reproduction itself, so we're talking about somewhere between a billion and two billion years ago. So sexual reproduction itself. Once you have two sexes evolving and sex being defined, bi evolutionary biologist

says according to the size of the game meats. So the sex cells that males are defined as the ones with the small gam meats, females with the large nutrient rich game meats in the human case, sperm and egg. And so once you have this sexual reproduction, what's optimal for the male will in certain conditions differ from what's

optimal for the female. And so there's what I call this zone of conflict where you have adaptations in one sex designed to influence or manipulate the other to be closer to its optimum, and then counter adaptations in the

other sex to resist those manipulations. And very much like predators in prey, which is a between species coevolutionary arms race, what conflict between the sexes is it results in what's called sexually antagonistic coevolution, which is very much analosis to the predator and prey coevolution where it just and it's been happening, as I said, for let's say conservatively a billion years and then and then of course over the

entire course of human evolutionary history. And so to take one example, it is often the case because females biologically invest more, starting with the the the nutrient rich egg, but also with the internal female fertilization, the nine month pregnancy, lactation,

et cetera. Because females invest obligatorially so much more than males to produce a single child, it's often in female interest to be to be very choosy and discriminating and discerning about who they have sex with and who they mate with and a Whereas from a male perspective, because of that minimum minimum, lower obligatory investment, it's sometimes beneficial to initiate sex sooner, more frequently, etc. Than is in

female's interest. And so you have this in this example of this zone of conflict where and it's a zune of conflict that results in a lot of sexual conflict. So now your other question was, well, why now, from a cultural standpoint, why are these things so prominent now? And I think that, I mean, I don't have a definitive answer for that. I think they have become prominent at different points in our cultural evolution. So, for example, it is not recently, but several decades ago that laws

got changed to make marital rape rape. So it used to be the case, if you go back thirty or so years in the United States, rape was defined as rape of someone who was not your house and it was viewed as an incoherent concept, rape of spouse. It doesn't make any sense, and many countries in the world today still have that it is literally not rape because the husband is entitled by law to sexual access to the wife's body whenever he wants, in whatever way he wants.

But now so there was a cultural shift so that in every state in the United States, marital rape is a crime and it is against the law. So these cultural shifts, so the current manifestation like with the Me Too movement and the attention given to sexual harassment, and the attention given to very prominent, high status, wealthy men who have used their status and wealth to evade the

consequences of their illegal action. So Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and many other that are just I mean almost every week, it seems like a new one is coming to light. And I think that, you know so, But even with sexual harassment, there was a in the nineteen nineties, there was with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There was a huge amount of attention to sexual harassment,

and then it kind of died away. And then with the Me Too movement, prominent actresses coming forward, you know, and these are people who can't be dismissed, you know, coming forward and saying that Harvey Weinstein did this and to so many victims, and this is one of the and so I think that I think that it's actually very good, it's salutary. Some think that it's gone too far, but I think that it has brought attention to high status, high resourcemen who have been able to get away with

these sexual crimes for many, many years. And that's one of the qualities, and I talk about this in the book to some extent, with both sexual assault and sexual harassment, is that it's not all men who do it. It's a subset of men who have certain personality characteristics, and it's a subset of men who are serial harassers and serial assaults like Harvey Weinstein. Or Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Epstein, and women know this, but it hasn't received enough scientific attention.

Is that women in the workplace, a new woman will come in and other women will say, oh, just be careful not to be alone with this guy, because he tends to have wandering hands or whatever. And so it kind of highlights the fact that it is not all men, and what you have is a small number of men who are committing a large number of acts of sexual

harassment and sexual assault. And that's why it's especially important to identify those men, to identify what characteristics they have personality and mating strategy, and also the circumstances in which they're able to commit these commit these crimes versus the

circumstances which inhibit them from doing so. And that's one of the things that I has also been somewhat of a shift in my thinking in the book is trying more fully to integrate individual differences combined with social circumstances, combined with evolved proclivities in males, all to bear into an integrated framework to understand these forms of sexual violence. And that hasn't been done in the past, at least not to a great degree that that is the field

of evolutionary psychology. And this has been one of my criticisms coming out of an individual difference tradition has historically ignored individual differences and focused pretty much exclusively on species typical characteristics. And that's fine, but we have to recognize how profound and important these individual differences are. Well, you're preaching in the choir. I completely agree. I'm an individual differences researcher, and that's what I tried to bring to

the table of evolutionary psychology. In whatever contribution I made to the field, I hope you know it is the evolution. It's the individual differences aspect. For instance, I have published papers in the evolution of intelligence. You know, why did the G factor evolve? You know, these kinds of questions. Okay, so tell me about the bad boy paradox, because I think our listeners, you know, that's what they really want to know. They're okay, all this mumbo jumbo. Why do

I keep following for the bad boy? You know? Can you talk about some of the research on the dark triad, which is an area I've studied as well, and I just by the way, I just recently proposed there's a light triad, so maybe we should talk about that later, but talk a little bit of it. And I think light triad people could be attractive too. But can you talk a little bit about why the dark triad is

so attractive? Yeah? So, well, first, maybe for listeners who might not know, briefly, mention what the dark triad are. So dark triad is a narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy are the three that have been called the dark triad. With narcissism just quick call mark of a sense of entitlement, including sexual entitlement, grandiosity, feelings that you are so special that the rules don't apply to you, et cetera. Psychopathy

one of the hallmarks is lack of empathy. So most humans, most of us have an empathy circuit where you know if someone gets harmed, if a child falls down, if a dog gets run over by a car or hit by acquir we feel this empathy. And whereas those low on ps those high on psychopathy don't. They might laugh if a dog gets hit and so and then Machiavellianism has to do with those who pursue an exploitative social strategy.

So these are cheaters, deceivers, viewing high mac people view others as pawns to be used and manipulated like pawns on a chessboard, for their own instrumental gains, very selfish gains. And so so you have this high dark triad and when you combine it with the dispositional pursuit of a short term mating strategy, this is a very this is

a deadly combination. So these guys who are high on dark triad, high and short term mating are most likely to be the serial sexual as or serial sexual assaulters, et cetera. Now, why are some women, I would say some women not who women are attracted to these guys. First of all, they often play a good game, so they can be very charming. They often display cues of high status, so for example, they take risks and command

the attention of the group. And that's one of the cues that we use to evaluate status is the attention structure. The high status people tend to be those to whom the most people pay the most attention, and so high dark triad people often command attention. And then the other is they are often risk taking, and women are attracted to risk takers. In part because those who take risks engage. We take animals at their own words, so to speak. That is, those who take risk we think can afford

to take risks. You know, if you're skydiving or you know, motorcycle riding, that you that you have the physical and psychological capabilities to successfully engage in these risks without without harm. And so there are many qualities that are attractive, okay, but these hygdark triad guys are disastrous as long term mates. They might be very exciting for short term mating, but

they're disastrous as long term mating. They are more likely to cheat on the woman, more likely to dump her, more likely to engage in multiple relationships simultaneously while deceiving each one about you know who thinks that they're in a monogamous relationship, uh, and they're very good at seduction and abandon them. So it tends to be younger women who are most attracted to these so called bad boys.

As women experience some of the harms associated with being involved in bad boys and mature, they tend to grow out of this being attracted to bad boy phenomenon. So so experience is sometimes very very useful. Sometimes a hard lesson. Now you mentioned that that there it exists dark triad women, but they have there's a different flavor to them, like I feel like there's a different They use different, as you would say, meeting strategy tactics. Yeah, well so hydro

I triad women. One of the tactics they use is they use their sexuality for instrumental gains. So, for example, they might use sex to flirt with the boss or even I actually know cases like this, sleep with the boss in order to get favorable treatment. I hope you don't know about that personally, I know, I help you

write the boss. No, no, no, I've never been the boss, but no, but I know of cases in academia where I know one case where a woman who is particularly high on the dark triad slept with the chair of the search committee and succeeded and got the job. So

obviously I won't mention any names involved in this. So they use sexuality to get ahead, but they also engage in mate poaching, so they have no qualms, no moral qualms about sleeping with their friend's husband for example, or a boyfriend, either just often for just short term gain or in some cases trying to glor them away for a longer term relationship. So there, if you ask who does the mate poaching, it's high dark triad women. High

dark triad men also do that. They don't have any compunction about trying to seduce their friend's girlfriend or wife. So that's that's one thing. But the high dark triad women. The reason I focus more on men than women in this case is that it is men who are engaging in the more severe forms of sexual violence toward toward in this case toward women, as the men who are more likely to beat up their partners. Stalking, criminal stalking, eighty percent of the stalkers are men, and often these

are stalkers have mating related motives. Sexual harassment, vast majority of sexual harassers are men. And then and then when it comes to sexual assault, of course it's like ninety nine percent plus that are that are men and so and so that's why I focus more. Although I talk about dark Triad women, I focus more heavily on dark Triad men because they're the ones who engage in the

more severe forms of sexual violence. Yeah, no, and rightly. So. I was just wondering because I wanted to ask, are dark tried women and dark tried men attracted to each other, like when like when they meet each other, do they tend to like subconsciously at least get attracted to each other. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that in terms of empirical work that's been done on it.

I just have anecdotal evidence because I know some women who are high on this dark triad and and characteristic of the himachiavelianism of using you know, exploitation as a social strategy. What they tend to do is is in their in their mating is is to use like one guy for his resources, another guy to provide a kind of secure, stable backup mate. Uh, you know. And so I haven't noticed in my personal observations and the tendencies of dark triad when men cooking up with dark triad men.

But as you know, assortment for similarities is one of the law laws of mating, although for personality characteristics that's less. So assortment coefficients tend to be highest for intelligence and political orientation and religiosity and things like that, and there is positive assortment for personality, but it's it's at a lower level. Well, yeah, you've done terrific work on what do people look for in a meat and regardless of

the personality. I really liked that. I like because I'm a creativity researcher, and you found that creativity is up there, you know, what people look for in a meat and as well as compassion. You know, in all this dark side talk, we can we talk about humans have the capacity for compassion and for overriding these instincts for self control. I mean, does don't men have don't men have self control?

You know, they may they may have these and I know, I know obviously you know you would say they do. But I think it's important these kind of discussions to if someone is not familiar with the field and they're just listening to this stuff maybe for the first time, to just outline the naturalistic fallacy as well as make clear that evolutionary evolve instincts doesn't mean we didn't also

evolve overriding h you know, self control functions as well. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, and even in the you know, the starkest case of this in my own research has to do with homicidal ideation or homicidal fantasies, which most people have had at one point or another. But most people don't go out and kill, you know, it's very, very statistically, extremely rare. And I think actually that's one of the functions of

scenario building of this sort is to inhibit that. Because people have homicidal fantasy, usually about someone who's wronged them in some profound way. In the case of women, that's guys who have raped them, they have homicidal fantasies about these guys. But the scenario building that people do when they experience homicidal ideation almost in very released the conclusion that no, this is not a good strategy to pursue.

It's not a good way to solve the problem. And so I think it actually does serve that inhibitory function, which may seem ironic to some, that homicidal fantasy is actually an inhibitory mechanism, you know, in most cases. But the other issue, so I agree with you totally. We have to have these self control mechanisms and also superordinate mechanisms.

So just as it's like if we have desires for calorically rich food that might be bad for us, if we're trying to lose weight, or if we're trying to eat healthfully, we might override those you've all taste preferences for a different goal, you know, for a more healthy goal, And so we have to We have different underlying desires, goals, and motives at any one point in time, and so we have to sequence that suppress some allow you know,

circumstances to dictate which ones get expressed when and so forth. But importantly, I think there profound individual differences in this and so the Like an example, there are some actors, as you know, who have been called out for sexual harassment, in some cases sexual assault. But you think, like on the lark Light Triad issue, like Tom Hanks as an actor, could you imagine him engaging in this bad behavior? And I think the answer is no, you would predict he's

he's he's he would never do that. You know, he just doesn't likely doesn't have those impulses that need to be inhibited to begin with, right, So so I think that you never know what he probably has freaking fantasies, you know. No, I hear, I hear you. I get your point. I think it's just just a meta comment on the field. Reading your book, there's such a there's a whole lexicon of it's like a whole different language.

You know that you calling these things. You know, you've got meat poaching, then you got meat insurance, you got you got I mean you know all these you know, strategies, tactics. It's I mean, you're so ensconched in it, David, I mean you you've worked in this field for how many years? These terms, and but like for the general public, like it's it's really actually getting up to speed on a whole new language. Yeah well and I think that yeah, yeah, well,

thank you for pointing that out. I mean, the term bait poaching didn't exist until I think I was the first one who used it back in ninety four. But the thing is, it requires a new lexicon, a new scientific lexicon, because many of these phenomena have not been studied before. So even like with another take a slightly different example, mate retention. So in the insect or non human animal mating literature, there's the term made guarding, so, which is what a lot of male insects do. They

made guard. They try to get the female and guard her prevent other males. But when I started studying this, guarding seemed to narrow a term, and so I use the term mate retention because in long term mating, it's not just a physical guarding, but it's also things like the lighter things like providing a mate with resources or benefits, or trying to embody do things that satisfy your mate's

desires that are part of mate retention. And these are don't really neatly fall onto the narrow category of make guarding. And so that's why I think a novel scientific lexicon is is in many cases warranted here. So yeah, fair enough. Just to just to close the circle on the bad boy paradox, I wrote a book with Glenn Gear called a Meeting Intelligence Unleashed, and and I really looked into that whole literature on bad boys, the evolutionary psychology bad Boys.

I have a whole chapter on that. My reading of the of the literature and total and my own attempt at the synthesis is that you know, women like these tender defenders. You know, it's not that they actually like the asshole, it's that the asshole traits sometimes come along for the ride. Or not only that, but you know they'll like someone who you know has a very strong

personality can defend them. You know that that will stand up for them, will protect them, you know, and uh uh and and so it's not it's not exactly that they are attracted to the asshole traits, but it's just that some of these kinds of you know, aspects, these characteristics can very easily turn into assholey behavior. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that that's fair enough. And yeah, it's a it's a

very cool book. I like that whole whole idea of mating intelligence spect I think it was, yeah, Glenn edited a book or this was like there was one that was kind of for more, Yeah, mating and audience with Jeffrey Miller, and then and then I this is when I was in grad school. I reached out to Glenn and I said, hey, you don't know me, but I this is one of my first books, I said, I ever written wrote. I said, hey, Glenn, do you want to write a popular book with me about that? Because

I loved it. I actually wrote a chapter in that edited book on humor, the role of humor and made selection. I wrote that with Jeffrey Miller and yeah, and Glenn and I turned it into a popular book afterwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool. Yeah. You know one other thing I just wanted to loop back to the topic of inhibition and self control mechanisms, and this has to do with one of the What I think is that one of the most important sex differences, which is I've mentioned, is the

desire for sexual variety. So and men just have on average higher levels of this. They desire a larger number of partners after less time has elapsed, and so forth. So men can walk down a city block and spot half a dozen women over the course of just a few minutes and have sexual attraction to those women. Now, if all of those desires were expressed in manifest behavior, we would live in a crazy, chaotic, antarchic, anarchic, anarchic

and violent culture, and we don't. And in fact, most men inhibit the even if they're trying to attract a woman for a short term sexual encounter, they inhibit the direct expression of their sexual interests for that short term goal. That is, they often deceptively give off long term signals.

They give off a nice guy signals, high investment signals, high commitment signals, high emotional involvement signals, UH in order to achieve a short term mating goal, and so and so, even in the service of short term mating, men often inhibit the expression of their uh, the sexual desires that they have. It's just called acting cool man, that's it. Yeah, be cool, don't be don't be so like, you know,

don't come across so needy. What do you, uh, how do you feel the fact that you have a whole cottage industry of so called pickup artists who are using your book and the premine principles of evolutionary psychology to seduce women and sometimes you know, trick them. How do you feel about that? Well, well, I've looked into this and I've I've had conversations with people in that community, in the pickup artist community, and I think there's there's

a whole range. So there are some like on the what I would say, on the better side, that are that are trying to train men just to be better quality men, better quality mates, in order to attract women. And so there's like and that's you know, most sort of honest courtship and improving your value as a mate. And then at the other end you have the sort of deceptive, smarmy, underhanded tactics, which which of course I think I find abhorrent. So so so you have the

whole range. There just like you have the range of scientists, you have the whole range of picker versions. But I'm not sure that. I mean, I know that they occasionally cite my book, I haven't looked into them enough to know whether they cite it accurately or not. Like this whole concept of nagging, for example, like that the way to you know, you kind of like try to undermine the woman's self esteem and as a way of displaying your high status. I don't I don't see that as

anchored in any way in evolutionary psychology. Yeah, I don't know what the evolutionary basis for nagging is. Yeah, uh, other than a motivation to maca ailianism to other than that, you know, Yeah, you know, I I did bring up the naturalistic faulcy earlier, but I think it's really really important for us to define that for people who've never heard of it. It kind of the naturalistic faucy like and under standing that really can quell a lot of

criticisms of the field. I think, Yeah, so, well, there are multiple fallacies there. There's the you know, the if it exists, then it ought to exist, So there is ought fallacy, which of course is not which is a fallacy because it's like if you, and it gets back to an earlier point that we discussed about, if you study a phenomenon, that means somehow you endorse it. So the example I use in the book is like, if you're a cancer researcher, you're trying to study cancer to

eliminate it or cure it. You're not studying it because you think cancer is a great thing and you want to promote it. And so I think the same is true here. I think that people, also getting back to the naturalistic fallacy, think that if something has evolved, then it must be a good thing. And then a related one is that if it evolved, you can't change it. So that what I call the interactability fallacy. And so I think if you and that's why in the book I I hope I take great pains to h and

I did. This is actually going back to the very first book that I wrote, trying to dispel some of these myths. But they're very they're very persistent. So even after people have been exposed to these fallacies, they still tend to commit them. You know, So even intelligent professors that I talked to have you know, explain X evolved

and they think, oh, therefore we're doomed not to change it. No, I think that in the case of sexuality, I think it's more difficult to change evolved desires than it is to change their expression and behavior. Getting back to that inhibition point, So you might not be able to change men's attraction to novel women who have certain cues, but you can change their expression of that their sexual desires in behavior, like, for example, in the workplace, where it's

inappropriate to express those sexual desires. And that's really what sexual harassment laws and policies are all about, is trying to inhibit those So and if I didn't think change was possible, I wouldn't have written this book, you know. I mean, getting back to that earlier point that we

talked about. I think these everybody would agree these are bad things, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and that we want to eliminate them, and a deeper understanding of their causes, the men who do these things, the conditions under which they do them is critical to eliminating their occurrence. So that's probably a more long winded answer than you wanted. For the naturalistic fallacy, What are your

thoughts on the naturalistic fallacy? Oh, I think it's very important for people to recognize that nature in our our self as genes are not necessarily in are the best interest of the whole organism, you know. Like my own research is on well being and self actualization of our highest potential, you know. And it's sometimes reading some of this evolution of psychology literature, it feels like we're far away away from our from the high talking about the

highest potential of humans. You know, you open up, uh, you know, uh an evolutionist, an evolution's cology textbook, like your textbook, and it's like the greatest hits of the dark side, you know. And that's why I really like Glenn Gear's new work and positive evolutionary Psychology. Actually wrote the forward to his new book that he wrote on positive psychology with Nicole Webban. I believe, yeah, yeah, yeah, so and yeah I agree, and I like his work

as well. But wouldn't you agree that that? Okay, So here here's the way I would put it. So, every human has a limited time and energy budget, and we have to allocate our time and energy to different endeavors. And the fact that there are these dark sides that

women experience sexual violence, unwanted sexual attention, et cetera. Means they have to allocate time and energy to dealing with those and fending them off and grappling with them, and so eliminating some of those these darker phenomena would free up time and energy to devote or positive, positive aspects of positive psychology. I completely agree. I mean, that's that's why I think of it in terms of a hierarchy of needs perspective. Yeah, that's you know. My my new

book on UH is on UH. You know, I revised Maso's hierarchy of needs, and I try to put a lot of it on an evolutionary foundation and and the whole you know, like like chapter one is all about all the you know, deprivations and when you live in environments that are harsh and unpredictable, you know, that causes our our focus to go right towards that and UH and activate certain evolutionary instincts that really hold us back from self actualization. So I think we're right there on

the same page. I think that the dark side and the light side, though, that those research literatures need to be integrated, you know, so we can have a fuller picture of what humans could be. I guess that's what I would so so on that. What is your view of the light side the light triad? Is it just the opposite of the dark triad? Or is it it

has different elements. We went into it with the research question is the light side just simply the reverse coded items of the dark side, And we found empirically that no, in fact, there's a point five correlation. It's not we're not talking. We're not saying that everyone who has low dark triad traits will necessarily have high light triad traits.

You know, it's something else. And the three aspects we discovered are Kantianism, which was our cheeky reversal of Machiavelianism, which is, you know, constant chirogorical imperative, you know, is treat people as ends and to themselves, not means as

an ends, not means to an ends. But humanism was a new one, a new facet that wasn't just merely the reverse coded treating every individual with dignity, worth and respect and faith in humanity, which is, do you have a general orientation in the world that you think that at heart humans are basically good kind of a worldview, and we found these three really coher together to this higher order factor. Okay, okay, very cool. I just I think my own curiosity and maybe listeners would be interested

in this as well. So I was friends with Chris Peterson, who was one of the founders of the Positive Psychology movement and unfortunately passed away early. But he had these I think twenty four character traits. What how does your does his system hold up or was he over extending or didn't have a solid empirical basis given what you know now about the light triad, how do how do

you view this and hear system? Yeah, so we actually looked at the correlation between the light triad and in all the character strengths the twenty four that Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman proposed, and you know that that research holds up quite well. There. You can actually go on the via Character Strengths Survey website and take the test

and find out your character trengths. The point is that people who score high in the light try it tend to be very oriented towards this particular class of character strengths, which are self transcendent character strengths, so love, wisdom, they tend to behind wisdom, gratitude, hope, uh and and you know, things that are very compassionate oriented. So you know, there are better, better angels of human nature, right that that exists alongside what you've studied predominantly in your career. I

think that you've done a great service. I mean, you're you're a legend in the field, and I just you know, I want us to be able to integrate into a full picture of what humans are and what they could be,

you know, yeah, yeah, well, thank you for that. And I think it's a it's a worthy goal and important to recognize that what has evolved in humans is this whole spec sectrum of adaptations, of psychological adaptations, some of which are you know, nasty and brutish, and some of which are benevolent, altruistic, cooperative, benefit conferring, etc. And we have to recognize that we, each of us have all

of these within us to some degree. And it's not just so That's why sort of painting human nature is either sort of intrinsically purely good and corrupted by civilization and bad parenting and bad cultures, or humans is intrinsically bad and have to be you know, tame. Both of views are wrong, and we have this whole collection of adaptations that vary in their functions, valence, and the degree to which they're expressed. And I'm all for suppressing the

nasty ones and bringing out the better angels of our nature. Well, that came through at and cleer David in your new book. I'm really glad that you're moving in this direction. I really am. The world needs it right now. Thanks so much for coming on podcast today, David, and all the best with the rest of your book tour. Well, thank you, thank you, And it's been great talking to you and intellectually enlightening and informative for me and hopefully for your

audience likewise, and I'm sure it will be. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, you can

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