Kind: captions
Language: en
what do women want
tell me what all the things women want
in a long-term mate
and so i would start at one end of the
blackboard there were like five
blackboards and they said well i want a
mate who's
who's kind who's understanding who's
intelligent who's healthy who's got a
good sense of humor who shares my values
and and i just go and fill five
blackboards and then run out of space so
then i turn to the men and i say well
what do men want and then i i run out of
space after about a blackboard and a
half because they they can't think of
anything else
so the women i think there's a lot of
explanations for that
the following is a conversation with
david buss evolutionary psychologist at
ut austin researching human sex
differences in mate selection
he's considered one of the founders of
evolutionary psychology and has authored
many exciting and challenging books
including the evolution of desire
strategies of human mating
bad men the hidden roots of sexual
deception harassment and assault
and the murderer next door why the mind
is designed to kill
we talk a lot about sex dating
relationships and love
i take these at times controversial
topics very seriously
but
i also try to inject humor and
ridiculousness throughout this
conversation and all conversations i do
please do not mistake my silliness for
lack of seriousness
and my seriousness for a lack of
silliness
and above all do not mistake my suit and
tie or my
phd
as a sign of intelligence or wisdom
i barely know what i'm talking about on
most days i'm simply curious and hoping
to understand the way a child does what
the heck is going on in this weird and
wonderful civilization of ours
if i say something stupid as i often do
i promise to learn and to improve
as mark twain said
i do not want my schooling to interfere
with my education
open-minded curiosity i think is the
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in the description and now dear friends
here's david bus
what is more important in the history of
the development of human civilization
sex or violence
so mating strategies or military
strategies
oh well both are important i mean uh
first of all
humans are sexually reproducing species
and so everything has to go through sex
you know so in
our our mating psychology has to be very
rich and complex
because uh to succeed
for us to be here now
all of our ancestors in an unbroken
chain
have had to succeed in selecting a
fertile mate attracting that mate
be mutually chosen by that mate
stay together long enough do all the
sexual things you need to do to
reproduce have the kids survive etc so
everything has to go through mating and
in that sense i think it's uh i mean
survival is really only
a means to an end if you if you will
uh so uh so sex has got to be important
and humans have a very rich
evol sexual psychology or an evolved
mating psychology okay but
uh i wouldn't minimize the importance of
violence either there's a ton of
evidence that humans evolved in the
context of small groups
and with a fair amount of small group
warfare
so intertribal warfare
uh where uh and this is a harsh
realization but
there historically um this is part of
our bad evolutionary history it has been
advantageous from a purely reproductive
standpoint to
conquer
a neighboring group kill the males
and
get whatever resources they have
including
females and and sexual resources to as
well as tools weapons territory and so
forth and so
um and so i think that we have uh of
course it's it's typically males
um
who do that i mean yes some females have
participated in warfare but
as far as i know there's never been a
single case in all of human recorded
history of women forming a war tribe
with other women to attack another group
of women and kill them and capture the
men
as husbands
but the these uh this phenomenon is
common um in the ethnographic record
and small group uh studies
um it's part of our common thing so just
one concrete example unfortunately he's
dead now he passed away napoleon chagnon
who studied the yanamamo for many many
years
um when he first started interviewing
them he he asked them
you know why do you go to war um and
they said well
to to capture women of course what it's
the only sensible
reason and they said you know why do why
does your culture go to war or however
they phrased it and he said well you
know we could work for to spread
democracy and ideas and everything they
basically fell off their logs laughing
at such a stupid reason because why risk
your life for anything
um other than women of course it's more
complex than that because
some
go to war for
reputational reasons they say if we if
we don't
retaliate because we've been attacked
and they've stolen three of our women if
we don't retaliate then we will get a
reputation as exploitable and then other
groups will start to attack us as well
and so they get into these cycles of um
you know like the hatfields and mccoys
of attacks counter-attacks retribution
and part of it is is um
reputation management
um so that's that's between groups and
and i think that's been the the primary
source of
violence but not the only source so
there's also within group conflict and
so many
ethnographies many traditional societies
have
things some of them are ritualized like
wrestling matches or
in diana mama they have uh these uh
we're used to these uh chest pounding
duels where so if we're in this match
you challenge me and
i have to of course chest pounding duel
like this yeah yeah so it's not you're
not hitting each other you're just it's
like peacocking you oh no you're hitting
each other oh sorry yeah so they they
get 20 paces away and they they run up
and
you punch the other guy in the chest and
he has to basically stand there
and then he does the same and everything
oh wow uh and then
it's basically last man standing that's
well i suppose that's better than the
face
that's an interesting decision with the
chest yeah i mean i'm sure if you get
good at that kind of thing you could
start breaking ribs yeah and you can get
loose about the rules of where exactly
in the chest you can hit whatever
and there's that guy who's always known
for hitting not exactly in the chat
right where is it only missing right
right the the mike tyson of
eating your ear off so interesting so
there's like ritualized uh conflict sort
of uh
you purify the
um the competition
that that that resolves some kind of
issue well yeah it's important to
establish status hierarchies you know um
but um
but also and here's here's just another
one more concrete point on on that the
yanaman we don't have this in our
language we just have one word for
kill or murder but
mama have um you're either an una if
you're a male you're an unokai or a
non-unokai
the non-unokai are men who have not
killed
if you're an unokai that means you have
killed someone and the unokai
among the anamomo historically had
higher status and more wives said
they're a uh poliginous
uh society which is which has been true
of um something like 83 to 85 percent of
uh traditional societies
were actually i was just corrected by a
anthropologist she said we no longer
call them traditional societies we call
them small-scale societies so nothing
can be called traditional
i i don't know bacteria the traditional
society yeah yeah i think it's just uh
one of these things the language the
word the the words that are deemed
appropriate to use to describe things
change over time
so
yeah so words can hurt people they can
inspire people words are funny powerful
things
you authored the textbook titled
evolutionary psychology the new science
of mind in its uh sixth edition
what is the magic ingredient that gave
birth to homo sapiens
do you think is it fire cooking
ability to collaborate
share ideas ability to contemplate our
own mortality
all that kind of stuff yeah well i think
it's hard to isolate one factor i know
uh i know you've had richard wrangham on
this podcast it was a wonderful
wonderful interview and
uh he used to be a colleague of mine
when i was a professor at michigan and
um i've stayed in touch with him uh on
off he's a brilliant brilliant guy and
he thinks
fire and cooking have been one of the
key things but i think it's hard to
isolate
i would trace at least part of our
uniqueness to uh the uniqueness of our
mating system so we have in in mating uh
unlike chimpanzees who are our closest
primate relative and of which richard
wrangham is is a world's expert but they
have basically no long-term pure bonded
mating okay they female comes into
estrus
all the mating all the sex happens most
of the sex happens during that window
but humans have evolved long-term pure
bonded mating
uh and it's it's only one mating
strategy but it's a really important one
and then you have with that
male parental care so basically again we
go back to chimps and chimps
with whom we share more than 98 of our
dna
males don't do anything so they
inseminate the females but then when the
kids are born they basically don't do
much of anything in terms of
provisioning and so forth but human
males do we invest in the modern
environment could be decades you know
especially with the boomerang kids and
everything but
we're
not all males do
but compared to
the vast majority of mammals we are a
very heavy
male parental
investment species could you uh if it's
okay and i'll ask you a bunch of dumb
basic questions
because those are fun uh could you
define mating here how we is mating
refer to the
the the series of sexual acts that lead
to reproduction is it include like
dating and love and camaraderie
uh
loyalty all those things yes uh i you
know yes yeah when i first started
studying yeah i don't respect it's when
i first started studying it i looked for
the right
term and
obviously it's much broader than sex so
by mating i include
things like mate selection
mate preferences made attraction mate
retention mate poaching um made
expulsions i mean poaching that sounds
fun so the early the uh the game
theoretics strategy made selection is
primary with mating what meeting is
about or do you include
the long term
once uh you agree
that you're gonna stick this out for a
while and have multiple children is that
also amazing yes i include that as well
so it's it's a broad category broad
definition and and absolutely includes
the emotion of love um and
of course there are many different types
of brotherly love love parents for
children
uh but love i think uh and this is one
of the shifts in the social sciences so
when i was an undergraduate for example
i was taught that love is this um
invention by some caucasian european
poets a couple hundred years ago and um
and it turns out that's not the case so
you you there's been extensive
cross-cultural
evidence now that um that people not
every person in all cultures of course
but all some people in all cultures
experience this emotion that we call
love and for the word love
are we going to in this conversation try
to stick to sort of romantic love for
the the
for the meaning of the word love well
they're uh that's that's a great
question but um i mean they're uh it's
pretty well established that there are
these different phases of love so
there's this uh infatuation phase where
uh our psychology we we get obsessional
thoughts it's hard to focus on work when
we're not with the person we're thinking
about the other person constantly uh so
there's kind of like ideolog
ideational intrusion
into our psychology but you you can't
sustain that i mean it would be
uh and then of course
there's a uh
pardon the phrase but what i describe is
the fucking like bunnies phase of of
this you know intense sexuality but
people have other adaptive problems they
have to solve
and so you can't stay in that state for
too long and so that subsides over time
and um
and develops into uh at least in many
cases this warm attachment cuddling
bunnies long-term cuddling bunnies yes
the face of the relationship but still
romantic not like brotherly love or
you know because i i talk about a lot of
love a lot and for me
you know love is a broader
experience of just um
experiencing the joy
and the beauty of life so like just
looking out in nature yeah that's the
kind of love like whatever the chemicals
that lead to a feeling that at least
echoes the same kind of feeling that you
get with romantic love you can
experience that with even inanimate
objects that sounds weird to say but
just
a gratitude and appreciation
um not in some kind of uh weird zen way
but just in a very human way just it
feels good to be alive kind of yeah yeah
yeah i guess i i would i mean that's an
interesting thought i hadn't thought
about
that i guess there i would use other
terms to describe that so like the term
ah
for example when you see a beautiful
sunset you know that's why i kind of
started out by saying i think there are
different types of love and i'm focusing
on the mating type and we'll talk about
that but so yeah there is a sense of
beauty
and there's a sense of
sexual appeal maybe that's a good and
those intersect in fascinating ways
we'll we'll talk about that okay we'll
talk about all that but you're saying
mating
strategies not that we've kind of
uh placed ourselves what we mean by
mating mating strategies
is one of the cool features
that made humans what they are one of
the initial inventions is is the weird
uh weird and wonderful ways that we mate
yeah and
i mean if you go to
even things like um
how we compete for mates and this is
another kind of strange for some people
angle on it but
mating is inherently a competitive
process
in that desirable mates are in
secure supply relative to the numbers of
people who want them
and so even
even post mating after that is after
mate selection made attraction a mutual
mate choice
uh desirable that's why there's mate
poaching mate poaching is one of the
strategies that
we in my lab with david schmidt
have studied
and so
okay but one of the unique aspects of
humans is that we compete using language
and that is we have reputations and
humans devote a lot of effort to
maintaining their reputations to
building their reputations to
trying to recover uh
reputations after uh a loss of
reputation for various reasons but we we
compete for mates um using
language and that includes
sending signals to the person that we're
trying to attract using language
um
verbal fluency and you know obviously
some more recent things like poetry
but also we use language to derogate our
competitors
so
one of the papers i published very early
on it was a research project on
derogation of competitors
the the ways in which people impugn the
status character and reputations of
their rivals
with the goal of making them less
desirable
to
other people and humans do that and
uh women and men both do that so
it's an interesting thing that were male
competitions we were talking about the
yanamamo earlier and some of these
overt physical or what what animal
biologists call contest competition
where there's a physical battle
uh males do that and so a lot of the
early attention on
mate competition was focused on these
sort of ostentatious
overt battles in contest competition
but we compete through language
um and uh and so there's this big
overlooked domain of women the ways in
which women compete with each other
using language and one of the things
that astonished me is how
observant
women are about the
subtle
imperfections in their rivals and take
pains to point them out so
just just this is uh two random examples
i went to a party
this is back in in my youth but went to
a party with uh
my girlfriend at the time
and uh and i got into this conversation
with another woman who happened to be
very attractive
but um but then we leave the party and
she said something just casually
off-handed like said did you notice that
um her thighs were heavy and
i hadn't but next time i saw her this
other woman i
found my attention being drawn to check
out her thigh well
and originally it puzzled me
why women would deregulate other women
on appearance well they do it of course
because men prioritize
appearance but i thought well the man
can see
the woman directly with his own eyes why
would verbal input
alter his perceptions of how attractive
he was and i think that
part of it is i think there are actually
a couple two quick answers to that one
is the attentional one so our
attentional field sure when they draw
attention to it the
those what could be very small
deviations from perfect symmetry or
whatever they are become magnified in
our attentional field
but the other is that
um
who we have as a mate is also a
reflection of our own status
um and and we you saw this in a kind of
um overt and uh
way in the uh
the earlier the last presidential not
the last part of the the
uh 2016 presidential election where uh
donald trump was saying
this was when he was in competition with
ted cruz i think in the primary he said
look look at my wife look at ted cruz's
life and
wife and he really impugned the
appearance of ted cruz's
wife so using language you can
alter the um the dynamics of the social
hierarchy the status hierarchy sorry so
like you can change the values subtly or
if you have a large platform in big ways
you can move things around just with
your words yeah yeah that's right right
and fascinating
because it's all socially constructed
anyway so this uh i mean the question i
have is you said there's the interesting
thing about mating strategies is there's
a small
pool of desirable mates
and what the word desirable means is
socially defined almost by on purpose to
make sure the pool always stays small i
would have a couple thoughts on that now
it's an interesting issue set of issues
you raise okay one is that
we i think we have evolved adaptations
part of our psychology is to detect
differences
um and so this is why
um like a i don't know a a martian or an
alien coming down
they might look at humans and say boy
they all look alike
as one just like we look at i don't know
zebras or whatever we think they all
look look alike
um but
what's important in decision making
especially in the mating domain or even
friendship domain or or coalitional
selection domain is the differences
and and so i i noticed this just a
concrete example of this
uh i was sitting around this is again
ages ago uh
watching a um
something like a miss america beauty
contest and people in there with a bunch
of other people and they were saying boy
did you see miss north carolina what a
dog and and so yeah this is astonishing
so here are like a 50 contestants who
are selected as the most attractive in
their state presumably um although they
claim it's based on talent um but um
but we noticed the differences um
and and
uh and this is why i would push back a
little bit on the term socially
constructed because i think it's
um
there are many different
meanings of that of that phrase and
one meaning
that some people have one connotation is
that it's arbitrary and i don't think
it's arbitrary so
uh this has been another shift in
understanding
standards of beauty where it used to be
believed in the in the social sciences
you can't judge a book by its cover
beauty is only
the skin deep
uh you know don't judge people on the
superficial characteristics
but in fact
physical appearance provides a wealth of
information
about the health status of someone their
in the case of males their physical
formidability
and we have formidability assessment
adaptations and then fertility as well
so there are a very predictable set of
cues to fertility that have evolved to
be part of our
standards of attractiveness and and
they're not arbitrary there are some
culturally arbitrary ones so like
you go to the the maori in new zealand
for example and they find tattoos on
their lips to be very attractive
so there are some culturally arbitrary
things um but standards of beauty like
uh cues to youth cues to health
uh in women clear skin uh full lips
clear eyes lustrous hair
um a small waist hip ratio that is
circumference of the waist relative to
the hips
uh is a cue to youth infertility and and
acute health symmetrical features so we
are a bilaterally bilaterally
symmetrical species but we all have
we all have uh deviations from perfect
symmetry that are due to
different things so mutation load
uh environmental insults diseases during
development and so forth
all right but that that's kind of deeply
biological like there's cues that
indicate something
that is biologically true about a
particular human so if we we'll talk
about both men and women
uh so we're now talking about what
men want
in the mating strategies when they look
at women
so you're saying small waist
to hip ratio right
is
how much of that is our deep biological
past on top of which we can build all
kinds of different standards of beauty
so you know we have many
things going on in our brain
our value of other
humans in selecting a mate
might uh incorporate a lot more
variables
as we get into the 21st century so how
quickly does
our
valuation of a mate
uh evolve relative to the evolution of
um
the human species
they're using evolving the sense of
culturally culturally evolved and then
relative to biologically evolve yeah uh
well i think that there are um
there are some things that are
biologically evolved some standards
standards of attractiveness
um and there are some of the things that
i mentioned so in male evaluation of
females let me back up and just say what
is the underlying logic why would we
have standards of attractiveness so
um
here's the interesting thing and this
gets back to your earlier question about
what is
unique to humans or what distinguishes
us or what set us off on the path that
we did
is
chimpanzee males
do not have any difficulty
figuring out when a female is fertile
she signals that like crazy with the
bright red genital
swelling uh olfactory cues she goes into
estrus
in humans we have and this was actually
a third thing that i wanted to add
earlier we have concealed ovulation okay
relatively concealed ovulation which is
remarkable given how close we are
primatologically to to chimpanzees
and so um uh there's there's a little
bit of evidence that
there are subtle changes that occur when
women ovulate non
women not on hormonal contraceptives but
it's mostly concealed but it is it is
largely concealed i think that's a
feature of bug in uh like do we evolve
that is that is that a
cool and a powerful invention for the
human species i think it's it's an
adaptation in women that women have
evolved concealed ovulation
and i think it's a feature not a bug
it gives more would it give more power
for women
to select
a mate there are a couple different
hypotheses about it but the one that i
think is
most plausible uh is that
you know if again comparing it to chimps
fema goes into estrus the male just has
to try to monopolize her while she's in
that estrus phase and then they
basically ignore the females after that
if you can't know when if when a woman
is fertile
then you have to stick around a lot
longer and so i think long-term pair
bonding
co-evolved with concealed ovulation
and with that also a very different form
of sexuality which is that we have sex
throughout the
ovulatory cycle
um and uh chimps don't you know there's
there's a little bit of mating a little
bit of sex toward the edges of the um
ester cycle but but very little so that
that actually makes mating
a more fundamental part of um
interaction between humans than it does
for chimps so meaning like
year-round every day i'm constantly
selecting amazing in terms of
biologically speaking so what else what
else do men want
today in the 21st century versus
in the caveman days a wonderful question
to answer it though i have to
distinguish between
long-term mating and short-term mating
uh and in long-term mating it gets very
complicated
so as as a uh that's one way to put it
yeah
uh well well so i teach a course in in
human sexuality at university of texas
at austin and
um one of the things this was back in
the days when there were chalkboards and
you and you taught with a piece of chalk
and wrote things on the board
and what i would do is i would ask the
class i'd teach this the large class one
to 200. i'd say what do women want
tell me what all the things women want
in a long-term mate
and so i would start at one end of the
blackboard there were like five
blackboards and they said well i want a
mate who's who's kind who's
understanding who's intelligent who's
healthy who's got a good sense of humor
who shares my values and and i just go
and fill five blackboards and then run
out of space
and and so you the first this large
number of characteristics that people
want and then
specific magnitudes of those
characteristics or or amounts so i say
you you want a mate who's say generous
with their resources and they say yes i
what makes jennifer the research so i
said so like a guy who this is a women's
mate selection the guy who at the end of
every month gets his paycheck and gives
it to the uh local wino um on on the
dragon i said well no not that generous
okay generous toward me
not not indiscriminately generous and so
you want a mate who's um
ambitious you know who's a hard worker
yes but but not a workaholic you know
and so uh
and so then you get to interactions
among different characteristics so
there's a lot of characteristics a lot
of variables in this very complex
optimization problem for women yes
that's right and more so for women than
for men so and then i turned it to men
and i say well what do men want and then
i i run out of space after about a
blackboard and a half because they they
can't think of anything else
so the women i think there's a lot of
explanations for that
besides
the lack of the number of variables it's
also you know um
i mean that's interesting so what what's
the difference between the variables so
on the men's side what are the variables
well they're in long-term base flexion
there there's a lot of overlap sure okay
um so
things like intelligence
um good health
sense of humor um
an agreeable personality someone who's
not too
neurotic or moody or or
emotionally volatile
but there are key differences as well
and the differences stem from they
basically fall on the delimited number
of domains so for men it's physical
attractiveness physical appearance and
youth are the two real big ones okay men
prioritize those
more than women do and so that's why you
have phenomena such as uh this quote
love at first sight where sometimes men
can walk into a party and they see a
woman across the room and say that i'm
going to marry that woman that's the
woman for me women very rarely do that
now most men do don't do that either but
men are much more inclined to fall in
love at first sight that's because they
prioritize physical appearance
why because physical appearance provides
that this wealth of information
about a woman's fertility status and
this is from from an evolutionary
perspective from a purely reproductive
perspective
in in a business school they would call
it job one
job one is you have to select a fertile
mate
so those who in our evolutionary past
who selected infertile mates so
post-menopausal women for example
um did not become our ancestors so we
are all the descendants of this long and
unbroken chain of ancestors who all of
whom success succeeded in selecting a
fertile mate but fertility cannot be
observed directly
uh it can't use some cues
exactly and and there are cues that are
probabilistically related to this
underlying quality of fertility that we
can't observe directly and we're doing
that computation in our heads what about
men
what do men want for short-term mating
well so for short-term mating um
for both sexes uh physical appearance uh
looms very large so so inc so women are
no physical attractiveness and
appearance they're important for women
in long-term mate selection so i don't
want to
um mislead anyone on that they're just
not as important as they are for men
um and so a lot of characteristics come
for women before physical appearance
physical attractiveness
um
so women
so if we switch to women what do women
want they want
also physical appearance for short-term
mating yeah phys physical attractiveness
what else uh well some cues that
represent physical attractiveness that
maybe represent health well here's this
is your
i'm learning a lot here yeah well so but
you're also asking a very interesting
question about uh what is a
controversial within the evolutionary
psychology
field right right and not totally
resolved so that's why you're on the
sixth edition of the book and there
could be a lot more additions coming
yeah i revised it every four years or so
because there's four years of um new
interesting work and so it deserves
updating but
the
traditional i should say uh
answer to your question is that women go
for good genes cues to good genes in the
short term
and
cues to resources in the long term and
this has been a hypothesis that
advocated i didn't come up with this
this one um
by um
steve gangstad a former student of mine
marty hales and randy thornhill and some
other um
very smart players in the field
and um and what they used as uh
markers of good genes are things like
symmetrical features
uh and masculine features so
strong jawline high shoulder to hip
ratio
you know other other sorts of masculine
features
but i started to doubt this
explanation for what women want in the
short term
because of some other
findings so for for women a lot of
short-term mating is not
one-night stand mating so
but rather it's uh a fair mating
so uh so if you ask the question why do
women have affairs
so let's restrict the question for a
moment
my colleagues would argue well women
have affairs because they're trying to
get good genes from one guy
while they're getting an investment from
the regular partner the the husband
okay but the problem is that when women
have affairs
uh 70 plus percent tend to fall in love
with or become attached to their a fair
partner
now outside what percentage 70 yeah 70
some large majority yeah 70 percent
or more
in contrast to men where it's more like
30 percent of men who have affairs
fall in love with or become attached to
their fair partner
so but from a design perspective um an
engineering perspective if you will uh
that's a disastrous thing if you're just
trying to get good genes so you're
trying to retain the investment of one
guy yeah while getting good genes
surreptitiously from this you know guy
who presumably has more
falling in love with them becoming
attached that's that's not a feature you
want yeah it's bad engineering yeah
exactly it's bad engineering and so and
so i developed a an alternative uh
hypothesis that i call the
mate-switching hypothesis
which is that um
affairs are one way in which women
divest themselves of a
a cost inflicting partner or a partner
who
things aren't working out well with and
it's a way to either transition back
into the mating market or to or to trade
up in in the mating market
uh and and so and anyway so these are
these are probably the two leading
hypotheses about why why women have
affairs and i
am putting my money on the mate
switching hypothesis um
my
esteemed colleagues are putting their
money on the good genes hypothesis but i
think
the evidence for the good genes
hypothesis is starting to um
look shakier than initially
but this is a heated debate i mean made
squishing sounds like a so from a game
theory perspective from an engineering
perspective seems to make a lot more
sense unless you put a lot of value
in lifelong sort of in the long term
mating
uh some kind of
value in the um lifelong singular
relationship like monogamy yeah
and maybe we do psychologically maybe
there's a big
evolutionary advantage to that and we we
do but we also know that divorce is you
know um and breakups are are also common
that occur in all cultures so yeah um
we're just not very good at this thing
well either we're not good at the mate
selection
such that
uh maybe we're
we're not incorporating
all the variables well or we're just not
good at monogamy period
from an evolutionary perspective well i
think they're
that's
a debate no that's raises an interesting
set of questions so i think that
i mean one issue is is longevity so i
mean we didn't live
to be 70 80
years old
and over 99 of human evolutionary
history and so we didn't necessarily
evolve to be
mated monogamously with one person for
decades and decades and decades
but i also think that
long-term peer bonding is a critical
strategy but mate switching is also a
critical strategy so if you have a mate
for example who
becomes cost inflicting or becomes
sufficiently debilitated or who
suffers
an injury such that like in
hunter-gatherer societies where the mate
can no longer
hunt can no longer provide resources for
their kids and and and the woman
this becomes this becomes a problem and
so uh and so i think that we have
adaptations to mate switch and to divest
ourselves from
some partners and trade up in the mating
market under certain conditions
so okay and those conditions will differ
from men and women what are some of the
cues
in terms of what women want um you know
i'll go to the gym
so a hotly contested debate you said
evolutionary psychology and this is uh
in the uh bro psychology forums that i
visit uh multiple times a day and no i'm
just kidding uh what what what's the
most important cue of appearance
for guys
um
what muscle group is the most important
to work on do women care about biceps is
what i'm asking in terms of physical
appearance um
uh
a a good um
shoulder to hip ratio
so
relatively wide shoulders relative to
hips um
is is one
women tend to prefer men who are uh
physically fit and
well
toned but not
muscle bound so like if you go to oh i
don't know someone like
those early when arnold schwarzenegger
was
doing the
mis mr whatever it was contest you see
the women don't find those attractive
the extremely muscle-bound guys but they
like
a guy who's physically fit high shoulder
to hip ratio
they like guys who are physically taller
than they are
and guys who are a bit above average in
in height so
if the average so if uh
you know the average is i don't know
five nine five ten and out there for
humans depending on the culture women
prefer uh an inch or two taller than
that
um so um so shoulders
height
dad bod
wha what's that about why don't why why
do you want a dad by what why do you
why why not how do i define
wait what is a dad bod dad bot is not
muscle-bound okay so out of shape a
little no no no just a little bit
a little bit of uh
uh cushion for the pushing i don't know
what the kids call it these days uh but
just a little bit a little bit of fat so
what's why do they not want guys to be
obsessed with their body is that or is
that some evolutionary thing
yeah i think that um
women
might interpret a guy who is so obsessed
with his body that he's uh they might
view that as a sign of narcissism yes
um and that's not a good trait
uh
what about like cultures where
large sort of overweight men are valued
is that how do you explain
like how much can we override the
evolutionary desires with our sort of
cultural
fashions of the day that maybe represent
other
desirable aspects like wealth well
wealth is
resources have always been important
um especially to women so is a man
able to acquire resources and is he
willing to dispense them to her and her
kids so that's always important in
traditional cultures that boils down to
hunting skills so
if so i have to
call a friend kim hill who's uh probably
the world's leading expert on the aceh
of paraguay
and uh and you ask him like what what
leads to high status in the aceh in
males hunting skills that's that's nice
one the one thing the big variable and
that's resources and that's resources
now what's what's interesting about
modern culture is we have cash economies
but cash economies are relatively recent
and
you know historically there's over the
vast uh 99 of human evolutionary history
you weren't able to stockpile resources
in the way that you are today
um
although there are interestingly certain
ways you can do it so so like you you
kill a large game animal okay you bring
it back you get some status points
because you
give some to your family you can share
it more widely with the group etc
um but um but it's going to go bad right
you can't just say i'm going to keep
this carcass around for the next several
months okay but
and and i think i think it's a steve
pinker who might have used coin this
phrase that they they store the meat in
the bodies of other people and so for
example they store it in their friends
so
you know um
hunting success is uh
you know it's it's a hit or miss kind of
thing so you might come back
empty-handed
four times out of five
but and but when you do you share your
meat with others and then when
you know and then they reciprocate by
sharing their meat with you and so and
so you can store resources in the bodies
of other people which is i think an
interesting way to think about it but
that can only go so far and when you
have cash economies you have both the
ability to stockpile resources but also
this kind of explosion and
inequality of resources
and that's evolutionarily recent what
about now this is the difference between
the hubermann the excellent huberman lab
podcast that you did that people should
listen to
he is a brilliant scientist a um
sort of
uh
a rigorous analyst of what is true in
the scientific community also helps you
with great advice on how to live now in
contrast to that i am a um
a terrible
uh
uh almost idiotic level journalist so
this is what you have to deal with
another thing that people talk about
that women care about is penis size does
penis size matter for women in sexual
selection
well um there's controversy about that
in the evolutionary psychology community
well
is there papers on penis size i wouldn't
say
a scientific paper so speculations
about
in nature or in science yeah yeah no
nothing nothing that i've seen there
um
you know i i think that there's
individual variability um so uh this is
something that comes up again you know
when i ask women in the class my classes
you know what do women want some will
say you know a large penis
but i think there's variability um in in
that preference and it also might depend
in part on the variability in
the woman's anatomy
so
um do you think there's something
fundamental in terms of evolutionary
psychology in terms of evolution or is
this a quark of culture that's current
that's maybe somehow connected to
pornography or something like that yeah
my my guess is it's it's something
that's uh
perhaps a quirk of culture or or
something that is
evolutionarily recent
um but um but but i don't know i mean
it's it's a topic that hasn't been
explored much i've never done work on it
and well somebody should do a phd uh
sort of some archaeologist should do a
phd on the history of
human civilization
and its
evaluation of penis size and the
correlation of penis size to the value
of the male
okay moving on another absurd question
in terms of what men want
again definitely not a huberman lab
podcast question
why do men
let's say a large fraction of men love
boobs
well uh i think that uh
you're one of the uh most cited
evolutionary psychologists
and this is what you signed up for this
is these kinds of questions questions
like this yeah well so again this is
something i haven't studied directly but
um
uh
scientifically yes yes uh but um but
yeah there's been some work on that and
and it's uh another cultural quirk
perhaps no i don't think it's a cultural
quirk because i think it's the uh
the shape
that matters a lot because
shape is going to be a cue to fertility
and
so one of the things that humans are
attracted to in the opposite sex is
sexually dimorphic features and breasts
are a sexually dimorphic feature and
dymorphic mean
difference between
difference in morphology between males
and females got it
um
diamond to morphic morphology
uh so um
and women don't develop uh
breasts until um
puberty or post-puberty
uh and and so uh as a sexually demorphic
characteristic we tend to be attracted
that same is true by the way with the
waist-to-hip ratio that we mentioned
earlier
uh prior to puberty males and females
have very similar ways to ratios but at
puberty um there's a differential
uh
hip development and fat deposition that
creates a sexual dimorphism uh with
respect to waist-hip ratio and so again
that's
men are attracted to this wasted ratio
that no man consciously says that they
find this woman more attractive than
that woman they don't think ah she has a
waist up ratio 0.70 that's exactly what
i do but most men most men yes
so
isn't that fascinating that we just
build these entire industries the
fashion and what we find beautiful
around
these kinds of ideas and we just
and then not just not just fashion and
then we build
uh we have
uh sociological tensions about whether
we should care about this kind of thing
or not
there's there's battles in that space
it's it's like
they seem so simple it's just the human
body and we wear clothes first of all
that's that's a funny thing what what's
the why are we wearing clothes what's
the shame aspect yeah of covering up the
body is that another feature or is that
what is that yeah that's a that's a
that's an interesting question and i i
don't know it's just like hiding uh
ovulation maybe that's another hiding
like uh maybe hiding is a great game
theoretic thing to play with because it
can give you it can give the powerless
more power
by covering well well maybe well i think
there are a few things so one is
the sort of arbitrary features of
fashion and then the other is the
aspects of fashion that attempt to um
magnify are what is inherent in our
evolved standards of beauty so for
example um women tend to wear things
that accentuate their waist hip ratio
so i mean
historically those
in the old days corsets for example
cinch the woman's waist
and you wouldn't see fashion develop in
a way that made a woman seem
old unhealthy
pock marked
signs of
open sores or lesions
there are certain domains um design
spaces that you wouldn't that no culture
would develop
um
so but there are arbitrary features but
sometimes they're not entirely arbitrary
or they're arbitrary at one level of
description but not another so for
example
fashion tends to be linked with status
and that's why it constantly changes
the high status people start wearing a
certain type of
clothing
and then when the lower status people
imitate them then they have to shift to
signal their status and so i think the
fashion and clothing is important linked
to
status
so this is not you talking this is me i
just want to make a
a statement a profound statement that i
think yoga pants now this is broadly
speaking but yoga pants is one of the
greatest inventions in human history
there's fire
and
i'm just going to leave it there i'm a
fan
um and i have uh female friends that
talk about how comfortable yoga pants
are which is what i'm referring to when
i say it's one of the greatest
inventions because comfort and fashion
is really um really important to me let
me ask about sort of the sociological
aspect of this
so i've um
i've talked to mark zuckerberg who
uh
the meta who's the ceo
founder of facebook and now meta and
owns i've heard of him yeah he's a yeah
he uh he uh holds the american flag and
likes the water
anyway um
so there's been criticisms of social
networks and so on
and i just want to ask you about the
broader question here that there's uh
object objectification of the human body
in the media and that creates standards
for young women
for young men perhaps but more
young women yeah um you mentioned to the
cruelty that women can have towards each
other in terms of well let's
you know cruelty is already a moral
judgment just you've made a statement
about the fact that women
uh
seem to point out imperfections in other
women
um
do you think it's a problem
in our modern society that
we
objectify each other in this way do you
think this is this is a
fundamental aspect of our biology that
we need
to um
suppress
versus celebrate
just like we might suppress our natural
desire for violence if such exists
um in modern society well a couple
couple thoughts on that i i think it is
um damaging um the uh the fact that uh
so many images are displayed in in
social media and so
um what i would say is that there's
what's called in in the field uh an
evolutionary mismatch
so we evolved in the context of small
group living
where there was make competition but
your competitors were a small number of
other potential
individuals and so people do comparisons
um
okay but now what we have is
uh this bombardment bombardment of our
visual
system and our sexual psychology and our
mating psychology with with
thousands and thousands of images uh
that are not at all representative of
who our actual competition
is in in in the mating domain
and so i think that um
and there's actually evidence on this
that um uh
baz luhrmann actually said something
like this in his uh sunscreen song i
don't know if you've ever heard that but
it's like i said it's a wonderful
like string of advice song about advice
but he says uh oh yeah yeah okay yeah he
says don't
read beauty magazines that will only
make you feel ugly you know i think that
there's
truth to that that is especially with
with women they look at all these images
and
you know of course they're
photographed they're photoshopped uh
they're they're highly selected and and
not at all representative
and so women compare themselves to that
so i think this social comparison is an
evolved
feature of humans i mean males do it
females do it
but it's exacerbated in the modern
environment in wildly
evolutionarily mismatched ways and so i
think i think that it is it is
destructive it's harmful
there's evidence that um it hurts
women's self-esteem
so
here's just another uh
factoid or fact if you will that at
least in western cultures
uh males and females have roughly the
same overall average levels of
self-esteem
but once
uh puberty hits all of a sudden women's
self-esteem starts to drop and i think
it's because when they enter
make competition then they start
elevating the importance they attach to
physical appearance and then as you
point out the the tremendous
objectification
that saturates social media and media in
general is um it's damaging and harmful
i don't know how to undo it though i
don't know how to design a society that
um that undoes that well one of the ways
we undo things just like you pointed out
is we use words when we manipulate
society we manipulate social and status
hierarchies using our words for ill
and we can do the same for good and
that's why there's
a lot of click-bait articles about uh
you know instagram
um
hit you know
leading to a lot of suffering amongst uh
teenage girls and all those kinds of
things
um
i'm criticizing the clickbait bait
nature and not the contents of the
articles but you know and those articles
hopefully become viral in a way that
makes us rethink about how we
build social networks that kind of allow
us to to easily misrepresent how we look
when we are quote-unquote influencers
and what a mental effect it has on the
um
on young people that look up to those
influencers but i guess you're it's not
the objectification fundamentally that's
the problem it's the
inaccurate it's the fake news
it's the yeah that's
misrepresentation
you still objectify
uh the male body the female body but you
do so uh while misrepresenting the
actual truth and and so you're moving
the average you're moving the standard
representation of what a male should
look like what a woman should look like
and uh
the dishonesty is the problem not the
objectification here's just one other
interesting empirical finding on that
and it has to do with another dimension
that i think is harmful and and that's
the thinness dimension
uh and so if you
and these are studies originally done by
paul rosen but they've been replicated
where if you ask men okay what is your
ideal figure in a woman and so they have
these say nine figures that vary from
very very thin to average to to plump
men
give it the midpoint they say the the
the midpoint is in
relative thinness or plumpness is what i
value and you ask women
what is your ideal body type for you
they give it they say thinner but then
if you ask them what do you think males
ideal body type is they put it in
exactly the same spot that they put
their own idea which is
thin and so there's actually an
inaccurate perception of how thin
men desire women to be
uh and i think that's partly
exacerbated by the the fashion industry
where the the models are often real thin
and you know they're
the lure is that clothes hang better on
thin models and then on tv they say you
gain 15 pounds over what you really are
or whatever but for whatever reason
women misperceive how thin men want them
to be and so you have this is another
huge sex difference
is eating disorders
anorexia
for example bulimia
binging purging where these these
disorder eating disorders are nine to
ten times more common in women
than men
can i just take a small tangent because
it is such a beautiful uh the sunscreen
song such a beautiful one if i can read
some of the words from it yeah i i
really enjoy it yeah it's great it's a
great song for people you should check
it out it's called everybody's free to
wear sunscreen i guess it's actually a
speech
to a class i don't know if that's
artificial or real but it's it's a
speech that gives advice and it goes
ladies and gentlemen of the class of 97.
i just remember it even now those those
words where's sunscreen
if i could offer you only one tip for
the future sunscreen would be it a
long-term benefits of sunscreen have
been proven by scientists whereas the
rest of my advice has no basis more
reliab