David M. Buss Quotes

“A male approaches a female and begins to flirt. She is not aware that he has slipped her a drug that renders her unconscious. He then takes her body to his home, positions her correctly, and has sex with her while she is knocked out.

If you’ve read about Bill Cosby, this may sound familiar. You may be surprised to learn that this is one of the mating strategies of the funnel-web spider, Agelenopsis aperta.

These male spiders have evolved a strategy of anesthetizing females who are reluctant to mate using a chemical cocktail.”

“A woman’s mate value even varies over the monthly ovulation cycle. Subtle changes in women’s attractiveness reflect the ovulatory phase.

Their skin glows a bit more, their waist-to-hip ratio becomes slightly lower, and their voices rise a bit. All qualities found to enhance perceptions of female beauty.

The fact that women become more exacting in their mate preferences at precisely this time in their cycle might reflect an adaptation to monitor their own mate value and adjust their standards accordingly.”

“As one woman noted: 'The best way to get over one man is to get under another.'”

“Both sexes typically get extremely upset at cues to both sexual and emotional infidelity, as they should. People sometimes fall in love with those with whom they have sex and conversely have sex with those with whom they become emotionally involved.

So researchers asked: 'What would upset you more: Imagining your partner having sexual intercourse with someone else? Or imagining your partner falling in love with someone else?'

This method revealed large sex differences, with the majority of men, roughly 60 percent, selecting sexual infidelity and most women, roughly 85 percent, selecting emotional infidelity.”

“Cultures vary in how jealous men get about a partner’s sexual infidelity, but it’s not random or arbitrary cultural variability.

It is theoretically predictable variability based on how much men invest in their children, which in turn corresponds to the costs they would incur by investing in a child who might just be their rival’s.”

“Dating apps open up vast pools of potential mates. Living in a small town with a limited mating market allows a 10 to be happily mated with an 8, as long as there exist no other 9s or 10s in town.

Living in a cyberworld containing millions of potential mates opens the floodgates to thousands of 9s and 10s.

In the cold calculus of relative mate value, if a more desirable potential mate than my current partner is interested and within reach, I may become dissatisfied with my current partner, which may motivate me to switch.”

“Differences in desirability create havoc in at least two fundamental ways. The first centers around misperceptions.

A man who is a 6 but thinks he’s an 8 will be utterly irritated when the woman who’s an 8 whom he’s trying to chat up rejects his advances.

Although women and men both can err in their self-perceived mate value, research shows that men are more likely than women to be overconfident in a variety of domains.”

“Feminist scholars rightly stress the importance of power in sexual conflict.

It must be recognized, however, that men’s motivations for power, status, and resources exist in part because women have preferred to mate with men who possess power, status, and resources.

Neglecting this part of the causal origins of sexual conflict will impede efforts to alter it.”

“Gazelles have evolved an antipredator adaptation known as stotting. Stotting is a behavior in which the gazelles leap into the air, lifting all four legs simultaneously, land more or less on the same spot, and then bounce-leap on all fours several times.

Gazelles stot only when they detect cheetahs. The tactic serves two possible functions.

First, it alerts the cheetahs that they have been spotted and communicates that the hungry predators have lost the element of surprise — one of their key weapons.

Second, it signals to the cheetahs that the gazelles are in excellent physical condition. It is as though the stotting gazelles are saying: 'I am so athletic, so nimble, so fleet of foot, that you won’t be able to catch me. You are better off going after more catchable prey.'

Stotting works. Cheetahs rarely go after gazelles after watching them stot.”

“Interestingly, married women in their early thirties are most likely to have an affair, perhaps reflecting a motivation to switch mates while their desirability is high and they are still fertile.”

“It would be a mistake to view human responsiveness to social norms as somehow separate from our evolved psychology.

We are a rule-following species. A core part of our evolved psychology is to decipher social consensus, conform to group opinion, and adhere to social imperatives.

Throughout human evolutionary history, people lived and died by their social reputations. Violating social rules, and especially sexual rules, brought shame to violators and sometimes reputational damage to their entire families.

We care deeply about how we are perceived by others. As the evolutionary economist Robert Frank notes, “We come into this world with a nervous system that worries about rank.”

“Male sexual jealousy is the leading cause of the murder of adult women, accounting for between 50 and 70 percent of all such homicides.

Police know this. When women are murdered, the prime suspects are boyfriends, husbands, ex-boyfriends, and ex-husbands.

Although jealousy sometimes motivates women to murder, only 3 percent of murdered men are killed by their romantic partners or exes, and many of these female-perpetrated homicides are women defending themselves against a jealously violent man.”

“Men view many women as 'above threshold' in attractiveness, but women tend to be attracted primarily to men in the top twentieth percentile.”

“Narcissistic men apparently think they are hot, even when they’re not.”

“One colleague captured the conflict that can ensue by expressing frustration after several years of unhappy dating: 'Why am I being pestered by guys I don’t care about, but the men I’m genuinely attracted to seem to show little interest in me?'

I told her that she is an 8 chasing after 10s but being pursued by 6s. It dawned on her that pursuing men just outside of her mate-value range was the source of her misery.”

“Sexual jealousy, once considered by psychologists to be pathological or a character defect, is in fact a supremely important emotion motivating mate-retention solutions.

Adaptive in the evolutionary sense of leading to greater survival and reproductive success, of course, does not mean morally good.”

“The irony is that attractive women, because they receive a larger volume of male sexual attention, are precisely the women who, on average, are least likely to reciprocate men’s sexual interest.”

“The key point is that men who have success in attracting women are typically more likely to use coercion, and those who are less successful are less likely to use coercion.

These findings refute the evolution-based mate-deprivation hypothesis of r*pe.”

“The psychological devastation women experience stems in part from damage to a woman’s sexual reputation. This reputation, in turn, is formed and driven by two key evolutionary forces of sexual selection — men’s mate preferences and women’s intrasexual competition.

Men worldwide prioritize sexual fidelity in long-term mates. Men interpret cues to perceived promiscuity as compromising prospects for fidelity in a committed partner. In contrast, men are attracted to cues of a woman’s perceived promiscuity when they seek casual sex partners because these cues convey information about their chances of succeeding sexually.

So victims of revenge p*rn suffer damage to their long-term mate value in the eyes of men. Women perceived as promiscuous, even if that perception is entirely erroneous and based on images they themselves have not posted, also tend to be slotted in the male brain as potential short-term mates.”

“Why would women fear r*pe from strange men when most r*pists are men they know? Why don’t women show greater fear of r*pe from acquaintances since they make up the vast majority of perpetrators?

And why would so many women fear that their r*pist would murder them when the conditional probability of 'if r*pe, then murder' is so small?

In short, why do women appear at first glance to be miscalibrated in their r*pe fears?

One possible solution to this mystery is an evolutionary mismatch. Perhaps over human evolutionary history the rates of stranger r*pe and r*pe followed by murder were much higher than they are today.

For thousands of years, small-group warfare often left a trail of female victims in its wake.”

“Within each sex, however, there exist large individual differences. Some men and women have a strong desire for no-strings casual sex; others opt for monogamy with their 'one and only'.

Some women and men practice the art of deception in the mating game; others opt for honest courtship. Some people remain sexually faithful; others have affairs whenever the opportunity arises.

Some sexually harass co-workers with impunity; others are appalled at workplace misconduct.

Because of these profound individual differences within each sex, all statements about sex differences in this book carry the always-necessary qualifier of 'on average'.”

“Women who initiate affairs are much more likely to suffer from marital dissatisfaction than women who do not.

This might seem blindingly obvious, but the same studies show that men who have affairs do not, in fact, differ from those who abstain from affairs in their levels of marital happiness.

Second, women are much more likely than men to become emotionally involved with, and to fall in love with, their affair partners.”