Making Sense - Sam Harris - #254 — The Mating Strategies of Earthlings

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.900 today i'm speaking with david buss david is a professor of psychology at the university of

00:00:52.580 texas at austin and he's the author of many books most recently when men behave badly the hidden

00:01:01.280 roots of sexual deception harassment and assault and david and i get into many interesting topics

00:01:08.880 around the differential mating strategies of men and women we discuss the controversy that surrounds

00:01:16.040 evolutionary psychology the denial of sex differences that one increasingly encounters

00:01:22.340 on the left cross-cultural findings in human psychology the replication crisis in psychology

00:01:29.560 and then we get into the differences between men and women with respect to the relevant attitudes

00:01:38.260 toward sex and mate preferences sex differences in jealousy and infidelity the sources of unhappiness

00:01:48.580 in marriage mate value discrepancies what we can learn from dating apps polyamory and polygamy

00:01:56.600 the plight of stepchildren and the so-called dark triad personality type that causes so much mayhem

00:02:06.280 the me too movement and related topics anyway i hope you enjoy this conversation as much as i did

00:02:14.200 all very useful stuff to understand and now i bring you david buss

00:02:20.060 i am here with david buss david thanks for joining me glad to be talking to you sam so um you have

00:02:33.620 written a uh a very interesting book you've written several books but the current one is when men behave

00:02:40.880 badly the hidden roots of sexual deception harassment and assault and um when did you start writing this

00:02:48.880 was this a a me too response or no no not not at all i i well first of all i've been i've actually

00:02:57.800 been researching conflict between the sexes for about three decades so i published my first paper

00:03:03.980 on it about 30 years ago uh and uh no i started writing a book and signed a contract for it at least

00:03:11.000 a year before the me too movement broke so it's it's a long-term project took me about three years to

00:03:17.760 write 30 years to research 30 years uh three years to write well it's really interesting and it connects

00:03:23.500 with so many topics that um are you know of perennial importance but you know seemingly even

00:03:31.560 more important now but before we get into the the specific topic of biological sex and the

00:03:38.480 differential mating strategies of men and women and in all of the logic they're perverse and otherwise

00:03:45.140 let's just talk about the scientific context in which we're having this conversation this is essentially

00:03:52.120 evolutionary psychology that is the the lens through which you're looking at these phenomena

00:03:59.700 evolutionary psychology it has been and probably still is somewhat controversial can we rehearse the

00:04:08.280 the reasons why that's the case i think that it's controversial primarily among people who don't

00:04:16.940 really understand its logic so people pick up a you know i don't know newspaper article on it or

00:04:22.560 even in the textbooks that cover it and all so all intro to psychology textbooks cover it they typically

00:04:30.960 contain conceptual errors typically many conceptual errors and so i think there's just a a lack of

00:04:39.080 accurate understanding of what evolutionary psychology is and i think part of that stems from you know in my

00:04:46.180 field which is psychology you can get a bachelor's a master's or a phd without ever taking a single

00:04:54.900 course in evolutionary biology and so what it means is that all all the professors and you know

00:05:01.840 don't have any training in it and they don't have a deep understanding of it now of course some do some

00:05:07.580 pick it up post phd or or get some exposure to it but one way to think about it is that i mean the term

00:05:17.060 evolution we can we can start there with some you know why things are controversial i like to say

00:05:23.400 sometimes that it's a evolutionary psychology is an equal opportunity offender in the sense that

00:05:29.520 on the political spectrum it offends some on the religious right uh be who don't believe in evolution

00:05:36.520 uh or evolution as applied to humans right uh and it offends some on the on the political left

00:05:43.240 uh who erroneously i believe perceive that if they're evolved in this case sex differences in mating

00:05:51.960 strategies then that will interfere with social justice goals like we want to eliminate

00:05:57.200 discrimination against women for example we want to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace

00:06:02.760 and so it is perceived that well if it's evolved it's inevitable it's ineluctable there's nothing

00:06:08.640 we can do about it and and that's just simply a conceptual error a misunderstanding of the field

00:06:14.520 and then i guess one of the reasons that it's controversial in the modern environment

00:06:18.680 is that i and other evolutionary psychologists conceptualize theorize and empirically

00:06:26.700 document evolved sex differences in in this case our mating psychology or sexual psychology

00:06:33.220 and we're in a you know uh an era where some people believe it's what i call sex difference denialism

00:06:41.820 uh and they they they don't they don't want there to be sex differences if there are sex differences

00:06:47.320 they don't want them to be evolved sex differences and then the final ingredient so i have i have it all

00:06:53.880 here and especially in this new book is that it deals with controversial topics so in this case in the

00:06:59.320 case of the new book sexual harassment sexual coercion sexual deception it deals with hot topics that are

00:07:07.660 controversial and that people care about a lot they have strong emotions you know to these topics alone

00:07:14.880 and so when you combine this mixture evolutionary theory sex differences and then the nature of

00:07:21.260 these hot topics it's a very combustible mix and i think generates some controversy for that reason

00:07:26.720 yeah it's fascinating this commitment to denying sex differences i mean i sort of i get the commitment

00:07:36.260 to denying evolution i mean that that's just theologically mandated i mean certainly in an abrahamic context

00:07:43.100 so that's there's not there's not much of a mystery there i mean but this denial of sex differences

00:07:49.760 even when it works to the i guess i understand the initial logic that you think any admission of sex

00:07:59.000 sex differences will work to the disadvantage of women but even in those cases where the denial of

00:08:06.880 sex differences obviously works to their disadvantage there are no brakes on this crazy train and people

00:08:13.940 you know usually on the left just keep denying that there's any basis for distinguishing men from

00:08:20.980 women apart from their self-designations in the end right so it's like it's like a blank slate dogma

00:08:26.600 coupled to a an identity politics that takes as its only fulcrum what someone wants to say about

00:08:35.340 themselves on any given tuesday yeah and and i think i mean that's i think i'm hoping that my book will

00:08:44.660 break through some of these attitudes precisely for the reason that you mentioned sam is that is that

00:08:51.100 denying sex differences in these contexts for example sexual harassment some of the topics we'll get

00:08:56.500 into actually does harm women i mean then you know what we know for example that you know the

00:09:02.520 more extreme forms of sexual violence are largely perpetrated by men and uh and women are the primary

00:09:11.620 victims of it and so my argument is that we really need to understand the underlying sexual psychology

00:09:18.180 of men and women and how they differ in order to eliminate some of these some of these problems which

00:09:25.940 are genuine problems yeah yeah so i guess there are a few other pieces here that could explain a bias

00:09:35.520 against evolutionary psychology that there's one you close the door to in several places in your book

00:09:41.420 there's the the naturalistic fallacy the idea that explaining things in terms of evolutionary logic

00:09:48.720 could be mistaken for saying that because this is the way things have been and we can tell a story

00:09:57.280 that there were adaptive advantages in the past to our ancestors for human nature taking this turn

00:10:03.960 we're therefore justifying in this case these you know differences in in mating strategies between men and

00:10:10.980 women say we're saying it's a good thing because it's a natural thing of course right no one no one is

00:10:16.440 saying that or at least i haven't met such a person and yet that's an obvious misunderstanding

00:10:20.700 it it is and it is astonishing to me how frequently people do jump to that fallacy but i think that

00:10:29.260 there's some hope at least for some people because i um you mentioned my other books the first book that

00:10:35.320 i wrote is the evolution of desire strategies of human mating and one guy who read it told me that

00:10:42.800 it understanding men's evolved desire for sexual variety helped him to stay more faithful to his

00:10:50.800 wife because he found himself attracted to women who were other than his wife and initially concluded

00:10:56.440 that well maybe i'm not in love with my wife anymore but once he realized no there are actually

00:11:00.780 two different sets of psychological mechanisms desire for sexual variety and also the emotion

00:11:07.160 of love which i think evolved in the context of long-term pair bonding which characterizes a lot

00:11:13.140 of human mating and so so i think understanding doesn't automatically lead to that oh it's inevitable

00:11:22.060 and there's nothing we can do about it because it's quote natural and one other element on that is

00:11:28.060 and this this example illustrates this i think is that humans have a large number of evolved

00:11:35.080 psychological adaptations and uh at any moment in time only some small subset uh is activated and so we

00:11:45.120 can keep certain adaptations quiescent unactivated we can activate those that we think are desirable to

00:11:54.440 activate and but but but the issue of what exists and what should exist from a moral or ethical

00:12:01.480 perspective those are those are two different issues yeah i guess there's also the concern that

00:12:06.620 an evolutionary explanation ignores the role of culture which of course it it indeed not because we

00:12:15.080 have evolved at least for some considerable period of time in the context of culture and there's an

00:12:21.580 evolutionary description of how culture changes as well uh you know whether that's more than an

00:12:28.940 analogy to genetic evolution is something people can argue about but there this has a similar darwinian

00:12:35.340 dynamics so you know before we jump into specifics what can we say about the role of culture here

00:12:43.000 because it's been widely alleged that much psychological research has been done on so-called weird people you know white

00:12:54.040 educated industrialized rich democratic people and therefore has ignored the diversity of people on offer across the

00:13:03.860 planet and therefore it can't really generalize its results to all of humanity given what we're about to talk

00:13:11.120 about how concerned should anyone be that that's the case i think that evolutionary psychologists

00:13:17.840 in general are less guilty than other social scientists in in that and so i mean one of the

00:13:25.360 first studies i published yeah on mating psychology was on involved 37 different cultures that were many of which

00:13:33.560 were decidedly non-weird right uh and uh also as i talk about in the new book some of these sex

00:13:41.760 differences for example in the psychological design of sexual jealousy uh have now been replicated in

00:13:48.340 a large number of you know more traditional cultures brooke scales out in california i think i don't know if

00:13:56.960 she's in your neck of the woods or not but she did a study of 11 different cultures and replicated the sex

00:14:02.020 differences so you know if you look at the cross-cultural evidence which you know is difficult to gather but

00:14:10.280 it accumulates year after year uh there is strong empirical support at least for a number of hypotheses

00:14:19.380 about that that have been advanced and in particular those centering on human mating it sounds like this is not

00:14:27.260 the epicenter of the replication crisis in psychology but uh how how concerned are you about

00:14:32.780 the replication crisis is that affecting any of what we're going to talk about and and just how much is that

00:14:39.200 casting a shadow on any of the work you have done or are doing we should probably remind people what

00:14:46.260 we mean by replication crisis i've mentioned it a few times on the podcast but i haven't actually done a

00:14:51.360 proper podcast on it so well uh i guess for the for the listeners the replication crisis is that many

00:14:58.640 uh phenomena especially in the field of social psychology in that sub-discipline have turned out

00:15:05.740 not to be replicated that is other scientists come in and especially if the findings are counterintuitive

00:15:12.520 or appear astonishing or that our intuitions wouldn't lead us to expect those many of those have not

00:15:19.400 been replicated and and so people are going back to the drawing board but i think as it pertains to my

00:15:26.120 work and the work that i talk about in uh when men behave badly i'm not at all worried about it

00:15:32.100 because these sex differences uh they are large in magnitude and highly replicable and it's one of

00:15:38.920 the reasons why you know from early on why i started studying 37 cultures rather than just you know a

00:15:46.220 couple of samples from north america or western europe uh because you know you you don't want

00:15:51.940 to stake your career on a on findings that are not replicable and so i've i always try to instill that

00:15:58.420 in my graduate students that you want to be you want to be sure yourself that the findings are solid and

00:16:05.600 replicable before you publish them so that you don't fall into that into that trap and so and so i can

00:16:11.840 tell you with respect to some of the sex differences in mate preferences that i've documented and that

00:16:17.400 others have attempted to replicate and in sexual jealousy is another example even people who dislike

00:16:23.820 the theoretical lens that i use are still able to replicate the actual results in their own in their

00:16:30.680 own labs and so i feel very confident in this case i think in fact these sex differences are among

00:16:37.760 the most replicable in the field of psychology so okay so let's start and let's take it from the top

00:16:46.560 or the bottom as the case may be how do we define sex biologically biologists define sex

00:16:55.260 very simply by the size of the sex cells so the gametes that is the the males are are defined as the small

00:17:03.580 ones um in the human case you have basically sperm which are you know little more than tiny packets

00:17:11.340 of dna and uh you know uh an outboard motor uh you know adaptation designed to get to the the egg to

00:17:19.820 fertilize it females are defined as the ones with the larger sex cells in the human case the the the egg

00:17:25.660 which is large many times the size of sperm and filled with nutrients and so from the moment of

00:17:34.360 conception and then subsequently uh females are investing more more than males so some people use

00:17:42.840 this kind of a cliche at this point but sperm are cheap eggs are expensive but it is it is true

00:17:49.800 and so uh and so uh and so sex defined in that way is different from uh things like gender identity or

00:18:00.180 sexual orientation or sexual attraction and and so for biologists it's it's it's very clear

00:18:09.780 you know that sex sex evolved somewhere around 1.3 billion years ago from a sexual a sexually

00:18:18.980 reproducing species so it's been going on a long time but there there are two sexes right and and i

00:18:25.640 think there's been also a lot of confusion that is developed when people intermingle that biological

00:18:32.220 definition of male and female with all these other phenomena such as identities and and orientations and

00:18:39.960 and uh labels and how old is sexual reproduction uh estimates vary uh but it's some somewhere between

00:18:51.420 1 billion and 2 billion years ago is when it when it first evolved so it's been going on for i guess

00:18:59.540 you know you'd say a quarter or a third of the of the time of uh life on earth i think life on earth

00:19:08.000 evolved about three and a half billion years ago so uh sexual sexual reproduction it took it took a

00:19:14.940 at least a billion or two billion years for sexual reproduction to evolve after that yeah so we've been

00:19:21.080 at this for a long time and uh you know even in our hominid form we've been at it for a long time and

00:19:28.480 that's worth remembering as we get into the details here because you know when when you describe

00:19:35.800 the different mating strategies and their evolutionary logic if you lose sight of

00:19:43.900 the vast amount of time wherein incremental changes could have tuned us differently it can seem less

00:19:54.720 plausible than it otherwise would i mean this is just we have bad intuitions for how much time it

00:20:00.480 need take for things to change in in evolutionary terms and we have we certainly have bad intuitions

00:20:06.320 for how long tens and hundreds of thousands of years really is yeah no exactly i i mean in in a way

00:20:13.920 it's our evolved psychology that causes those failures of intuition because we evolved to solve problems

00:20:21.840 in you know the here and now and in time spans of seconds or minutes or sometimes days and occasionally years

00:20:29.440 but we didn't evolve to even understand deep time or or the concept of a billion years it's it's just a

00:20:38.720 it's very difficult to make that transition and some have used some scientists have used

00:20:43.960 analogies or metaphors to try to make that leap so for example a football field like if you start if

00:20:51.220 evolution of life started at one end of a football field and then evolved to the point of modern humans

00:20:57.420 sort of where where are we in that space and you get down to i don't remember the exact details but

00:21:02.720 something like the last inch of the football field where where our species evolved um a couple million

00:21:09.620 years ago uh and then then when you talk about even things like farming and technology the agricultural

00:21:16.460 revolution and those those are like you're down to seconds at that point so uh so but sometimes those

00:21:22.580 devices can help people make the leap to try to tune their intuitions to to deep time so what do we

00:21:33.560 think we understand about the differences between men and women with respect to evolved mating strategies

00:21:41.440 well i guess we can start maybe just with a few basics uh and that is and we've mentioned sperm and

00:21:47.840 an egg uh but males and females let's in the human case we have dramatically different reproductive

00:21:55.720 anatomy and physiology uh and consequently uh these have posed different adaptive problems for males and

00:22:04.780 females so for example uh fertilization occurs internally within the female body not within the male body

00:22:11.060 that what this creates is uh an asymmetry in certainty of parenthood where women are always 100% certain

00:22:19.860 that they are the mothers like no no mother ever gave birth as far as i'm aware and as the child is emerging

00:22:25.220 from her body wondered uh gee is this kid really my own uh you know mothers are 100% certain men can never

00:22:32.860 be sure so some cultures use the phrase uh mama's baby papa's maybe to kind of capture that asymmetry

00:22:40.100 but this stems from the fact that fertilization occurs internally within women not within men and so this is an

00:22:46.980 example of an adaptive problem that men have faced recurrently over evolutionary time that no woman has ever faced

00:22:54.440 and so you take this this example other examples other fundamental features are the obligatory parental investment

00:23:04.440 that each sex has to devote to produce a single child uh women have that obligatory nine month investment and and it's

00:23:13.020 obligatory in the in the sense that women don't have a choice about it really uh i guess well maybe some modern

00:23:19.320 technology i mean they can you can farm it out to other female bodies but a woman can't say look i'm very busy with my

00:23:26.660 career right now i i really only want to put in two and a half months of the pregnancy it's it's obligatory and

00:23:32.440 nine months is heavy investment metabolically uh it also creates problems for women uh because her

00:23:41.200 center of gravity is moved forward and so it puts extra torque on her back and that's one reason why we

00:23:46.960 think that male and female spines are are differently constructed uh where females have a wedge like

00:23:54.320 the vertebra in there which uh helps to relieve the torque when that center of gravity is moved forward

00:24:01.260 uh but to produce that single child that takes a woman nine months it takes man uh a man just one

00:24:08.160 act of sex at a minimum now of course men do more than the minimum typically or often they do although

00:24:15.520 although their investment varies a lot but so you take this stark sex difference in this asymmetry in

00:24:22.320 obligatory parental investment just to produce the child to start with and then that creates different

00:24:28.600 adaptive problems for men and women and also a different payoff matrix when it comes to optimal

00:24:35.900 mating strategies that is for example and this is one of the ones that i think creates the most havoc

00:24:42.280 that i talk about in the book is that males their primary limit historically over evolutionary time

00:24:48.920 on reproductive success has been the number of fertile women that they can successfully inseminate

00:24:55.120 for women and so adding additional sex partners historically has led to increases in reproductive

00:25:01.560 success for men for women adding additional sex partners does not now women can sometimes benefit

00:25:08.800 from additional sex partners as i talk about in the book under why women have affairs which i think is a

00:25:15.260 really interesting dimension of uh hidden side of female sexual psychology but you you can see that

00:25:23.560 due to the asymmetries in investment there are going to be sex differences in optimal mating strategies

00:25:29.780 and so so the key point that i want to make here is that is that it would be astonishing to an

00:25:39.000 evolutionist if you found profound sex differences in our reproductive anatomy and physiology and zero

00:25:46.580 attending psychological behavioral and strategic sex differences that correspond to the adaptive

00:25:52.940 the different adaptive problems that those sex differences in anatomy and physiology create

00:25:58.080 and and so we we look and and there are clear predictions in some cases uh and we find that yes

00:26:05.580 lo and behold they they do uh you do find psychological and strategic and behavioral sex differences

00:26:12.200 in precisely the domains where the sexes have faced these different adaptive problems and and one of the

00:26:19.560 things i'll just mention why i some people say oh you're saying men are from mars and women are from venus

00:26:24.900 which i absolutely hate because no that's not what we're saying the the meta theory of evolutionary

00:26:31.240 the evolutionary psychology predicts both sex differences and similarities between the sexes at the

00:26:37.800 psychological level and it's and it's a very precise meta theory namely we expect similarities between men and

00:26:45.860 women in all domains in which they face approximately similar adaptive problems so as an example both sexes have

00:26:54.220 faced the problem of eating you know getting fuel for the machine and so men and women have by and large similar

00:27:02.340 although not identical taste preferences you know for things like sugar fat salt and protein okay where do you

00:27:10.100 see sex differences in taste preferences well when women get pregnant uh and they face an adaptive problem

00:27:17.880 uh that men don't face which is namely that substances that are teratogenic meaning dangerous to the fetus

00:27:27.400 in in minute quantities are perfectly fine for an adult woman but if they pass the placental barrier

00:27:33.860 uh they can damage the fetus and so all of a sudden women's taste preferences change when they

00:27:40.040 get pregnant and so but this that example illustrates that we we expect sex similarities in large areas

00:27:49.960 perhaps most areas of psychology now as it happens where do we expect sex differences well they fall

00:27:56.200 very heavily in the mating and sexuality domains yeah that's a very interesting and useful frame to put

00:28:03.300 around this so if you just start with the acknowledgement that evolution is a thing and that the two sexes have

00:28:12.180 different anatomies and physiologies related to reproduction and different resource demands and constraints and

00:28:23.460 fairly discrepant interests in in genetic terms uh with respect to you know many

00:28:33.140 mating options you know extracurricular mating options infidelity um just you know how it advantages the

00:28:40.180 propagation of the the man's genes to have sex outside of marriage versus uh the woman's it would be a

00:28:47.940 a miracle and and you know even a a strike against the theory of evolution if there were no differences

00:28:56.340 there in evolved psychology yes yeah indeed and and it would be i mean it would be like saying humans

00:29:04.580 have developed the anatomy and musculature for bipedal locomotion but we don't we don't have bipedal

00:29:10.500 locomotion right the behavior yeah so let's get into some of these details so that there's the um i mean maybe

00:29:17.860 we we could just take kind of specific concepts here and extrapolate from them so you know you have a

00:29:25.140 married couple that is um they have shared interests again these are not i'm not talking about the

00:29:34.740 psychological first person interests we're talking about the genes eye view of things they have shared

00:29:40.820 genetic interests in successfully raising children but how are their interests not precisely aligned

00:29:49.940 in your view yeah it's a great point so i mean and and men and women do cooperate and cooperate

00:29:58.340 supremely and over long periods of time for for that precise reason that is they have a shared uh

00:30:05.140 vehicle a shared genetic vehicle that's carrying the precious cargo into the into the future uh but

00:30:12.580 they differ in very predictable ways so so one is if there is a possibility for infidelity okay and this

00:30:21.780 could be sexual infidelity where uh sexual or reproductive resources are being diverted to someone outside of

00:30:29.620 the the the couple uh or even financial infidelity when one partner is shunting financial resources

00:30:38.420 toward either their interests or even toward their kin at the expense of their partner's interests or their

00:30:45.140 partner's kin you have the possibility of a dissolution or divorce or breakups uh where

00:30:54.100 and that that possibility creates a potential for conflict uh so i outline i think in the books

00:30:59.460 something like 12 ways in which men and women men and women's interests from an evolutionary perspective

00:31:08.180 can depart from one another so even even in the case i end with that ideally for minimizing conflict

00:31:16.420 men and women would the couple would die at exactly the same time because if one member of the couple dies

00:31:22.500 and the other does not then the one who is still alive can remate and then in some cases

00:31:29.140 reproduce and have additional children and so the pooled resources can be devoted toward interests that

00:31:37.300 are not you know aligned with the interests of the original partner so so it's there's a very

00:31:43.300 predictable set of circumstances in which the interests of men and women depart from an evolutionary

00:31:49.140 perspective with the qualification that that also occurs within the context of shared interests

00:31:55.620 okay so so from the genetic perspective here it's very easy to explain

00:32:03.780 the man's infidelity or inclination to be unfaithful provided he can get away with it right

00:32:11.860 i mean like there's really no limit to the evolutionary advantage for him if he could impregnate

00:32:19.460 a thousand women surreptitiously and actually expend no resources on on them and their progeny that would

00:32:29.780 be an amazing gain for him in in evolutionary terms over remaining faithful to his wife and one could also

00:32:38.740 add that you know from again that this doesn't this is that it's an all too common inclination for men but

00:32:46.420 you know we could also say that he should be highly incentivized to donate sperm to a sperm bank whenever

00:32:53.460 he can on the i mean that that's really the ultimate case where he could father scores of children

00:33:00.500 for whom he would shoulder no financial or or emotional responsibility and from his genes perspective that

00:33:08.020 would all be to the good but there are very few men who feel you know any internal psychological

00:33:13.620 motivation to do such a thing so there's clearly daylight between what people feel they want to do and what

00:33:20.660 would make genetic sense if you were going to use the cold logic of evolution but of course we haven't

00:33:28.980 evolved in the presence of sperm banks and we don't have intuitions for how good it would be to father hundreds of

00:33:35.700 children we never meet but there's something more mysterious or at least slightly harder to explain

00:33:41.940 about a woman's tendency to be unfaithful in a marriage what do we know about the evolutionary logic

00:33:50.980 of that yeah it's a great question and and i i devote a chunk of my book to exploring that that very

00:33:57.780 issue just one quick comment on the sperm bank i think you hit the nail on the head with it

00:34:02.980 that sperm banks are evolutionarily novel yeah and we don't have adaptations to things that are

00:34:07.540 evolutionarily novel and so um so it's that's not really a great mystery as uh as steve pinker once

00:34:15.540 said um you know his genes he's never reproduced he says his genes can go jump in a lake right you

00:34:20.500 know that we're we're just operating from our evolved psychology that evolved not to these weird

00:34:26.740 modern conditions that we find ourselves in anyway so the your question about female infidelity i think

00:34:32.740 it's really fascinating because this is an area where i end up disagreeing with some of my

00:34:38.660 evolutionary psychology colleagues uh even even those who i have a lot of respect for uh such as

00:34:45.380 marty hazelton former student of mine steve gangestad and and and others where the the the traditional

00:34:52.340 explanation which i originally thought was compelling is that is that women can in at least in some cases get

00:35:00.980 high quality genes from an affair partner while while retaining the investment of resources and

00:35:08.660 commitment and fathering from a stable regular mate and so and and in principle that logic could work

00:35:16.260 out so in particular if a woman is mated to a man who has inferior genetic material for example genes for

00:35:24.420 diseases or or ill health or a compromised immune system in principle that can work out okay and there

00:35:32.340 have been a variety of tests of that and and this is still under contention but but if you ask the

00:35:38.820 question well why do women have affairs do women really have affairs for the functional reason of obtaining

00:35:44.580 good genes from these affair partners and what i argue is for a different hypothesis that i call the mate

00:35:52.260 switching hypothesis that is women have affairs primarily when they're when they're unhappy with

00:35:59.460 their current relationship and you you may say well boy that is the least surprising thing i've ever heard

00:36:07.380 but it's interesting that if you look at men who have affairs and compare them with men who don't have

00:36:11.780 affairs there's no difference in their marital happiness or relationship satisfaction so women have

00:36:18.420 affairs when they're unhappy with a relationship the nature of their affairs differs qualitatively

00:36:24.900 on average and we're talking about on average differences here in that something like 70 of

00:36:31.140 women become deeply emotionally involved with or in love with their affair partner and so that that is

00:36:38.580 that would be a terrible design feature if all you're trying to do is obtain the good genes and you know you

00:36:45.380 do you don't want to be falling in love with the affair partner if that were the if the good genes

00:36:49.380 explanation were correct right if you look at what motivates men to have affairs desire for sexual

00:36:56.340 variety novelty novel sexual experiences is overwhelmingly the motivation not exclusively but there's this

00:37:03.780 enormous sex difference in uh the design of of male affairs and female affairs uh and males typically

00:37:13.620 don't fall in love with their affair partners although of course some do and in fact try adopt strategies to

00:37:21.300 minimize the the cost the risks and investment in the affair partner and so the my argument stems from

00:37:31.460 the notion that something could always go wrong in a relationship so going back over human evolutionary

00:37:38.500 time a man could get injured in in a war or get killed and bad stuff can befall any relationship the

00:37:48.020 woman could get dumped or he might decide he wants to take on a second or third wife compromising the

00:37:54.900 investment he's devoting to the first wife and so something can always go wrong and so my argument is that

00:38:00.340 if a woman would have been left totally unprepared and had to just suddenly if her husband

00:38:07.540 got killed or dumped her she would have to re-enter the mating pool that wouldn't be optimal because

00:38:14.580 women take out what i call mate insurance as we have you know we have house insurance and car insurance

00:38:20.100 if something bad should happen to our house or car uh we'd hope that it doesn't but you know it's it's

00:38:26.660 a backup and that women do exactly the same thing they cultivate backup potential mates and sometimes

00:38:33.700 have an affair in order to exit from a bad or cost inflicting relationship or to trade up in the

00:38:42.340 mating market if she can obtain a substantially better quality mate than the one that she has or as a

00:38:50.180 transition back into the mating pool so i argue and again this is in contrast to my some of my evolutionary

00:38:57.620 psychology colleagues it's i think it provides a more comprehensive explanation for why women have

00:39:04.820 affairs and the evidence for the good genes or dual mating strategy hypothesis is the way it's sometimes

00:39:13.380 called the evidence is turning out to be a lot shakier than originally thought so there's something there

00:39:22.340 right but it doesn't seem to explain the majority of cases where women have affairs i guess they could

00:39:29.220 both be true but the emotional entanglement that many women feel when having an affair could be a byproduct of

00:39:38.980 just the degree to which they weight emotional engagement and the prospect of finding a a caring

00:39:48.020 mate more than men do in in any mating circumstance and i guess there's this background fact that we

00:39:55.940 we haven't spelled out yet which is that men and women tend to value different things in mates or or the

00:40:03.300 same things to very different degrees and you know by comparison i mean the cartoon version of sex

00:40:09.780 differences sort of applies again there's going to be a bell curve over both populations and there will

00:40:16.100 be women who are psychologically more like men than most women and there'll be men who are more like

00:40:23.060 women than most men so that these distributions will overlap considerably but generally speaking

00:40:29.300 men tend to be more concerned about how women look than women are with respect to male appearance and

00:40:37.940 presumably the the evolutionary logic there is on the physical you know criteria of bearing children and

00:40:46.260 being healthy all the while and women care more about social status and the prospects that the man will be a

00:40:54.340 good source of you know care and and resources and that discrepancy certainly explains a lot of what

00:41:02.740 we see out in the world but it to your your last point if the operating systems are that different with respect

00:41:09.700 to those variables i guess emotional entanglement under the conditions of infidelity if you're a woman could

00:41:17.620 just be a kind of cost of the the underlying mating strategy logic as opposed to something that proves

00:41:27.060 that you're not actually out to surreptitiously get good genes you know behind your partner's back

00:41:33.620 yeah well i i think that i mean you have to look at with all these cases the the weight of the evidence

00:41:39.380 and i think there has been enough time for evolution by selection to decouple that emotional involvement

00:41:47.940 for women under some under certain circumstances so so as i mentioned it's a terrible design feature

00:41:55.700 terrible psychological flaw if if the sole goal is getting good genes but it but it is an excellent

00:42:03.540 design feature if the goal is a mate switching goal is there i seem to remember there being

00:42:08.980 research around women's mate preferences changing to one another degree when they're ovulating

00:42:17.780 did i make that up or is that yes no no no you didn't make that up there's been a fair amount of

00:42:23.220 research on precisely that and that was the body of research that was used to try to test the um the

00:42:31.220 good genes hypothesis or the dual mating strategy hypothesis uh the problem it that it runs into

00:42:38.900 is is is a couple things one is well what qualifies as markers of good genes and the the people who

00:42:48.580 have argued for the the good genes hypothesis basically selected things like uh masculinity and

00:42:56.740 symmetry those were the two that were primarily focused on so that women were hypothesized to prefer

00:43:02.580 more masculine and more symmetrical men around ovulation when they're most likely to conceive

00:43:08.420 but the question is like why would these two be viewed as the exclusive markers of good genes so

00:43:16.820 another example is i mean one of the most heritable things that we know and i know you've talked about

00:43:20.820 this on in other podcasts but is uh intelligence intelligence is a is a you know at least moderately

00:43:28.100 heritable and probably a bit more than moderately heritable and we know that intelligence is

00:43:32.900 beneficial for uh solving a wide variety of problems but women's preferences for intelligence does not

00:43:39.780 shift at ovulation okay so so there's there's the conceptual issue of what qualifies as markers of

00:43:46.420 good genes i have a nice one i have a knee-jerk response to that what we mean by intelligence now

00:43:53.140 is quite a bit more nuanced than what counted as a evolutionarily important difference in intelligence

00:44:03.460 you know even a few hundred years ago much less 75 000 years ago right so like if you're if all you're

00:44:11.780 doing is clubbing one another over the head with rocks being smart while you're doing that didn't didn't

00:44:19.220 give much of a differential advantage you know hedge fund managers and software engineers and other

00:44:27.620 markers of differential success now a bit like sperm banks right we just did not evolve to pay attention

00:44:35.300 to those differences yeah uh yeah possibly i mean i i accept your your point i guess partially where i

00:44:42.740 would push back a little on it is that you know that we didn't just our ancestors didn't just hit

00:44:49.220 over the head with rocks that is socially i didn't navigate social space too yeah navigate social space

00:44:55.940 and even you know the the physical environment you know create uh navigate to habitats that had

00:45:03.380 resources and uh but yeah the the social intelligence hypothesis is one hypothesis for the evolution of

00:45:09.620 you know you know high level high levels of human intelligence so so i would push back a little bit

00:45:15.460 on that and i and i think it's an open question i mean if you go to i don't know traditional hunter

00:45:20.660 gatherer societies do the people that they call intelligent would they be the same people that we call

00:45:27.380 intelligent right but but i of course recognize that your point about you know we have very specialized

00:45:33.060 you know skills and abilities in mathematics and and hedge fund managing and so forth that

00:45:39.620 that wouldn't have been relevant ancestrally but but i want to get back to this the second problem

00:45:45.380 that i see and it actually relates to the issue you brought up very early in our conversation which

00:45:50.500 is the replicability crisis so it's very difficult and time-consuming to do this ovulation research you

00:45:57.220 know you really have to track women over time and over a number of cycles to really document it well

00:46:03.860 uh and the attempts so there have been several large-scale attempts to replicate these ovulatory

00:46:11.540 shifts in mate preferences uh and that have failed to find the effects uh and so the effects are either

00:46:19.700 a lot less replicable than initially thought or they're a lot weaker than initially thought and

00:46:25.380 require much more sensitive designs to detect and so i think that there are you know both conceptual

00:46:32.100 problems with the good genes hypothesis as well as empirical problems okay so we're back to the um

00:46:40.420 the man and the woman however hapless they might be let's say they have one child and

00:46:47.140 Tolstoy got here first they're happy families and and unhappy ones and the happy ones are all alike and

00:46:54.500 the unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way but how did the predictable variance of unhappiness

00:47:00.340 here conform to the different mating strategies right so i mean just take the response to infidelity

00:47:09.540 let's say that or just imagined infidelity you ask the wife to imagine you know her husband cheating on

00:47:15.940 her and vice versa what do each party find most disturbing about that consciously and how does that

00:47:23.300 relate to their different mating strategies uh biologically yes well uh there i think were two

00:47:31.700 questions embedded in your question is what one is uh what what are the sources of unhappiness in

00:47:37.460 in couples and then the second is what what are the sex differences in the nature of jealousy and

00:47:42.580 infidelity and basically there there are and these are highly replicable and and one is a real cool

00:47:50.820 study on verbal interrogations when you when people discover that their partner is cheating or might be

00:47:58.420 cheating and men want to know did you have sex with him and women want to know do you love her and so

00:48:06.420 this sex difference when you imagine your partner being unfaithful now we've done studies where we we

00:48:12.260 ask let's say your partner got emotionally involved with an affair partner and had sex with him had

00:48:17.780 passionate sexual intercourse which aspect of the infidelity would bother you more and women are much

00:48:23.460 more likely to say that the emotional aspects the falling in love the attachment that those aspects

00:48:29.780 bother women a lot more than men whereas it's the sexual aspects that bother men a lot more and so

00:48:36.980 there's you know not that women are overjoyed about finding their partner having sex uh they're not

00:48:43.860 they're upset about it if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 25, 2021

#254 — The Mating Strategies of Earthlings

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