David M Buss

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Psychology

Previous studies on sex-differentiated mate preferences have focused on univariate analyses. However, because mate selection is inherently multidimensional, a multivariate analysis more appropriately measures sex differences in mate preferences. We used the Mahalanobis distance (D) and logistic regression to investigate sex differences in mate pref...

This paper reports independent studies supporting the proposal that human standards of attractiveness reflect the output of psychological adaptations to detect fitness-relevant traits. We tested novel a priori hypotheses based on an adaptive problem uniquely faced by ancestral hominin females: a forward-shifted center of mass during pregnancy. The...

This article proposes a contextual-evolutionary theory of human mating strategies. Both men and women are hypothesized to have evolved distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie short-term and long-term strategies. Men and women confront different adaptive problems in short-term as opposed to long-term mating contexts. Consequently, different...

The desires of one sex can lead to deceptive exploitation by the other sex. Strategic Interference Theory proposes that certain "negative" emotions evolved or have been co-opted by selection, in part, to defend against deception and reduce its negative consequences. In Study 1 (N = 217) Americans reported emotional distress in response to specific...

The current study sought to answer three key questions about explaining the emotion of regret in the domain of casual sex: Are sex differences in sexual regret robust or attenuated in a highly egalitarian culture? What proximate psychological variables might explain sex differences in sexual regret? And what accounts for within-sex variation in exp...

Evidence is abundant that evolution by selection has produced sex differences in the design of adaptations to solve the problems surrounding reproduction. A prime example is the design of human jealousy, which research suggests is triggered by distinct evoking acts that are specific challenges for women and men in their exclusive reproductive bond....

Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can b...

Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can b...

Science is among humanity’s greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific qual...

Incels (involuntary celibates) are an online subculture community of men who form an identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. They attribute their lack of success to genetic factors, evolved mate preferences, and social inequities. While we have a deep ancestral history of incels, the modern incel communit...

Presentation of research replicating and expanding upon unpublished data from Buss and Schmitt (1998) investigating how accurate/inaccurate each sex is at predicting the sexual desires of the opposite sex and the average member of their own sex. Specifically, participants were asked questions derived from the seminal sexual strategies theory (Buss...

Status hierarchies are ubiquitous across cultures and have been over deep time. Position in hierarchies shows important links with fitness outcomes. Consequently, humans should possess psychological adaptations for navigating the adaptive challenges posed by living in hierarchically organized groups. One hypothesized adaptation functions to assess,...

Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships, and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking, hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here, we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 partici...

Sexual double standards are social norms that impose greater social opprobrium on women versus men or that permit one sex greater sexual freedom than the other. This study examined sexual double standards when choosing a mate based on their sexual history. Using a novel approach, participants (N = 923, 64% women) were randomly assigned to make eval...

Evolutionary social science is having a renaissance. This volume showcases the empirical and theoretical advancements produced by the evolutionary study of romantic relationships. The editors assembled an international collection of contributors to trace how evolved psychological mechanisms shape strategic computation and behavior across the life s...

Recent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, w...

Despite progress in attractiveness research, we have yet to identify many fitness-relevant cues in the human phenotype or humans’ psychology for responding to them. Here, we test hypotheses about psychological systems that may have evolved to process distinct cues in the female lumbar region. The Fetal Load Hypothesis proposes a male preference for...

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

The present study developed a brief version of the Hungarian Why Sex? questionnaire (Meskó et al., 2022). The study was in part based on previously reported data obtained from several samples ( N = 6193; 1976 men, 4217 women). Using Mokken Scaling Procedure, Item Response Model and redundancy analysis indicated that retaining three summary scales c...

Benenson et al. (2022) amass impressive evidence of robust sex differences as support for expanding “staying alive” theory. We argue for a broader and more domain-specific conceptualization focusing on life history tradeoffs between survival and mating success. Using three examples – women's disgust, fear of rape, and cultivation of bodyguards – we...

Despite the increase in the scientific study of morality over the past decade, one important domain remains relatively underexplored—sexual morality. The current article begins to fill this gap by exploring its multidimensionality and testing several evolution-based hypotheses about sex differences in moralizing distinct components of sexual morali...

The niche-diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait combinations within a society. It predicts that personality traits will be both more variable and differentiated in populations with more distinct social and ecological niches. Prior tests of this hypothesis in 55 nations suffered from pot...

Using the same methodology as Meston and Buss (2007), three studies were conducted on a Hungarian sample (total N = 4913) which corroborate previous findings on the universal diversity of sexual motivation. Study 1 ( N = 2728; 1069 women and 1659 men) identified 197 reasons for having sex based on participants’ free responses. In Study 2 ( N = 1161...

A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates. Less empirical attentio...

Objective One of the factors that sexual disgust should be calibrated to is the size of the mating pool. This study tested this hypothesis by examining whether perceptions of mate availability explain variance in levels of sexual disgust towards potential mates.Methods Participants (N = 853; 373 women) rated how sexually disgusting they found 60 po...

A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates. Less empirical attentio...

A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates. Less empirical attentio...

Sexual arousal is conceptualized as a motivational system that prioritizes mating and minimizes the perceived risks associated with sex. Previous studies show that when sexually aroused, individuals are more likely to endorse engaging in risky sexual behaviors. A majority of these studies examine a restricted number of sexual behaviors or do not te...

The book goes into depth into topics subsumed by the umbrella of 'sexual conflict,' or the battle of the sexes. These include deception in dating and mating, sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, sexual coercion, and sexual assault. It presents a unified evolutionary theory of sexual conflict

This extended reply addresses comments on our paper examining the role of cost infliction and benefit generation in status allocations across 14 nations (Durkee et al., 2020). Specifically, Cheng et al. (2021) identified multicollinearity among our predictors as cause for concern and reviewed existing evidence that purportedly challenges our conclu...

Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and you...

Personality makes us who we are and influences every aspect of our lives - from how we interact with others, to how we respond in stressful situations. Personality Psychology uses a unique organizational framework to explore the six key domains of knowledge about personality - Dispositional, Biological, Intrapsychic, Cognitive/Experiential, Social/...

Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine...

The cognitive revolution reshaped our understanding of psychology by considering the mind as an assemblage of information-processing mechanisms. A central proposition of this computational theory of mind was that, to understand human behavior, we must attend to the information-processing mechanisms responsible for producing it. Despite the indispen...

Reports an error in "Human status criteria: Sex differences and similarities across 14 nations" by David M. Buss, Patrick K. Durkee, Todd K. Shackelford, Brian F. Bowdle, David P. Schmitt, Gary L. Brase, Jae C. Choe and Irina Trofimova (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, May 28, 2020, np). In the article, the...

Significance Social status is a universal and consequential dimension of variation within human groups. Multiple prominent theories have been proposed to explain how status is allocated, but extant evidence is insufficient to adjudicate between their conflicting predictions. Here we show that distinctions between each theory hinge on the relative i...

The Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale – STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined mor...

The field of personality psychology aspires to construct an overarching theory of human nature and individual differences: one that specifies the psychological mechanisms that underpin both universal and variable aspects of thought, emotion, and behaviour. Here, we argue that the adaptationist toolkit of evolutionary psychology provides a powerful...

The niche diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait-combinations within a society. Prior tests of the hypothesis in 55 nations suffer from potential confounds associated with differences in the measurement properties of personality scales across groups. Using recently developed psychometric...

Objective: One of the factors that sexual disgust should be calibrated to is the size of the mating pool. Previous research provides evidence that low mate availability affects perceptions related to mate choice. However, methodological shortcomings leave the role of sexual disgust in facilitating mate selection unclear. We will examine whether per...

Social status is a central and universal feature of our highly social species. Reproductively relevant resources, including food, territory, mating opportunities, powerful coalitional alliances, and group-provided health care, flow to those high in status and trickle only slowly to those low in status. Despite its importance and centrality to human...

Public Significance Statement Evolutionary psychology provides a cogent meta-theory for psychological science. Historical assumptions of prior meta-theories are fatally flawed and known to be empirically incorrect. Evolutionary psychology provides a sound scientific framework for understanding human nature—one that is consilient with known causal p...

In her commentary on Buss and von Hippel (2018), Fine (2020) makes two primary claims. First, she argues that Buss and von Hippel’s study suffers from measurement problems and inconsistent findings, and hence the data do not support their conclusions. Second, she argues that Buss and von Hippel make unsubstantiated and inappropriate accusations of...

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for the...

We developed and validated the Reasons for Disagreement in Romantic Relationships Scale (RDRRS). We conducted act nomination (Study 1), investigated the items’ component structure in a sample of newlywed couples (Study 2), and compared responses in the newlywed year to responses three years later (Study 3). First, we identified 82 reasons for disag...

Sexual disgust is an emotion hypothesized to aid in mate selection, deterring individuals from selecting suboptimal mates or from engaging in risky sexual activities. Sexual disgust thresholds tend to be higher for men than women, and these differences are large and robust. Varying types of context-specific input might result in cross-cultural diff...

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/1138088617/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

Sexual disgust is an emotion hypothesized to deter individuals from engaging in sexual activities that are probabilistically detrimental to fitness. Existing measures of sexual disgust are limited in treating sexual disgust as a unitary construct, potentially missing its multidimensional nature, and inadvertently ignoring important adaptive problem...

Evolutionary mismatch concepts are being fruitfully employed in a number of research domains, including medicine, health, and human cognition and behavior to generate novel hypotheses and better understand existing findings. We contend that research on human mating will benefit from explicitly addressing both the evolutionary mismatch of the people...

Purpose of Review The aim of this review is to examine recent literature on the relationship between sexual disgust and aspects of female sexual functioning, with consideration of how an evolutionary perspective of this important emotion may help inform treatment and intervention programs. Recent Findings Researchers have begun to link sexual disg...

Humans express a wide array of ideal mate preferences. Around the world, people desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across thes...

Research has documented 237 distinct reasons for engaging in sex, which have been clustered into the 141-item, 13 subscale YSEX? instrument. Although the YSEX? has impressive psychometric properties, the required completion time is a barrier to its use in time-constrained contexts. The current studies develop and validate a short-form version of th...

Short-term mating strategies involve casual sex, multiple partners, and short-time intervals before initiating intercourse. Such strategies should be difficult to implement in the presence of high levels of sexual disgust. Researchers have therefore suggested—and found evidence for—the hypothesis that individuals with a stronger proclivity for shor...

Mate choice lies close to differential reproduction, the engine of evolution. Patterns of mate choice consequently have power to direct the course of evolution. Here we provide evidence suggesting one pattern of human mate choice—the tendency for mates to be similar in overall desirability—caused the evolution of a structure of correlations that we...

Bodily attractiveness is an important component of mate value. Musculature-a crucial component of men's bodily attractiveness-provides women with probabilistic information regarding a potential mate's quality. Overall musculature is comprised of several muscle groups, each of which varies in information value; different muscles should be weighted d...

We apply recent adaptationist theories about the emotions “pride” and “shame” to the domain of hierarchical status and test the hypothesis that pride and shame are distinct components of a culturally universal statusmanagement system. Using an international dataset containing ratings of the status impacts of 240 personal characteristics within 14 n...

Historically, psychology has been characterized by a dichotomy between branches that focus on human nature and those that focus on individual differences. Initial “grand theories” of personality, such as those advanced by Freud, Maslow, and others, were interested in universal psychological features. For Freud, the emphasis was on sexual and aggres...

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, 6th edition. Contains a major update of the past 4 years of research on topics ranging from mating to murder, from cooperation to status hierarchies. https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/1138088617/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

Mating motives, informed by an evolutionary perspective, are central to marketing and consumer behavior. Humans have an evolved menu of mating strategies that vary along a temporal continuum anchored by long-term committed mating (e.g., marriage) and short-term mating (e.g., one-night stands, brief affairs). Men and women, although similar in some...

Evolved mate preferences comprise a central causal process in Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Their powerful influences have been documented in all sexually reproducing species, including in sexual strategies in humans. This article reviews the science of human mate preferences and their myriad behavioral manifestations. We discuss sex differe...

Cambridge Core - Social Psychology - The New Psychology of Love - edited by Robert J. Sternberg

SCIENTIFIC In this paper, we argue that four interlocking barriers beset psychologists seeking to develop a proper science of social psychology. The first is the ideological orientation characteristic of most social psychologists—heavily skewed on the left side of the political spectrum. The second is the adoption of a view of human nature that soc...

Cyber aggression is a pervasive problem, yet evolutionary psychologists have been slow to address this area of research. We utilize an evolutionary perspective to provide a theoretical framework to address research that has found that women are more vulnerable to negative effects of cyber aggression. Studies of intrasexual competition suggest that...