David M. Buss | Is Monogamy Natural | Clip_02 Ep. 195

uh they had this is done originally on a college campus so they had male and female um Confederates as they were Republicans doesn't meet people from the South but it's just members of the experimental team um who were judged to be moderately attractive walk up to members of the opposite sex on a college campus and say hi I've been noticing around campus lately I find you

very attractive would you and ask them one of three questions would you go on a date with me uh would you come back to my apartment with me would you have sex with me and they simply recorded the percentage of individuals who agreed to these three different requests and of the women approached about 50 percent agreed to go out on a date with the guy six

percent agreed to go back to his apartment and zero percent agreed to have sex of course women typically need a little more information about the guy of of the man approached by the female Confederate also about 50 percent agreed to go on a date with her 69 percent agreed to go back to her apartment and 75 we'd have secular how did it how you're a man

how do you answer yes I'll just go back and have sex with you let's just start there let's start there it's a great question and well first of all um uh one qualifier is that um these Confederates were judged to be moderately attractive but and equally equally so um for men um sexual opportunities are very rare now it may not seem that way in the modern

environment with Tinder and college campus hookups and everything but historically um sexual opportunities were very rare and even in the modern environment so you go on um Tinder for example and uh or OkCupid is another dating site and there's studies on a just a rate how attractive members the opposite sex are and Men rating women it shows this normal distribution where some women are very attractive

some of them are not so attractive you know as a large number and kind of in the middle or different range you ask women how attractive men are only about 20 percent make it up above threshold um and most women find most men just to be below threshold on attractiveness and so what that means is that men find women on average more attractive than women to

find men uh and so um and so these guys who are approached by a woman this has probably never happened to them in their life I mean of course it happens to uh movie stars right because it's a very small amount of men that are actually getting the action yeah in the ranking of it all because there's so many so much criteria and so much judgment

on a woman wants to mate with that or have sex with him or connect with him so there's just the pool is Tiny of the men that are actually having sex with women right right exactly and and it's gotten tinier in the sense that um uh the men who are having sex let's say the top 20 percent are having a lot of it a larger number

of women um and then in essence monopolizing I was leaving a larger and larger share of men who are sexless and and that's why you have these phenomena the inso is an extreme example um but there's this pool of men who just um uh can't find women who uh are attracted to them and and this is where this gets back to our earlier discussion of the

mating crisis where um these guys are spending all their time on uh on watching pornography on social media uh playing video games uh and so they're not interacting in real life and how do you develop mating skills you know skills of Attraction skills of social interaction so you actually have to meet people and interact in real life and these guys are not doing that and so

there's has been a rise of um anxiety and I think it's actually anxiety of several different sorts one is simply social anxiety where men feel awkward and when they especially when they meet an attractive woman they don't know what to say what to talk about or they you know and they get kind of paralyzed with anxiety uh and so they tend people tend to avoid things

that they're anxious about so it's kind of this vicious cycle um and then fear second one is like a subset is meant fear rejection yeah and which is um you know when they approach a woman if they and they fear being shot down um for a good reason because they often are shot down um uh but the um the fear of rejection has this paradoxical ity

where even though we're supposed to live in a sexually egalitarian World ninety percent of women still expect the guy to make the first move right another catch so they're expecting the guy to make the first move he's paralyzed with anxiety and doesn't want to risk being shot down uh and so they tend to avoid interacting with women and so don't develop the kinds of mating skills

that they need is monogamy completely natural I get asked this question a lot of your humans fundamentally monogamous or are we fundamentally religious or promiscuous or polyamorous right is marriage and mating just to do with now like Beth in the old days with uh keeping uh family land in the land and the family or you know riches or things like that or you know the way

I think about it is that we have humans have an evolved menu of mating strategies we don't just have one long-term mating peer bonding and catchment and I think that is part of our mating strategy so if you go to our closest primate relative who's the chimpanzee with whom we share more than 98 of our DNA they don't have anything resembling the long-term rating strategy or

a pure bonded mating strategy they have the female comes into estrus female chimp males mate with that female when she's an asterisk she doesn't conceal it she either you get the bright red genital swellings and the over fat Factory cues and then after she the estrus phase the males are indifferent and they don't interact much with the females anymore and they don't um and they don't

do anything for The Offspring either so but in humans you have these three things that have co-evolved so you have one is the evolution of long-term pair bonds right and it's one of the mating strategies I'm I missed this menu two you have relatively concealed ovulation so compared to our chimps you men can't tell when women are ovulating or not and a lot of women can't

tell now some women are very sensitive to their bodies in the modern environment you you can get that information but three you have the evolution of very high male parental investment so in contrast to the male chimps men do invest heavily in Australia not always of course we have deadbeat dads and guys who abandon their families and all that but but compared to all other primate

species human males men do invest uh sometimes a couple of decades or more in their children they protect them they feed them they provision them they they put a shelter over their heads Etc and so um so so so we definitely have long-term peer-bonded mating now that doesn't necessarily mean monogamous mating because we also have short-term mating we have a fair mating infidelity uh as I

as I mentioned uh we have serial mating which is very common in our species so you made with one person for a while break up and then mate with another person for a while break up and so worth it um that's a very common pattern especially in the modern environment um and then we have people who mix and match and then a small minority of people

do polyamory um and then historically there's also been polygyny which is one man multiple wives and that is um against the law in this in in this country but we have sometimes what you might call effective polygyny you know which is that top 20 of the men sometimes engage in you know not necessarily simultaneous wives but maybe one long-term Aid after another after another after so

an extreme example might be a Leonardo DiCaprio you know who uh I'm sure you've seen those charts where as he gets older the age of his girlfriends stays the same yeah lucky him I mean George Clooney I think sort of did that for a while before he settled down to what seems like a very happy long-term uh marriage right what triggers that what triggers settling down

to a happy long-term marriage um I don't know that's a great question um I know one guy and I don't know if this is a general answer but his view is he he's gonna mate um as much as he can with different women until his mate value kind of plateaus and then he's going to start a lock in a high maintenance best you can find woman

so I I mean I don't I don't know I mean I still have a I mean another example of that in the Hollywood arena is Warren baby you know who is a notorious um ladies man in his day but then met uh Annette Benning and and settled down to uh like a 25 year 30-year relationship with four kids and so forth so probably good not to

count on a guy in his 20s um settling him down if he's in the top 20 percent oh that is the catch right there if he's in the top 20 percent be careful of that because they have more options and like Chris Rock said you're only as loyal as your options an exaggeration but there's some truth to it as well that men who who can who

have the opportunity so and that's why you get um I mean that's why it becomes problematic for you know and I know I mean you've your involvement in in racing and the Sports World and you're familiar with all that the the star athletes um and sports figures and rock stars I mean they got they got a huge amount of attention um from women you know I

mean oh yeah the women definitely make it obvious for the men I can't say that from the other perspective being a female athlete the men don't make it as obvious to women I mean they can but I think it's much more it's a much more dangerous situation for a woman wanting one of those top 20 men who especially are Elite level performers and celebrities to to

imagine that that's going to go well if you want right and and the you know and the problem is that it doesn't stop so even after uh let's say um Leonardo DiCaprio let's say he settles down and gets married you know does that mean that they're no longer going to be any women interested in him well I think the women will continue to be interested in

at the bottom of your screen