Sexual Conflict in Human Mating | David Buss | TEDxVienna

[Music] so I'd like you to imagine someone of the opposite sex walking up to you on the street and say hi I've been noticing you around lately I find you very attractive and they asked you one of three questions would you go out on a date with me would you come back to my apartment with me would you have sex with me so these are actual empirical studies the first one was done in a state of Florida and these are the results of that study of the women approached by the male to Confederate that's what

we call the people who are members of the experimental team Confederates it doesn't mean someone from the south of the United States of the women approached 56% agreed to go out on the date with the guy six percent agreed to go back to his apartment zero percent agreed to have sex with him women in the sex condition in fact thought it was a rather peculiar question most women need a little bit more information before they agree to the the sex of the men approached by the female of the experimenter team about 50 percent agreed to

go out on a date with her 69 percent agreed to go back to her apartment and 75 percent agreed to have sex with her of the 25% of the men who declined several were apologetic about it citing a girlfriend a fiancee asking for a phone number in a raincheck very different responses now this talk is about conflict between the sexes and I'm going to talk about six regions in which men and women get into conflict and the first one is desire for sexual variety now let's imagine that I am king of the universe and I

will give you your magic wish how many sex partners would you like to have over the next month over the next ten years or in your lifetime just get a number in mind how many would you like to have in your lifetime okay do you have the numbers in mind okay well here's what we found ideal number of sex partners women said on average they would like to have seven tenths of a sex partner over the next month gradually escalating to a full sex partner at six months and leveling off at about four to five

in the lifespan men thought to in the next month would be about right eight eight in the next couple years and 18 in the lifespan this was after eliminating three men in our sample who said they would like a thousand as we'll see this is this desire for sexual variety on men's part is one of the sources one of the key sources of conflict between the sexes a second is what we call the sexual over perception bias and the classic example and this is highly replicated in my lab and other labs is you show a

videotape or photographs or just have people observe a man and woman interacting and after a few minutes the woman smiles at the man stop the videotape and ask why did the woman smile what was her intention what was she trying to signal men are more likely than women to say oh she was sending sexual signals she she wants his body it's obvious women seeing exactly the same film say no she was just being friendly she was being polite so men have this sexual over perception bias and but it's interesting that in our laboratory studies where

we had it's basically a speed-dating paradigm where men and women interact with each other briefly and then evaluate how interested the other person is in them and how interested they are in the other person that this sexual or perception bias is most likely to occur with women who are physically attractive and what's interesting about that is because attractive women are hit on more more often they are least likely to reciprocate that sexual attraction it's also the case we found that men who are high on narcissism are especially prone to the sexual over perception bias they

think they're hot but they're not moving to sexual conflict number three deception I hate to break it to you but men sometimes lie but they lie in very specific ways and we've done studies of lying on internet dating sites which are very common nowadays something like 38% of all couples have met on an internet dating site but men lie in very predictable ways so for example they lie about their height so they tend to if they're 5/8 they tend to say they're 6 feet tall they kind of round up by about two inches on average

they lie about their income they lie about their status now women also deceive in internet dating they tend to shave about 15 pounds off of their weight and both sexes post photographs that are not truly representative of what they actually look like that's why you have to meet someone in person to see whether there is actually true sexual chemistry but when you do men continue to lie and one of the things they lie about is the depths of their feelings the depths of their emotions in order to have sex so this is bad but it's

especially upsetting to a woman so if you if you want to upset a woman declare that you love her I really love you I have deep feelings for you now let's have sex and you have sex and then after the sex after he has an orgasm he says actually I was just kidding I don't love you at all goodbye well women in our studies extremely upset by that on a seven-point scale they max out men who are deceived in that by a woman not to bothered so she doesn't love me I can live with that

now some people interpret these findings to mean that well women are just more emotional than men so of course they're going to get upset about everything but it's not true that stereotype is inaccurate because men get upset about other sorts of things it's domain specific for example mislead him about her willingness to have sex or led to believe that sex is forthcoming and said no at the last minute men were upset about that than women sexual conflict number four mate value discrepancies mate value you have to distinguish between short term mate value and long term

mate value long term mate value it consists of a large number of quality so it's not just physical attractiveness it's also the esteem in which other people hold you your status your reputation your personality your level of intelligence your health and even your sense of humor humor turns out to be a very important quality although not everybody believes it the comedian Jim MacFarlane said one of the things women claim is important in a man is a sense of humor in my years as a comedian I've learned that they're usually referring to the humor of guys

like Brad Pitt Tom Cruise and Russel Crowe apparently those guys are hilarious but humor is important humor actually does convey a wealth of information about someone's verbal skills their level of intelligence their social skills and even perspective taking requires a certain level of mind-reading to get people to laugh now back to the mate value discrepancies how do mate value discrepancies cause conflict well it's illustrated by a female colleague of mine who was complaining to me one day she said David why is it that all the guys that I'm interested in don't seem to show any

interest in me yet I'm pursued by all these guys who were trying to chat me up and I have no interest in them and what I told her is I said I was brutally honest I said on the mating market you are an eight seeking tens and being lusted after by sixes and she said that this single piece of information when she thought about it was more important to or was more helpful to her than three years of psychotherapy to figure out what the problem was she was going for guys who were too high in

mate value now the problem with going for people who are too high in mate value and supplies to both men and women is even if you succeed if you're an eight you succeed in attracting a nine or a ten into a long term relationship they are more likely to leave you but when someone better comes along statistically and also they're more likely to be sexually unfaithful to you okay statistically speaking which brings us to sexual conflict number five infidelity now from a male's perspective from an evolutionary perspective it's fairly straightforward why men would be tempted

to have affairs who how many people have affairs I won't ask you to raise your hands on this one but but studies point to about forty to fifty percent of married men have an affair at some point during the course of their marriage and it's about twenty to thirty percent of women women are actually catching up with men so not not everybody has affairs but but a substantial number people's substantial might already do and it's fairly clear why men do studies of motivations for infidelity for men involved they say sexual variety the woman was up

was there the opportunity presented itself I wanted to have sex women it's more complicated now for women my evolutionary colleagues other scientists who study this have advanced what's called the dual mating strategy hypothesis or the good genes hypothesis where they basically propose that women can get the best of both worlds by getting investment and resources from one man and good genes like genes for good health from another man but I think there's reason to be skeptical about this one of the reasons is that we know from DNA fingerprinting technology that only 2 to 3% of

offspring are actually fathered by men who are other than the person believed to be the father the husband where the regular mate so what that means is that most women are getting genes and investment from the same guy so that raises the puzzle why do women have affairs and this is something that my lab has studied and I think there are some important clues ok one is that women who have affairs tend to be sexually and emotionally unhappy with their regular relationship and you may be thinking as I would be well that's totally obvious ok

women who are unhappy with their relationship are gonna be more likely to have affairs but it turns out it's not true for men if you compare men who have affairs with men who don't have affairs there is no difference in their marital happiness but there is a huge difference for women clue number two 70% of women to become emotionally involved with their fair partners are fall in love with their affair partners now if you're just trying to get good genes this seems like a very bad strategy why get emotionally involved or fall in love and

the third clue is that the qualities desired an affair partner turn out to be more or less identical to the qualities desired in a long made and so what I think this does this set of clues combined with other evidence points to the mates which in hypothesis which I think is a more compelling hypothesis about why women have affairs so in our lab we've also documented that women tend to cultivate what we call backup mates one woman told me she said men are like soup you always want to have some on the backburner okay in

case something goes wrong with your relationship of course some of this information might be disturbing to the males in the audience it might be disturbing to realize that your partner is cultivating surreptitiously backup mates that they have fantasies sexual fantasies about people other than you and that maybe perhaps someone who's just a friend oh he's just a friend uh or that maybe you're more replaceable than you realize which brings us to the last sexual conflict breaking up now Rekha asked you if you've ever experienced a romantic breakup studies show that about 85% of all people

have experienced at least one romantic breakup it's a very very common thing it is rare to meet the one and only when you're 18 years old and then live in happily ever after monogamous bliss for the next 50 years it happens sometimes but it's rare people engage in what I call serial mating mating with one person for I don't mean Cheerios or Wheaties or anything meeting with one person breaking up mating with another person for a while and some people get better at it with time now breaking up involves a lot of a lot of

conflict and it's one of the most heart-wrenching heart-wrenching phenomena that people go through I mean people get depressed they start drinking they start abusing drugs they they go into depressions etc it's a very intense emotionally Laden thing even if you're doing the dumping okay it's worse if you get dumped but it's even bad for the person doing the dumping and it results in conflict over sexual access to sexual access to sex continued after the breakup and sometimes it does for a period there's some oscillation conflict over division of pooled resources so couples often pool their

resources I know one couple that got into a bitter bitter bitter divorce over who would get the dog and of course there are financial resources and there's sometimes conflict over r-e mating and this is one of the darker aspects of work from my lab I've studied victims of stalking that is but we've looked at about 2,500 victims of stalking and it turns out it's a fairly common strategy post breakup often starts as the relationship is starting to fall apart people cyberstalk their partners they hack into their cellphones they you know trace them on Facebook etc

and and sometimes physically follow them and men of course are more likely to stalk so about 80% of the stalkers are men men who are high on what we call the dark triad are especially prone to stalking that is men who are highly narcissistic they feel a sense of entitlement men who are Machiavellian that is used in the interpersonal the exploitative manipulative strategy in their social interactions and men who are high on what's called psychopathy which basically involves one of the hallmarks is a lack of empathy so you've got basically get a cold calculating narcissistic

self entitled guy for statistically more likely to stalk disturbingly stalking sometimes works in our study 15 percent of the victims of stalking ended up getting back together with their ex either temporarily for sexual interactions or more permanently one woman told us that that her ex-boyfriend would threaten any guy who came around and after six months she said she went back to her ex boyfriend because there were no other guys around so I think that there are three three pieces of information that I hope might be useful for you in your own mating lives one has

to do with if you're ever a victim of stalking if you're ever a victim of stalking do not be friendly to your stalker and especially don't smile at your stalker because that triggers the sexual / perception bias and reinforces the stalking behavior okay number two is that sexual / perception bias men need to realize that the inferences that they make about the intentions of women when they smile or even when they give an incidental touch on the arm that's another one incidental touch on the arm a man takes up boy that's a signal men need

to realize that sometimes they are over inferring sexual interest when it's not there it could be politeness friendliness or could even be anxiety because the guy's a creep and the third thing is to realize that we have a very complex mating psychology a complex sexual psychology that involves at a minimum a system designed for sexual attraction and a system designed for long term pair-bonding involving attachment and the emotion of love which turns out to be universal and I know one man told me that when he understood the logic of this that there are these two

evolved systems it helped him to stay more faithful to his wife because he realized that when he was attracted to women who were other than his wife he realized oh that's just my evolved desire for sexual variety it doesn't mean I don't love my wife so that enabled him to remain more faithful to her and I think lived happily ever after so I in conclusion I would just like to wish all of you the best of success in your own mating lives and I hope some of this information helps you to reduce conflict between the

sexes thank you very much thank thank you