Men Behaving Badly: David Buss on the Ancient Origins of Sexual Harassment – CALIFORNIA

IN MARCH, FACING MULTIPLE COMPLAINTS of sexual harassment, New Yorks three-term Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, issued an apology. I never knew at the time that I was making anyone feel uncomfortable, he said. I never, ever meant to offend anyone or hurt anyone or cause anyonepain.

One of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, David Buss lays out a theory of sexual conflict between men and women involving a co-evolutionary armsrace.

To many, the apology seemed only to underline Cuomos cluelessnessor disingenuousness. How could he not have known that sexually charged conversations with subordinates, some of them young enough to be his grandchildren, were bound tooffend?

Evolutionary psychologist and Berkeley Ph.D. grad David M. Buss has someanswers.

On average, men find women more attractive than women find men, says Buss, 68, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Studies also have found that men tend to prefer women younger than themselvesand, as they grow older, their preferred age gap increases. Men in this situation tend to commit mind-reading errors, Buss says, finding it unfathomable that the woman is not also attracted to them. A male sexual over-perception bias could have led Cuomo to mistake a friendly or ambiguous signal, such as a smile, for sexualreceptiveness.

Not all men are equally susceptible to the sexual over-perception bias, Buss adds. What we found in our lab study is that men who are most inclined to do this are high in narcissism. Other research shows that men with status or wealth feel a sense of entitlement, and have this psychological proclivity to feel that the rules are made for other people, not for them, he says. In other words: When youre a star, they let you doit.

One of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Buss details these ideas in a new, ripped-from-the-headlines book, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault (Little, Brown Spark). Juxtaposing more than three decades of laboratory research with case studies from the animal kingdom, hunter-gatherer societies, and the Wild West of internet dating, he lays out a theory of sexual conflict between men and women involving a co-evolutionary armsrace.

Evolutionary psychologists maintain that natural selection and sexual selection have favored specific traits and tendencies. One of the disciplines core tenets is that reproductive biology has given rise to psychological differences between men and womensuch as the male desire for sexual variety and the female preference for long-term commitmentthat enhance mating success. Conflicts naturally arise because what is good for women is not always good for men, and vice versa.

Our modern cultural environment may have exacerbated these conflicts, Buss argues, leading to widespread sexual harassment, stalking, assault, and rapepatterns of conduct that the #MeToo movement and societies around the world have only just begun to confront. But Buss notes that he has been studying these issues for years. The cultural zeitgeist happens to be coinciding with my work, hesays.

With its emphasis on human universals, evolutionary psychology has long been criticized for downplaying the role of culture, or for failing to disentangle culture and biology. Feminists have taken the discipline to task for what they see as an endorsement of gender-based distinctions and a sexist status quo. And there remain strong academic currents of what Buss calls sex difference denialism, exemplified by books such Gina Rippons Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (2019), which emphasizes brain plasticity, and Cordelia Fines Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (2017). Fine suggests that the social impact of overstating evolutionary differences is the denigration of womens professionalambitions.

In this new book, his first in a decade, Buss confronts such criticisms directly, positing a complex relationship between patriarchal cultural institutions and evolved psychology. He also seeks to identify the personality types of men most likely to transgress against women. Far from endorsing the status quo, Buss writes that he hopes to raise consciousness and spur change, to reduce the occurrence of sexual conflict and heal the harms itcreates.

IN THE EARLY 1970sand early 1980s, evolutionary psychology did not yet exist. No one studied human mating strategies, and sex differences were believed to be trivial or nonexistent, Buss wrote in a 2003 paper, Sexual Strategies: A Journey into Controversy, in the journal Psychological Inquiry. If there was a nature to humans, according to mainstream assumptions, it was that humans had no fundamental nature. People were plastic, formless, passive receptacles whose adult form was achieved solely by input that occurred duringdevelopment.

With its emphasis on human universals, evolutionary psychology has long been criticized for downplaying the role of culture, or for failing to disentangle culture andbiology.

Buss himself has been integral to changing these attitudes. David is the worlds foremost researcher on the psychology of sexuality, says Steven Pinker, the renowned Harvard professor and experimental cognitive psychologist. He has a grasp of deep ideas from evolutionary biology, insight into human motives and emotions, ingenuity about research methods, and the right combination of moral seriousness and good-naturedhumor.

Buss describes his own nature as rebellious. Born in Indianapolis, he moved repeatedly as a childfrom Pittsburgh to northern New Jersey to Austineach time his father, a psychology professor, switched jobs. His mother, a homemaker, worked with the NAACP to combat housing discrimination. Busss adolescence was bumpy. My grades absolutely plummeted, in part because of the peer group that I got involved with, he says. He dropped out of high school after two marijuana possession arrests (both times the charges were dropped) but earned a diploma at nightschool.

Matriculating at the University of Texas, he finally found his academic footing. He encountered evolutionary theorythe first intellectual idea that mesmerized me, he saysin a freshman geology class. His 1975 psychology term paper, Dominance and Access to Women, made the then-novel argument that men competed for status to gain sexual access towomen.

At Berkeley, Buss focused on personality psychology. One of his mentors, Jeanne H. Block, was a leading exponent of the idea that sex differences were the result of socialization, not biology. But as an assistant professor at Harvard, Buss met others who shared his evolutionary outlookincluding the husband-and-wife team of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides and the entomologist E.O. Wilson, author of the controversial 1975 book Sociobiology, which emphasized the biological roots of social behavior. Buss also incorporated into his lectures the ground-breaking 1970s work of the anthropologist Donald Symons, on the evolution of human sexuality, and the biologist Robert Trivers, on sexual selection and parentalinvestment.

Buss came to believe, that mating was the center of the psychological universeand that men and women had different sexualpsychologies.

Busss breakthrough was a collaborative multiyear study of mating preferences, the International Mate Selection Project, encompassing 10,047 subjects from 37 cultures. (My Nigerian colleague wished to know whether I sought mate preferences for a mans first wife, second wife, or third wife, Buss noted wryly in Psychological Inquiry.) Published in 1989, after Buss had moved to the University of Michigan, the study demonstrated that men universally valued youth and physical attractiveness in womenpresumptive markers of fertility. Women, by contrast, sought long-term mates with high status and economic resources to provide for them and theiroffspring.

Buss came to believe, he wrote in Psychological Inquiry, that mating was the center of the psychological universeand that men and women had different sexual psychologies. Over the years, he refined and expanded his theories, looking, for example, at the varied mating strategiesboth long- and short-termemployed by men and women. Buss (who has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1996) has written several books for popular audiences: The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion (on jealousy), The Murderer Next Door (on homicide), and, with Cindy M. Meston, Why Women Have Sex. He also authored a textbook, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, the first, and still the dominant text, in thefield.

Busss research has given him insight into his own behavior, too. He describes himself as basically, exclusively, a long-term mating guydivorced, with two children; widowed when his second wife died of cancer after a 20-year marriage, and now in a very happy more than eight-year-long partnership with another professor at the University of Texas atAustin.

For much of my life, Ive been very shy with women, Buss reflects. Evolutionary psychology predicts that women will prefer self-confident men, since self-confidence is a cue to status. And as he attained professional success, Buss says, Ive shown more self-confidence in approaching women who strongly attractme.

Even though I think of myself as empathic for a man, Buss says, I realized that, at some level, I had been clueless. And, undoubtedly, I still amclueless.

WHEN MEN BEHAVE BADLY IS, in part, the product of Busss growing consciousness of the prevalence and impact of sexual assault and harassment. So many women he knew had been touched by sexual violence, he says. The range was tremendous, from mild to horrific. But I saw the psychological scars itcreated.

Buss remembers a friend of his college girlfriend sobbing hysterically about being sexually abused. He heard a girlfriend consoling her best friend, who screamed in rage and anguish for hours, after being raped by two strangers. Yet another girlfriend told him she had been raped by someone she met in a bar. A former partner revealed a history of repeated rape that led to chronic black holedepression.

He recalls examples of sexual harassment as well: Four female graduate students complaining to their department chair about a male professors unwelcome advances. A graduate student told by an interviewer that he could not hire her because he wanted to ask her out, and he couldnt do so if she were in hisemploy.

During Busss undergrad years, professors threw keg parties where teaching assistants would have their arms draped around the undergraduates, he says. And it was not unusual for professors themselves to sleep withundergraduates.

I started talking to more and more women, some close female friends, some just women I knew. And many confided in me, Buss says. I started to realize how pervasive various forms of sexual violence were. He published a 2011 paper, The Costs of Rape, examining its traumatic aftermath. Even though I think of myself as empathic for a man, he says, I realized that, at some level, I had been clueless. And, undoubtedly, I still am clueless, since I dont think its possible for a man to fully grasp how psychologically devastating these things are towomen.

WHEN HE FIRST CONCEIVED OF WRITINGa book on sexual conflict, Buss figured he would try to be even-handedto note, for example, that both men and women engage in tactics designed to enhance their mating prospects. Womens efforts to avoid what Buss calls subpar males or their requirement of extensive courtship displays before consenting to sex have inspired male adaptations designed to circumvent these barriers, including lying about their income and their interest in commitment, he writes in When Men Behave Badly. Women, too, engage in deceptionfor instance, by under-reporting their weight or posting photoshopped or old pictures on dating sites, hesays.

Adaptive does not mean morally good, Buss writes. Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excusesit.

But the even-handedness Buss contemplated had its limits, he discovered. When you get to sexual violence, Buss says, it is the case that men are primarily the perpetrators, and women are primarily the victims. Predator-prey analogies, gleaned from the animal kingdom, are disturbingly on point, he writes, and help explain behavior such as sexual harassment, stalking, rape, and intimate partnerviolence.

Stalking and violence may arise from male jealousy, provoked by fears of sexual infidelity, mate defection, and paternity uncertainty. Studies have shown that female jealousy, by contrast, focuses more strongly on emotional infidelity, linked to the possibility of losing male investment in current or futureoffspring.

Another trigger of violent, controlling, or abusive behavior is what Buss calls mate-value discrepancy, which can be aggravated by changing circumstances. A man who loses his job, for example, might worry that his diminished resources would impel a partner to mate switchthat is, trade him in for a newer, more prosperous model.

One ongoing (if somewhat arcane) discussion within evolutionary psychology concerns whether men have evolved specific rape adaptations because sexual aggression results in more offspring. The alternative view is that rape is instead a byproduct of such factors as the male desire for sexual variety and low-investment sex. Parsing the evidence, Buss prefers the byproduct theory, and argues that rape could be reduced by [a] diminution of patriarchal ideology, stronger enforceable laws, greater police sensitivity to victims of sex crimes, and a more educatedpopulace.

Throughout the book, Buss insists that evolutionary psychology should not be tarred by the so-called naturalistic fallacy, which confounds what is with what should be. Adaptive does not mean morally good, he writes. Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excusesit.

Buss also aims to present a nuanced view of the relationship between culture and sexual psychology. The failure of patriarchal legal systems to recognize spousal rape, for example, is an artifact of men with an evolved sexual psychology that prioritizes their rights, he says. Once those laws exist, though, they do exert a social pressure. By the same token, changing legal and social norms can discourage patriarchal or sexistbehavior.

Ive realized that this work has profound implications for solving some real social problems, and I think sexual violence against women is the most pervasive human rights problem in theworld.

In fact, human beings are intensely responsive to such factors as social reputation and group consensus, if only because reputation bears on mating success. (Accusations of sexual misconduct, one might recall, led to divorces for men such as the film producer Harvey Weinstein and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.) Sexual psychology gets played out in a social and cultural context, Buss says, and contemporary developments such as the #MeToo movement are sending tremors through government, academe, Hollywood, publishing, and the rest of theculture.

Not all men, of course, are guilty of offensive conduct against women. To pinpoint those who are, Buss returns to personality theory and the research of Delroy L. Paulhus, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver (who did a sabbatical at Berkeley). Paulhus has identified three subclinical personality types whom he calls the Dark Triad: men high in narcissism (marked by a sense of personal entitlement), Machiavellianism (the tendency to manipulate and exploit), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). In a 2002 paper with Kevin M. Williams, Paulhus called these overlapping but distinct constructs. (He and two collaborators have since added everyday sadism, making for a DarkTetrad.)

In Busss view, it is Dark Triad men who are most apt to sexually harass, stalk, assault, and rape women. Geographic mobility and the potential for anonymity in urban settings have made Dark Triad personalities harder to detect and ostracize, Buss hypothesizes. And women living alone, lacking the kin protection of their hunter-gatherer ancestors, are more vulnerable to their predations. Modern life may be spawning an increase in a psychopathic strategy, Buss says. Its just easier for men to get away with deception, andworse.

Buss says he used to consider himself a pure scientist, uninterested in applications of his work. But that has changed. Over time, he says, Ive actually realized that this work has profound implications for solving some real social problems, and I think sexual violence against women is the most pervasive human rights problem in the world. Not that scientific knowledge is a magic bullet thats going to cure everything. [But] the assumption that male and female sexual psychologies are identical is a harmful position to take, given that we know that they arenot.

There are lessons in evolutionary psychology for both men and women, Buss suggests. Learning about such phenomena as the male tendency to infer interest where there is none can be helpful, he says. It doesnt necessarily mean youre going to be able to prevent experiencing the bias, but you might be able to correct it. (Andrew Cuomo, takenote.)

In an ideal world, Buss adds, women would be free not to worry that certain behaviors, such as imbibing intoxicants or rejecting undesirable suitors, might subject them to male sexual aggression or coercion. But, in our world, he says, not informing women about the circumstances in which theyre at risk is morally problematic, to put itmildly.

Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Slate, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.

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Men Behaving Badly: David Buss on the Ancient Origins of Sexual Harassment - CALIFORNIA