David Buss

Introduction

David Michael Buss (born April 14, 1953) is an American psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. He is best known for large cross-cultural studies of human mating, above all a 1989 survey of more than ten thousand people in thirty-seven cultures that asked what men and women want in a partner, and for his account of sexual conflict — the claim that the reproductive interests of the sexes diverge in systematic ways that shape jealousy, deception, mate retention, and aggression. His textbook Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind helped define the field for students, and his findings about sex differences in mating have been both enormously influential and continuously contested. Critics argue that his explanations lean too heavily on ancestral adaptation and too little on culture and social structure; Buss replies that the cross-cultural regularity of the findings is difficult to explain without evolved mechanisms, and he has responded to the replication crisis by mounting a large-scale restudy of his own classic result.

Early Life and Education

Buss was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, into an academic family: his father, Arnold H. Buss, was a psychology professor. He has described himself as an indifferent student who left high school and finished his diploma through night classes while working, an experience that gave him an unusual route into the discipline. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976 and then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate study in personality psychology, completing his doctorate in 1981 under Kenneth H. Craik. His dissertation, "The act frequency analysis of interpersonal dispositions," grew out of a problem that preoccupied him as a personality researcher: how to define and measure a trait such as dominance or ambition without circularity.

Academic and Professional Career

Buss spent four years at Harvard University, joining as an assistant professor in 1981 and being promoted to associate professor in 1984. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where he was an associate professor from 1985 and a professor from 1991, and where in 1986 he helped found the Evolution and Human Behavior research group with colleagues across disciplines. In 1989 and 1990 he led a project on the foundations of evolutionary psychology at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He has been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 1996.

His early training in personality shaped his later work. With Craik he proposed the act frequency approach, which defines a trait by the acts that people judge to be prototypical of it and then measures individuals by how often they perform those acts, rather than by asking them to rate themselves. That methodological instinct — specify the behavior, count it, and compare it across people and cultures — carried over into his mating research. Buss has published more than two hundred scientific articles and has received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology in 1988 and its G. Stanley Hall Lectureship in 1990.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Cross-cultural mate preferences

Buss's most famous study surveyed 10,047 people in thirty-seven cultures about the characteristics they valued in a partner, and reported a consistent pattern: across most of the world, men placed more weight than women on youth and physical attractiveness, while women placed more weight than men on financial prospects, ambition, and status. He interpreted the pattern through parental investment theory, arguing that the sex that invests more obligatorily in offspring should be choosier and should value cues to resource acquisition, while the sex facing the problem of uncertain paternity should value cues to fertility. Both sexes rated kindness and intelligence highly, and Buss has emphasized that the overlap between the sexes is far larger than the differences.

The study became a target for replication during psychology's methodological reckoning, and Buss joined a large international collaboration that reran it with more than fourteen thousand participants across forty-five countries. The 2020 result largely reproduced the classic pattern, including the age preferences — women preferring somewhat older partners, men preferring somewhat younger ones — though the factors previously thought to predict the size of sex differences were only partly supported. Commentators noted the very large overlap between the sexes, a point the authors regarded as irrelevant to whether mean differences exist.

Sexual strategies theory and mating effort

With David Schmitt, Buss set out sexual strategies theory, which holds that men and women possess a repertoire of mating strategies deployed differently according to context, and that the sexes differ most sharply in the weighting of short-term mating: men, facing lower minimum costs per act of reproduction, show a stronger desire for sexual variety and a faster lowering of standards when commitment is not required. The theory generated a large literature on sociosexuality, mate poaching, and the conditions under which women pursue short-term mating, and it predicted effects — such as shifts in what men attend to in a face versus a body depending on the type of relationship sought — that have been tested experimentally.

Jealousy, mate retention, and sexual conflict

In a widely cited 1992 study, Buss and his colleagues reported that men are more distressed by the prospect of a partner's sexual infidelity and women more by emotional infidelity, a difference they attributed to the distinct ancestral threats of paternity uncertainty and the loss of a partner's investment. Later work extended this to mate retention tactics — vigilance, resource display, the induction of jealousy — and to strategic interference, the ways in which each sex's attempts to pursue its own strategy obstruct the other's. Buss also developed, with Martie Haselton, error management theory, which explains apparently irrational biases as the adaptive result of asymmetric error costs: because the costs of missing a sexual opportunity and of missing a threat differ for the two sexes, their inferential biases differ predictably.

Aggression, homicide, and sexual violence

Buss extended evolutionary analysis to lethal violence, proposing with colleagues that homicide is often the output of mechanisms designed for competitive problems such as mate competition and status conflict, and that humans possess corresponding anti-homicide defenses. His 2005 book The Murderer Next Door presented this work, and his 2021 book When Men Behave Badly applied sexual conflict theory to deception, harassment, and assault, arguing that a small subset of men with dark-triad traits account for much of the harm and that understanding the evolved roots of conflict can inform prevention. In that book he is careful to distinguish explaining behavior from excusing it.

Major Publications

  • The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (1994)
  • Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (1999)
  • The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (2000)
  • The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill (2005)
  • The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), editor
  • Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (2009), with Cindy M. Meston
  • When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault (2021)

Impact and Legacy

Buss did much to make evolutionary psychology a recognized subdiscipline rather than a polemical position: he built its textbook, its handbook, and its largest cross-cultural datasets, trained many of its leading researchers, and supplied a generation of courses with a coherent framework for asking how selection might have shaped the mind. Ideas such as error management theory and sexual strategies theory are now standard tools in social and personality psychology, and his mate-preference datasets have been reused by researchers who disagree with his conclusions.

His work has also attracted sustained criticism. Feminist and social-constructivist critics argue that his accounts overstate biological determinism and understate the role of patriarchal structures and economic inequality: a woman's preference for a partner with resources may reflect her restricted access to resources rather than an evolved mating mechanism. Methodologically, critics point out that much of the evidence comes from pencil-and-paper questionnaires, and that the forced-choice format used in the jealousy studies may manufacture a difference that disappears with continuous measures — the very pattern several early papers reported. Others argue that the jealousy difference can be explained without positing sex-differentiated modules: if both sexes merely respond to whichever infidelity they believe threatens the relationship more, and people generally believe men are readier for sex without emotional involvement, the questionnaire results follow; that account also explains why homosexual men depart from the male pattern and why the size of the difference varies substantially across cultures, with only a minority of men in some samples choosing sexual infidelity.

Buss and his allies have replied on several fronts. Meta-analytic work by Brad Sagarin and colleagues, covering more than two hundred effect sizes from dozens of samples, found the predicted difference with continuous measures as well as forced-choice ones and in reactions to real infidelities as well as hypothetical ones, concluding that the difference is neither an artifact of response format nor confined to imagined scenarios. Buss has also maintained that evolved predispositions interact with culture rather than replacing cultural explanation, and that the consistency of findings across very different societies would be improbable if culture were doing all the work. On the political objection, he and others argue that documenting an evolved basis for a difference says nothing about what ought to be done, and that prevention is better served by understanding the psychology than by denying it. The debate continues, and the 2020 forty-five-country restudy — which Buss joined rather than avoided — is now the shared reference point for both sides.

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References

  • Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(1), 1-14.

Last updated: 2026-10-28

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