Sex differences

Buss posits that men and women have faced different adaptive challenges throughout human history, which shape behavioral difference in males and females today. Women have faced the challenges of surviving through pregnancy and lactation and then rearing children. Men, by contrast, have faced the challenges of paternity uncertainty, with its related risk of misallocating parental resources, and of maximizing the offspring onto which they pass their genes. Because insemination and pregnancy occurs inside of the female, males cannot be certain that the child in which they are investing is genetically their offspring.[10]

To solve the female adaptation dilemma, females select mates who are loyal and are willing and able to invest in her and her offspring by providing resources and protection. Historically, women who were less selective of mates suffered lower reproductive success and survival.[11] Males solve the adaptation challenge of paternity uncertainty and resources misallocation by selecting sexually faithful mates.[12] To maximize their offspring, men have adopted a short-term mating strategy of attracting and impregnating many fertile mates rather than one long-term mate.[13]

David Buss supported this evolutionary reasoning with research focused on sex differences in mating strategies. In a large cross-cultural study that included 10,047 individuals across 37 cultures, Buss sought first to determine the different characteristics each sex looks for in a mate.[14] From these findings, Buss was able to hypothesize the evolutionary causes for these preference differences. Buss found that men place very high importance on youth. Because youthful appearances signal fertility[15][16] and men seek to maximize their number of mates capable of passing on their genes, men place high value on fertility cues. Buss also found that women desire older mates. He later hypothesized that this is because older males tend to have a greater chance of higher social status;[17] this social status could lead to more resources for a woman and her offspring, and could therefore increase a woman's likelihood of sexual success and reproduction.

Another area in which the two sexes seem to differ greatly is in their reactions to sexual and emotional infidelity. Buss found that women were more jealous of emotional infidelity while men were more jealous of sexual infidelity.[18] This has been supported as universal norm by Buss' cross-cultural study.[14] Buss hypothesized that women find emotional infidelity more threatening because it could lead to the woman losing the resources she had gained from that mate and having to raise children on her own. He then hypothesized that men found sexual infidelity more threatening because they could risk spending resources on a child that may not be their own.[19]

Mate preferences

Buss has conducted numerous studies comparing the mate preferences of individuals by factors such as gender, time, parents vs. offspring, and type of relationship. He has also conducted a large study investigating universal mate preferences. He and Chang, Shackelford, and Wang examined a sample from China and discovered that men more than women tend to prefer traits related to fertility, such as youth and physical attractiveness.[20] Men also desired traits that could be seen as feminine stereotypes, including skill as a housekeeper. A similar study conducted in the US by Perilloux, Fleischman, and Buss[21] revealed the same, with the addition of the desire for the traits healthy, easygoing, and creative/artistic. Women, however, favor traits related to resources, such as good earning capacity, social status, education and intelligence, and ambition and industriousness.[20][21] Woman also favor, more than men, the traits kindness and understanding, sociability, dependability, emotional stability, and an exciting personality. Parents of sons similarly ranked physical attractiveness at higher importance than parents of daughters, and parents of daughters ranked good earning capacity and education at higher importance.[21] Overall, these sex differences in mate preferences appear to reflect gender stereotypes as well as theories of evolutionary psychology, which state that men will prefer fertility to pass on their genes, while women will prefer resources to provide for a family.

Emotional distress towards intersexual deception

The research facilitated by Buss and colleagues shows that women, in comparison to men, will display more emotional distress when they have been deceived about their partner's socioeconomic status, when their partners deploy expressions of love as a short-term mating strategy, when their partners display postcopulatory signals of disinterest in pursuing a long-term relationship, and when their partners conceal their existing emotional investment in another person.[23] Men, more than women, will become emotionally distressed when their partners present false invitations for sex as a long-term mating strategy, when their partner displays sexual infidelity in the context of a long-term relationship, and when their partners lie about the content of their sexual fantasies.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss