An interesting read about the "battle of sexes" aspect told through the eyes of David Buss, a professor of psychology and expert on human behaviour and evolution in society. Using psychological and behavioural evidence, Buss digs deep into how gender politics operate within the context of sexual violence. An important book in the midst of the #MeToo movement. This book seeks to further understand why do men engage in this type of violence. Using case studies, Buss argues that based on science that not all men are sexual predators. He justifies his claim by stating that "sexual harassers score high on the Dark Triad of personality traits - narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy" and again using this concept of dark triad, Buss further argues that women can be sexual aggressors too.

Buss's monograph is, therefore, engaging in a current conversation. The only critique that I can offer is that it is very specialized literature that caters to a particular academic audience or audiences who are interested in this subject. T

Overall, an interesting read. Thank you Netgalley for the electronic ARC of his monograph!

This review was posted on my Psychology Today blog at:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202103/review-david-busss-when-men-behave-badly

Review of David Buss's When Men Behave Badly

Background

I have followed David Buss's research from the time we were both graduate students in the late 1970s—David studied at UC Berkeley and I, at Johns Hopkins. We were in similar situations, both enrolled in graduate programs in personality psychology, but probably only because there were at that time no graduate programs in evolutionary psychology, which was our true interest. Personality psychology was probably the most hospitable home for aspiring evolutionary psychologists at that time, given that at least some personality theories assumed there was such a thing as evolved human nature. I was fortunate in that my graduate school advisor was actively developing such a theory, which he eventually named socioanalytic theory (Hogan, 1982).

However, most personality psychologists in the 1970s focused more on personality measurement than theory, much less evolutionary theory. Such was the case at Berkeley, so David had little professional support for his evolutionary interests. I recall reading one of his graduate school manuscripts that he had submitted for publication, a paper in which he argued for looking at personality from an evolutionary perspective. Whoever reviewed the manuscript thoroughly trashed it. I was horrified by the reviewers' savage comments, which made me pessimistic about David's budding career as an evolutionary psychologist and about the nascent field of evolutionary psychology in general.

Fortunately, David Buss was—and still is—a remarkably tenacious psychologist. Initially marketing himself as a personality psychologist, he landed his first job at Harvard. [As a personal side note, I had interviewed for the same position right before David interviewed, and was told by the chair of the department that they were planning on offering me the position until David interviewed. Which is fine with me in retrospect. I doubt that I could have used the Harvard position as effectively as David.] Harvard was an excellent environment for an aspiring evolutionary psychologist, not because the Department of Psychology and Social Relations had evolutionary thinkers but because of strong evolutionary thinkers in other departments (e.g., E. O. Wilson in Biology and Irven DeVore in Anthropology). David persisted, and eventually the graduate school manuscript that had been so harshly criticized was published in psychology's premier professional journal, the American Psychologist (Buss, 1984).

While at Harvard, David was extremely fortunate to meet two students in the Anthropology PhD program, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. Tooby and Cosmides, after establishing themselves at UC Santa Barbara, are credited with helping to found evolutionary psychology as a recognized scientific field. David's continued interactions with Tooby and Cosmides, as well as Donald Symons (also established at UC Santa Barbara and recognized as a founder of evolutionary psychology) helped him to develop an approach to studying human behavior from an evolutionary perspective.



David Buss's New Book: When Men Behave Badly

Although David has continued to address the nature of personality from an evolutionary perspective from time to time, he has devoted nearly all of his research energy toward understanding evolved differences in male and female psychology, and his most recent book represents the latest example of that. In reading his books and articles on that topic over the past 40 years, I have noticed a pattern. He begins with a phenomenon that is already pretty much common knowledge (or at least a common supposition) in the general public. For example, that men tend to prefer a younger mate, and women, an older mate. Or that men tend to be more interested in a woman's physical appearance than her social and financial status, while the reverse tends to be true for women. Or that men tend to prefer to have more sexual partners than women. Next, he explains how such sex differences might have evolved from a few core, undisputable differences between what men and women need to do in order to produce viable offspring, particularly differences in the amount of energy, time, and risk involved in conceiving, gestating, birthing, feeding, and rearing offspring. Finally, he assembles data from his own and others' empirical studies that provide more precise details about the phenomenon he is studying. Exactly what is the typical age difference in couples, and does that average difference vary across cultures or across different points in the life span? Exactly which female physical features attract men the most, and how important is social status to women, compared to other traits such as height, intelligence, sense of humor, thoughtfulness, and signs of commitment? Exactly how many sexual partners do women and men regard as ideal, and what factors influence how many partners one actually has?

When Men Behave Badly follows the formula described above. Buss identifies a number well-known "bad male behaviors," that is, male behaviors that interfere with women's choices and goals. These include the following: pretending to have more status or financial resources than they really have; pretending to be interested in a long-term relationship when they are only interested in a short-term sexual relationship; engaging in secret sexual affairs; being hyper-vigilant, suspicious, jealous, and controlling of their mates; pursuing women particularly vulnerable women (women who are young, inexperienced, and lacking in self-confidence); using alcohol and drugs to disarm and disable women; forcing women to have sex against their will; objectifying women by focusing only on their bodies; stalking women who are not interested in them; seeking revenge after a breakup by spreading stories and posting pictures and videos on the Internet; and physically and psychologically abusing women and threatening violence to prevent them from leaving a relationship.

Along the way, Buss does mention female versions of deception, infidelity, jealousy, and manipulation, presumably to present a more complete picture of conflicts in relationships. But the focus is on bad male behaviors, which Buss documents with research from his own lab, from other labs, from cross-cultural studies, and analogies in other species. He also sprinkles in a variety of personal anecdotes about famous people, ordinary people who made the news due to a relationship conflict, imaginary characters from movies, and people he has known personally. Obviously, a scientific account of human behavior cannot be based only on anecdotes, but the personally stories he shares are great illustrations and really bring his account to life.

How Evolutionary Psychology Can Help

Now, how does evolutionary theory add to our understanding of well-known bad male behaviors that have also been documented in detail with scientific studies? Anti-evolutionists claim that it does not, that evolutionary accounts are just-so story-telling. Even worse, some anti-evolutionists might claim that evolutionary accounts of bad male behavior somehow justify and excuse such behavior because "evolutionary" and "genetic" imply that such behaviors are inevitable. Such complaints demonstrate a poor understanding of evolved traits and evolutionary explanations, and Buss strives to correct these misunderstandings. He points out that evolved psychological traits do not manifest themselves constantly in every situation. All men do not rape women all the time. Identifying exactly the conditions under which men are most likely to deceive, have an affair, become suspicious and controlling, force women to have sex, and engage in stalking, revenge, and physical abuse—along with an evolutionary understanding of what men are trying to accomplish with these bad behaviors—can suggest to us how to change policies, laws, and the social environment, and how to educate men and women to reduce the likelihood of these bad behaviors in the future.

Personally, I favor evolutionary education as a partial antidote to the problem of bad male behavior. To use one example from Buss's book, most people figure out on their own that everyone has a "mate value" (all the things that make you desirable as a mate) and that you are most likely to successfully attract someone with the same mate value as you. That is, if you are a man whose mate value is a 6 on a scale from 1 to 10, you are much more likely to attract a woman who is a 6 than a woman with a higher mate value. But what most men probably do not know is that men tend to overestimate their mate value. A 6 might think of himself as an 8 or even a 9 and therefore pursue women who are higher on the mate value scale. When the 6 man's advances are resisted by an 8 woman, the over-confident man might feel justified in applying what is really unwarranted pressure on the 8 woman. That is, he engages in bad behavior. If all men could take a course in evolutionary and learn about mate value and how to realistically assess their own value, this might reduce the amount of inappropriate pursuit of mates.

Education can also help women to recognize when and why men are trying to control them and what kind of counter-strategies they can use to break free from such attempts to control. Men who are insecure about their mate value and do not know how to attract women with the things that women really want often resort to tactics such as threats and violence to keep their mates from leaving them. In the distant past, women usually had male relatives (brothers, father, uncles) to help protect them from this kind of control. But in modern, industrial societies, members of a family often live so far apart that members of a family cannot directly protect each other. An insecure man may attempt to increase his control over his mate by preventing her from even talking to members of her family or other friends who might help. With proper education, women can recognize such a scenario and take steps to get help from others before her mate's efforts to control her escalate to physical abuse.

Buss also suggests that women can empower themselves by reconsidering their priorities while looking for a mate. At the top of the list of valuable traits in a mate for many women is the ability of a man to provide economic resources to her and any children she might have. A man's ability to provide resources is generally linked to his social status. Unfortunately, many men who are successful at achieving status, power, and money are ruthless. They also tend to be unfaithful because there are many other women who will be attracted to their economic position. So many of our female ancestors were attracted to powerful, high-status men, that sexual selection has created a horde of status-hungry men and women who are still attracted primarily to status in modern times. But there are many other traits that contribute to a man's mate value, and a woman does have choices today about which traits to use in selecting a mate. Although she might hear the allure of status whispering in her ear, she can still focus on other traits such as kindness, reliability, and empathy that would make a man a good mate.

Of course, downplaying the ability of man to provide for her and her children will depend on whether a woman can manage without a lot of resources from her mate. This, in turn, will depend on the economic and social structure of the culture in which women live. Buss does talk about changing social structures to help reduce bad male behaviors. I agree that this is desirable, but it is more time-consuming than education, so this is more of a long-term project. Buss notes that one characteristic of societies where women suffer less physical abuse are societies such as those in the Scandinavian countries where there is greater economic equality between men and women. Women without economic means are more vulnerable to control and abuse by their mates, so economic gender parity reduces bad male behavior.

Another characteristic of societies that exacerbates the problem of bad male behavior are unequal sex ratios where the number of males is far greater than the number of females. When there are not enough women for everyone, men are more likely to engage in violence against each other as well as against women. Sadly, there has been an historical bias toward having sons rather than daughters, in in some societies girls were actually killed or left to die as babies. That is obviously bad in itself, but it also produces a sex ratio that is likely to cause problems when the boys reach adulthood and have difficulty finding a mate. A surplus of males does not help anyone except maybe warlords who send the surplus men into battles.

Whereas David Buss clearly spells out how economic parity between the sexes helps to reduce bad male behavior, he only hints at the impact of economic inequality within the male population. I would like to spell out what I think Buss is suggesting. For better or worse, women today are still more attracted to men who are rich than men who are poor. Being poor not only drastically and directly reduces a man's attractiveness to women; being poor is also associated with an inferior education (you are unlikely to attend college and take a course in evolutionary psychology), greater susceptibility to drug and alcohol addiction, involvement in crime, and a host of other factors that reduce a man's mate value. What recourse does a man in such a position have except violence against women? There will always be some economic inequality in modern societies, but the degree of such inequality has grown to obscene proportions in the United States. I am not suggesting a Robin Hood, take from the rich and give to the poor to reduce economic inequality. I am not an economist and don't have a specific solution for increasing economic parity among men as well as between men and women. But I am saying that if we can somehow manage to reduce economic inequality both within and between sexes, money and status will become less important factors in intra- and intersexual conflict.

So, When Men Behave Badly continues to follow the successful formula found in David Buss's earlier books. Buss identifies a number of sex differences that ordinary people already know about. In fact, he has already analyzed many of the sex differences mentioned in this book in his previous writings: deception, short-term and long-term mating strategies, jealousy, infidelity, mate-guarding, and so forth. There were really only a couple of behaviors I don't recall him writing about earlier. But then he produces whole new sets of data that document, scientifically, the specifics of these sex differences. He then explains why bad behaviors that tend to be uniquely male are a product of evolution and suggests what we can change to make these bad behaviors less likely to occur. Although much of the material in this book will sound familiar to someone who has read Buss's previous books and scientific publications, the focus on bad male behavior and what we can do about it certainly makes this book worth reading.

A final observation I would like to make about When Men Behave Badly is that it includes a new wrinkle not seen much in his other books but hearkens back to his roots as a personality psychologist, namely, an appeal to personality traits to explain some bad male behaviors. Specifically, Buss invokes the Dark Triad—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—to argue for the role of individual difference in bad male behavior. Whereas all men, under certain conditions, are likely to exhibit the bad behaviors he describes in the book, men who score high on the Dark Triad seem to make bad behavior a consistent lifestyle, regardless of environmental conditions. Their sense of entitlement, ruthlessness, and lack of empathy, often accompanied by a shallow but convincing charm, makes them far more likely than men not high on the Dark Triad to behave badly. Their focus is on as many short-term matings without commitment as possible. Ironically and sometimes tragically, many women are attracted to these "bad boys." [One explanation for this is that any sons produced from such a union will grow up to be bad boys themselves, helping to spread the mother's genes.] This is a problem that can be addressed at both a social and individual level. Socially, we need to have ways of identifying Dark Triad individuals and prosecuting them to the fullest extent when they break laws, to get them out of circulation. On an individual level, women need to learn about the Dark Triad and resist the temptation to get involved with men who exhibit those traits.
 



Buss, D. M. (1984). Evolutionary biology and personality psychology: Toward a conception of human nature and individual differences. American Psychologist, 39(10), 1135–1147. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.39.10.1135

Buss, D. M. (2021). When men behave badly: The hidden roots of sexual deception, harassment, and assault. NY: Little Brown Spark.

Hogan, R. (1983). A socioanalytic theory of personality. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 55–89.

“Men’s sexual violence towards women remains the most widespread human rights problem in the world.” So says David Buss. It gives a hint to the global mountain of incidents of harassment and abuse the world endures daily. In When Men Behave Badly, Buss has collected an astonishing litany of abuses, origins, variations, defenses and just plain unfathomable data. It is a mind numbing as well as dazzling trip.

There is what is called the dark triad traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. The more men have of them, the more violent and objectionable they turn out. The less they have, the more loving, caring, thoughtful and just plain human they turn out to be. On the other hand, men with deep dark triad traits “turn out to be unusually attractive to women,” Buss says, and then goes on to prove it and its almost inevitably grim outcomes. And so, a no-win conflict is baked right into humanity.

Tracing men’s behavior back through the ages has led Buss to claim “Evolution by selection, amoral in nature and indifferent to suffering, has forged some nasty human adaptations.” So there is some excuse for the way some men are, but there is also no excuse for the way those men are, as Buss repeats after every headshaking trait and example is examined.

Among other things, high-scoring Dark Triad men are more possessive, vigilant, deceptive, manipulative, emotionally exploitative, and physically threatening in their mate-guarding tactics compared to men who score low in these traits. They are the ones who track and trail their own spouses, threaten them, threaten other men who talk to them, lock up their spouses, beat them and rape them.

Worse, the women stay, or if they leave, they come back, a global and historical phenomenon that Buss examines in detail.

Rape of spouse is now a crime in most American states. But it wasn’t until as late as 1993, and it is still entirely acceptable in many, many countries and cultures. It’s all part of the patriarchy by which men ensure their role as top predator in any setting. But a remarkable thing is happening: the patriarchy is diminishing in power. All over the world, mass communication and news sharing is shaming the patriarchy into a less significant role, Buss says. In Scandinavian countries, something close to equality has become the norm. The dark trait men will of course fight for it to the death (power is power, after all, and few give it up voluntarily), but the long term trend is definitely downward.


Buss put numbers to the violence, showing how different societies are saddled with it. Intimate partner violence dogs a fairly astonishing 30% of relationships in the USA, and 27% in Canada, for example. These kinds of stats will make readers look at harassment, violence, guarding and the other abuses in a very different light.

There are also two sides to the story. Men get harassed too. Women can be just as manipulative, have affairs, love to tease, trick and walk away from men. Violence against men tends to go all but completely unreported. As police officers in one case told the male victim – you might as well not press charges, because if she has broken so much as a fingernail, it is you who will be arrested, not her.

“Studies have asked women if they ‘ever had sex’ with a man other than their husband while living with their husband. Ten percent of the non-victimized women reported having had an affair; 23 percent of the battered women reported having had an affair; and 47 percent of women who were both battered and raped reported having committed adultery. “ Humanity is complicated.

For all the talk of harassment and abuse, women weigh it according to the man doing it: “Women evaluated sexual advances from a physically attractive man as significantly less disturbing than advances from a physically unattractive man. Workplace sexual advances from men low in desirability, apparently, are more upsetting, “ numerous studies show.

They also weigh a man’s value by his height(!). Women prefer men to be at least six feet tall, preferably with a V-shaped body. They believe those kind of men will not only protect them from others, but become social and financial leaders in their group, tribe, society or country and therefore a better catch. This is a global phenomenon, going back as far a history is recorded.

Because women live in fear. They seek protection, while men seek sex. Women fear men will chase them, attack them, rape them and kill them, especially if they rape them. (It’s not true, but that is their overwhelming fear.)They dream it, live it and are ruled by it. Reading the book can make it seem amazing that these two totally different subspecies ever get together at all.

But back to men behaving badly, they really do a lot of damage to a very large number of women, damage both physical and psychological: “A study of 1,882 American men found that 120, or 6.4 percent, admitted that they had. Of these, about two-thirds were repeat rapists, averaging 5.8 admitted rapes. This sample consisted not of convicted rapists but of college students attending a midsize urban commuter university. Other studies have found that between 6 and 15 percent of college males admit to rape or attempted rape as long as the word “rape” is not included in the description.”

But this is not all by a long shot. Buss devotes a chapter to online dating and the ways both men and women lie, stalk and harass each other. Their strategies just show how trapped they are by their evolutionary position. There is also a chapter on revenge during or after a breakup. The pitfalls are endless, but somehow, Homo sapiens continues on its merry way.

Buss, a psychologist who specializes and teaches the subject, is steeped in studies. They come from all over the world, and he has conducted countless varieties himself. He knows their strengths and weaknesses, and is highly conscious that correlation does not imply causation. This makes the book overflow with cautionary statements, but It is still thorough, engaging if not overwhelming, and myth-busting.

The word fraught comes to mind. It’s a wonder it works at all.

David Wineberg

A profoundly illuminating, carefully evidence-based and urgent book by one of the founders of evolutionary psychology -- compellingly and sensitively shows how a rigorously Darwinian lens can uniquely contribute to existing approaches in understanding and ameliorating sexual conflict between women and men. Written with great care and precision, a very wide readership -- both popular and scholarly -- stands to benefit from its insights, explanatory power, and advice.