And now, the dirty-old-man gene

And now, the dirty-old-man gene

Detail from “The Old Man in Love” by Lucas Cranach the Elder (ca. 1530)

Originally published 11 July 1994

Stop the press­es! Sci­en­tist makes astound­ing discovery!

Based on sur­veys of thou­sands of peo­ple in 37 coun­tries, psy­chol­o­gist David Buss of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan con­firms the fol­low­ing facts about our mat­ing habits: Men pre­fer women who are young and good-look­ing. Women are attract­ed to wealthy and pow­er­ful men.

You knew that already? Well, at least it’s nice to have our intu­itions sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly confirmed.

Buss presents these con­clu­sions, and oth­ers, in an arti­cle in the May-June [1994] issue of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tist. The research is report­ed in greater detail in his recent book, The Evo­lu­tion of Desire: Strate­gies of Human Mating.

In gen­er­al, Buss con­cludes that human mat­ing is inher­ent­ly strate­gic, and that strate­gies are often con­stant across cul­tures. Men and women have evolved dif­fer­ent mat­ing strate­gies, and men and women behave dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on whether a sit­u­a­tion presents itself as a short- or long-term mat­ing prospect.

Buss has an engag­ing­ly sim­ple notion of sci­en­tif­ic method: the­o­ry, hypoth­e­sis, pre­dic­tion, test­ing. It is not clear to me that his research does much more than cat­a­log the obvious.

His clas­si­cal­ly Dar­win­ian the­o­ry is this: Strate­gies in human mat­ing have evolved because they enabled our ances­tors to sur­vive and pro­duce offspring.

In oth­er words: When an old guy comes on to a young gal, he is not sim­ply a dirty old man; he is act­ing out a species-spe­cif­ic strat­e­gy shaped by mil­lions of years of sex­u­al selection.

Or per­haps we should say that some­where among his chro­mo­somes there exists a dirty-old-man gene. Pre­sum­ably, he gets a response from the younger woman because a gold-dig­ger gene lurks among her chromosomes.

Any­way, that’s the theory.

From the the­o­ry, Buss draws cer­tain hypothe­ses. For exam­ple, Hypoth­e­sis 1: Short-term mat­ing is more impor­tant for the repro­duc­tive suc­cess of men than of women.

Men are able to pro­duce off­spring with a min­i­mum invest­ment of time and respon­si­bil­i­ty; women inevitably invest months or years of ges­ta­tion and lac­ta­tion. One-night stands are to his advan­tage; she will want some­thing more enduring.

The hypoth­e­sis sug­gests cer­tain pre­dic­tions: 1) Men will express a greater inter­est in seek­ing a short-term mate than will women; 2) men will desire a greater num­ber of mates; and 3) men will be more will­ing to engage in sex­u­al inter­course with­in a short­er time after meet­ing a poten­tial partner.

Buss tests the hypoth­e­sis by see­ing if the pre­dic­tions are confirmed.

As is often the case in psy­cho­log­i­cal research, col­lege stu­dents were the guinea pigs. Any­one famil­iar with the con­tem­po­rary col­lege scene will have no dif­fi­cul­ty guess­ing the outcomes.

Buss men­tions favor­ably a nov­el test of Pre­dic­tion No. 3 — that men will engage in sex after a short­er peri­od of time — con­trived by two researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii. In this study, col­lege stu­dents were approached by an attrac­tive mem­ber of the oppo­site sex and, after a brief intro­duc­tion, asked one of the fol­low­ing ques­tions: “Would you go out on a date with me tonight?” “Would you go back to my apart­ment with me tonight?” or “Would you have sex with me tonight?”

Of the women who were approached, 50 per­cent agreed to the date, 6 per­cent to the apart­ment vis­it, and none agreed to have sex. Many of the female sub­jects found the sex­u­al propo­si­tion from a vir­tu­al stranger to be “odd or insulting.”

The response of guys was rather dif­fer­ent: 50 per­cent agreed to the date, 69 per­cent agreed to go to the wom­an’s apart­ment, and 75 per­cent agreed to have sex. The male sub­jects found the sex­u­al request flat­ter­ing. The few men who declined the propo­si­tion were apolo­getic, “cit­ing a fiancée or an unavoid­able oblig­a­tion that par­tic­u­lar evening.”

One won­ders how the guys felt when they dis­cov­ered that the unex­pect­ed come-on was part of a psy­chol­o­gy research project. This is the stuff of a Bill Mur­ray comedy.

Pro­fes­sor Buss lists eight more hypothe­ses, and makes pre­dic­tions on the basis of each. For exam­ple, Hypoth­e­sis 6: A man seek­ing a long-term mate will solve the prob­lem of pater­ni­ty con­fi­dence; that is, he will want to make sure the kids are his own.

To test this hypoth­e­sis, Buss and col­leagues hooked up col­lege stu­dents to elec­trodes that mea­sured the wrin­kling of brows (frown­ing), skin con­duc­tance (sweat­ing), and heart rate. They then asked each sub­ject to imag­ine that his or her part­ner was hav­ing sex with some­one else, or that his or her part­ner was falling in love with some­one else.

Judged by their phys­i­o­log­i­cal respons­es, women were more con­cerned about emo­tion­al, rather than sex­u­al, infidelity.

And the men? Buss writes: “In response to the thought of sex­u­al infi­deli­ty, their skin con­duc­tances increased by an aver­age of about 1.5 microSiemens, the frown­ing mus­cles showed 7.75 micro­volt units of con­trac­tion and their hearts increased by about five beats per minute. In response to the thought of emo­tion­al infi­deli­ty, the men’s skin con­duc­tance showed lit­tle change from base­line, their frown­ing increased by only 1.16 units, and their heart rates did not increase.”

Sci­ence march­es on.

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