David Buss

Buss was born on April 14, 1953, in Indianapolis, Indiana; his father, Arnold H. Buss, was a professor.⁠[1]

He has written that as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin from 1971 to 1976 he majored in psychology, first encountered evolutionary theory in a geology class, and in a 1975 term paper proposed that men evolved a status-striving motive.⁠[2]

Psychologist Douglas T. Kenrick recalled that Buss had already published 10 papers while still a graduate student at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

After completing his doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1981, he spent four years as an assistant professor at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry; in 1985 he moved to the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry, where he taught for 11 years before taking his current position at UT Austin in 1996.⁠[4]

In 1988 he received the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and in 1989–1990 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.⁠[5]

In March 1989 he published “Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, volume 12, issue 1.⁠[6]

Kenrick wrote that the paper led many psychologists to rethink their default assumption that sex differences found among American college students could be explained by American culture.⁠[3]

In 1990 he was the American Psychological Association’s G. Stanley Hall Lecturer, and since 1990 he has directed the International Consortium of Social and Personality Psychologists, which conducts parallel research across more than 40 cultures.⁠[7]

In 1992 Buss and co-authors Larsen, Westen and Semmelroth published a study arguing that men are more troubled by a partner’s sexual infidelity and women by emotional infidelity, an innate difference they attributed to men’s need for paternity certainty and women’s need for male investment.⁠[8]

He has written that he began his first book, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, during his 1989–1990 Stanford fellowship; it was published in 1994, with revised editions in 2003 and 2016.⁠[2]

The publisher describes the book as presenting a unified theory of human mating behavior based on a study of more than 10,000 people in 37 cultures.⁠[9]

Since 1996 he has headed the Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology area at UT Austin.⁠[7]

In November 1996 David A. DeSteno and Peter Salovey published two studies in Psychological Science arguing that the link between sex and type of jealousy found by Buss and colleagues is better explained by people’s beliefs about how sexual and emotional infidelity co-occur.⁠[10]

In the same issue Christine R. Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld proposed that the difference may stem from reasonable sex differences in interpreting evidence of infidelity, concluding that proposing innate emotional differences “may, therefore, be gratuitous.”⁠[8]

On February 1, 2000, Free Press published his The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex; a review summarized his argument that jealousy holds long-term relationships together by sparking passion and commitment, with women’s jealousy triggered most by emotional betrayal and men’s by sexual betrayal.⁠[11]

In 2005 Penguin Press published his The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill.⁠[1]

The publisher says the book puts forward a general theory that the human psyche evolved specialized adaptations for killing, draws on an FBI file of more than 400,000 murders, and reports his finding that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had at least one vivid homicidal fantasy.⁠[12]

From 2005 to 2007 he was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES).⁠[7]

In July 2005 philosopher David J. Buller criticized evolutionary psychology’s claims that men prefer young women and women prefer high-status men, saying Buss liked to point to Hollywood stars as examples but that the broader evidence does not support the claims; he also argued that the account of sex differences in jealousy prematurely narrowed the hypotheses considered.⁠[13]

In August 2007 he and UT Austin clinical psychologist Cindy Meston published a study that first compiled 237 distinct reasons for having sex from questioning 444 people and then had 1,549 college students rate them; Meston said the results refuted many gender stereotypes.⁠[14]

In 2009 he and Meston published Why Women Have Sex, based on a survey of more than 1,000 women about their sexual motivations; the authors said that evolved psychological adaptations “are not inflexible instincts.”⁠[15]

In August 2015 a study he co-authored in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin analyzed 4,764 men and 5,389 women in 33 countries and 37 cultures and found that a person’s sex could be predicted with 92.2 percent accuracy from his or her mate preferences.⁠[16]

In February 2017 he discussed the revised edition of The Evolution of Desire on the radio program AirTalk; the new edition added material on homosexuality and on how technology shapes love and lust.⁠[17]

The same year the Association for Psychological Science gave him its Mentor Award, recognizing his training of more than a dozen doctoral students and his role in establishing evolutionary psychology as a major research area.⁠[18]

In July 2018 he received the HBES Lifetime Career Award at the society’s annual meeting in Amsterdam.⁠[5]

In June 2020 a study he led with graduate student Patrick Durkee, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, surveyed 2,751 people in 14 nations and found that traits such as honesty and intelligence raise status universally, along with universal sexual double standards that reward men and punish women.⁠[19]

On April 27, 2021, Little, Brown Spark published his 336-page When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault, which the publisher says presents a unifying new theory of sexual conflict.⁠[20]

On May 4, 2022, he appeared on episode 282 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing mating strategies, monogamy, jealousy, mate poaching, polyamory, sex differences and cancel culture.⁠[21]

In January 2023 the first edition of The Oxford Handbook of Human Mating, which he edited, was released; in August 2024 he published the seventh edition of his textbook Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.⁠[22]

As of October 2026 he is a full professor of psychology at UT Austin and supervises a lab of evolutionary psychology PhD students.⁠[23]

His recent research focuses on the dark side of human nature, including conflict between the sexes, jealousy, stalking, intimate partner violence and murder, and on the mating emotions and the psychology of prestige, status and reputation.⁠[24]

He has written for publications such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and has made more than thirty television appearances.⁠[25]

Personal website: Public link: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/profdavidbuss (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

University of Michigan: Official website: https://umich.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

University of Texas at Austin: Official website: https://www.utexas.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[23]