The Problem With Evolutionary Psychology and When Men Behave Badly
A review of David Buss' "When Men Behave Badly" with a critique of evolutionary psychology
I just finished When Men Behave Badly by David Buss and, I’ve got to say, this book was really hard to finish. By the third chapter, I was ready to call it quits and go read real research (even though I’d just finished reading a ton of Buss’ research when I began the book, which is also often lackluster).
But the book is making its rounds on the internet, so I figured I absolutely had to give it a spin.
When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault explores the evolutionary and psychological factors that drive many of our sexual behaviors. Buss, a renowned evolutionary psychologist, draws on decades of research and his own extensive experience in the field to provide a comprehensive analysis of the behaviors and motivations (often of men who behave badly)
Buss explores the “battle of the sexes” through a series of hot topics, like the “mating market” He covers sexual coercion, body adornment (ie, lipstick, jewelry, and other things worn to allegedly enhance sex appeal), intimate partner violence, stalking, revenge, murder, and much more. The book contains what professes to be explanations for a whole host of embarrassing behaviors, especially those most often carried out by men.
Plenty of people are swearing by Buss’ approach and findings as if they’re the gospels of psychology, explaining away all the ills of the modern world. His studies and findings are adored by the red-pill and INCEL communities, even though these communities seem unaware that statistically, much of the evidence in his findings that he discusses—with an air of such certainty—is extremely weak.
Needless to say, I strongly disagree with the idea that his ideas should be anything more than fun tidbits of entertainment.
Buss, and other evolutionary psychologists, read a bit like the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. For those who haven’t read Schopenhauer, relax; you don’t need to be familiar with his work. I love Schopenhauer in small doses and the very narrow windows of life where he’s applicable.
Schopenhauer is a great metaphysician, and his pessimism is okay-ish if you’re studying human pessimism, but that’s about it.
Schopenhauer and Buss have a very narrow worldview that they’re both excellent at describing. When you read Schopenhauer's philosophy, it's like looking at yourself in the mirror on only your worst days. Schopenhauer is so incredible at describing the negative aspects of the human experience, from dissatisfaction to despair. It's often breathtaking.
The problem is, your worst days are very rare. So much of the human experience is missing from Schopenhauer's philosophy. The same is true of Buss' worldview formulated in evolutionary psychology. And it is just that—a worldview.
He uses his own research to influence future findings, formulating a sort of system of views that sees human relationships through the lens of the “mating market,” two terms that converge to create one of the most dreadful phrases ever uttered. It’s like a tabloid newspaper citing its own bunk articles as a source.
The issues that plague Buss’ work aren’t limited to Buss alone. They are problems within the discipline as a whole. Evolutionary psychology is a useful tool when applied to understand a very narrow set of things in a very small set of circumstances, but outside of that, it’s incomplete—and it’s nowhere near complete.
This is far off from the grandiose claims the field makes about describing humanity’s core, universal drives. Oftentimes, proponents of evolutionary psychology pretend to be speaking to human universals with a rebel-without-a-cause flair that has the hook of talking about “bad boy” stuff.
Pseudo-pessimism that’s passed off as cold, scientific realism is the core of this book (the title gives it away). He wants to tackle all of the unflattering aspects of human dating and mating life.
But that in itself only tells a small fraction of the story of what it means to be human.
Science & Entertainment
Beyond the incompleteness of the scientific discipline and book’s genre, I have some scientific gripes with the work as well. Call me a cranky science guy, I’ll own it. That’s totally me sometimes.
But the line between scientific rigor and entertainment is too often blurred. This book does just that.
The whole book unfolds through what appears to be a scientific lens. This is David Buss, after all, the so-called “Darwin” of evolutionary psychology.
I understand his point was to talk about issues relevant to modern dating and to help people understand them. The point of evolutionary psychology isn’t to justify people’s bad behaviors. Its purpose is merely to describe how they came to be.
Like many other species of social primates, humans in some tribal societies still practice infanticide. If a woman has children with a man who later dies in war, once she takes on a new man, the new guy often kills her children instead of squandering finite resources on some other dude’s kids. This is horrific.
And the fact that it’s explained perfectly by evolutionary psychology’s theory that the core, hidden motive of many behaviors in all sorts of organisms is to further the likelihood that their genes will be passed on and survive. It makes perfect sense. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a horrific behavior (it is).
Evolutionary psychology never tries to justify these types of behaviors. But it spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on them, and it often presents weak evidence for their explanations of such behaviors as if it was the most irrefutable evidence on earth.
I’m not one of those people who pretends evolutionary psych is making moral claims so I can make it into a straw man.
Weak Evidence
I’m also not one of those people who think science should be silenced when it yields unflattering, controversial, or politically incorrect results, no matter how much those results conflict with our delicate moral sensibilities. Since some will raise that objection to my criticism of Buss (and evolutionary psychology as a field), I figured I would get that out of the way.
I’m also not anti-evolutionary psychology. There are a lot of valuable findings backed by robust, statistically significant research. I’ve covered David Buss’ high-quality research here on The Science of Sex, and some of his findings have truly transformed the landscape of how we understand human sexuality.
But the stuff in this book was mostly repetitions of the same stuff I’ve been reading since the 1990s, with some additional speculation piled on top of it.
Buss is like that band who had a hit thirty years ago that they keep trying to repeat even though times and tastes have changed. Only instead of times and tastes, it’s our understanding of dating and sexuality that’s changed. But they grumble and insist that “kids these days” don’t appreciate the classic stuff while they try for the umpteenth time to recreate it.
My problem with this book is the same problem I have with much of Buss’ research. It blends untested hypotheses with rigorous research and doesn’t delineate between the two. You never really know how solid the research is backing up the claims Buss is making or if there’s even any research at all.
The leaps from a finding that’s weakly backed by evidence to an unrelated claim that logically follows are often large.
Just yesterday, I was reading a research paper by David Buss, and I literally rolled my eyes at how embarrassingly bad his reasoning was given the paltry, weak evidence he provided.
When addressing very serious social concerns about whether certain sex-based traits stemmed from cultural causes or whether it was biology at work, he claimed it was biologically hardwired. The concerns in question relate to the dating lives of wealthy, high-status individuals. The evidence he gave that the dating habits in question were fixed biological traits of humanity and not cultural constructs was a single study that sampled some students in med school about their dating preferences on a questionnaire.
I’m sorry. That doesn’t cut it.
The magnitude of such a claim—that something is a fixed and enduring part of human biology or behavior—necessitates much more evidence than a single cute little study. Besides, do tired, Adderall-fueled college kids pulling all-nighters in med school truly speak for wealthy, high-status individuals? No, they don’t.
Even worse, this was in response to further research that called into question Buss’ research.
A Questionable Formula
Buss’ formula for drawing conclusions seems to be very inductive throughout his career. He uses a lot of inductive reasoning, identifying something specific and then drawing conclusions about the general based on those observations.
He sees commonplace or popular behaviors, then he looks around for some research that supports those behaviors, then he assembles it all in a loosely-stitched-together hypothesis.
For instance, it’s true that in most societies, women marry up. Buss concludes that this must be from an innate biological drive that’s been hardwired into women. Again, his evidence for such a belief is often flimsy, a handful of college students fill out a questionnaire and say they want their partner to have a job (literally), and thus, women have a deeply-engrained thirst for wealthy partners.
If it sounds like a cartoonish example, rest assured, I found this exact scenario playing out in his research claims. It’s so bad, it’s laughable.
We can’t just force our research to fit the narrative that we want it to fit and call that legitimate science. Again, it’s entertaining, but we miss the beautiful breadth of understanding that science has to offer when we do this.
Do I report on research that’s incomplete? Absolutely! But I always tell my readers that there’s more research that needs to be done to draw conclusions. And I’m not the “Darwin of evolutionary psychology” speaking from the position of prestigious authority that Buss is.
My job is simple: to read and simplify the research so you don’t have to and to have thought-provoking discussions about the topics that matter to us in our sex and relationship lives.
All in all, it’s probably a good read if you plan on joining a red pill INCEL movement sometime in the near future. If not, stick with the actual research or The Science of Sex by subscribing below.
Hey Joe! I'm very glad to read this. It blows my mind how incredibly naive a lot of people are. As you said, one little study on a specific group of people, does not mean the entire human race has the same behaviors. It's also ridiculous to me when some theorists just ignore outliers as if they are mere statistical blips. But they are not just statistical blips. They are real life people with valid experiences! I find this especially frustrating, as I am often an outlier and minority in things.
If a study is impressively big, representative of the population, and contains enough diversity, they could at most say that "most people do X" rather than "all people do X." It's like how most people can feel sexual attraction if they meet a stranger they find physically attractive. But demisexuals and many other folks on the ace spectrum don't. That doesn't mean ace folks don't exist or don't matter!