David M. Buss, born in Indiana in 1953, spent his early years with his head in the clouds instead of in books. Academically, his childhood performance left much to be desired. Although he excelled in mathematics, he barely passed in other subjects. Buss instead preferred engaging his wild imagination and playing chess.
Buss dropped out of high school at age 17 and moved to New Jersey where he found late-night work at a truck stop. The job provided interesting encounters with eccentric people, but Buss had a limit. Realizing that there must be more to life than truckers, he moved back to Texas and enrolled in night classes so he could finally get his diploma.
David Buss’ Academic History
Despite poor grades, Buss was accepted to the University of Texas thanks to the school’s experimental lottery system. There, his interest in creative fiction and its portrayal of human nature fused with a new-found adoration of science and led Buss to develop an interest in psychology.
In 1976, he entered the graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley where he met his long-time collaborator, Ken Craik. Together they developed the “act frequency” approach to personality psychology. The concept was simply that personality traits could be measured in terms of how frequently the person performs trait-specific behaviors.
Upon completing his PhD in 1981, Buss became an assistant professor at Harvard University where he published a paper concerning the evolutionary roots of personality. The 1984 paper noted, “[e]volutionary biology and personality psychology, broadly conceived, share several common concerns.”
He left Harvard, however, in 1985 and traveled to the University of Michigan where he became an associate professor. He soon became involved in the university’s Evolution and Human Behavior Group, which consisted of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists whose distinct perspectives fostered Buss’ interest in evolutionary psychology.
The Mate Selection Studies of David Buss
His most important contribution to the field was a study that sought to find empirical evidence for the existence of evolutionary psychological mechanisms. In a 1989 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper, Buss made a number of predictions about male/female mate preferences based on evolutionary speculation. Among them was the prediction that “[m]ales, more than females, [would] value relative youth and physical attractiveness in potential mates because of their links with fertility and reproductive value.”
A number of female physical characteristics indicate fertility, like smooth skin, good muscle tone, and full lips. By contrast, male fertility is not strongly correlated to elements of physical appearance because male reproductive ability is not as closely tied to age as female fertility is. As this was such a highly speculative prediction, Buss needed a way to find evidence to support this and other evolution-driven hypotheses.
Due to skepticism that accompanied evolutionary explanations of psychological processes, Buss had to find solid evidence. “I knew that I had to go overboard and document the findings beyond a reasonable doubt. That is why I set out to study as many cultures as I possibly could,” he said in a 2004 interview. Over a period of four years, Buss began the International Mate Selection Project. Data were collected from 37 samples across 33 countries that spanned six continents.
Results of the Human Mate Preferences Study
When the project was complete, Buss had collected information from 10,047 culturally, politically, and economically diverse people. The participants represented cultures that ranged from South African Zulu to mainland Chinese. Even with such a tremendous diversity of subjects, however, consistent patterns emerged.
Buss found that each of his predictions had empirical support from the data he collected. Across cultures, people tended to place the same importance on particular characteristics in terms of mate-seeking behavior, certainly suggested the existence of evolutionary predestination—at least with regard to mate preferences. In the previously cited interview, Buss pointed out that “the study was critical in helping to establish evolutionary psychology as an empirical discipline, rather than one involved in speculation or untested hypotheses.”
David Buss as an Advocate for Evolutionary Psychology
Since completing this influential study, Buss has been a recognizable voice in advocating evolutionary psychology. Through numerous journal articles and books written for the public, Buss has publicized the mechanisms underlying evolutionary psychology.
Despite his success, Buss’ work has not been without controversy. In the June 2007 Texas Monthly, he said, "Everything I've ever done has been attacked” and that he has occasionally been the victim of hate mail and malicious rumors. In spite of these things, however, Buss continues to bring evolutionary psychology to greater attention.
Andy Luttrell - I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at the Ohio State University after having completed undergraduate education at Eastern ...
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