Dr. David Buss

Is this guy dependable?

Is he going to be a good father to my children?

In short-term mating, women use that mate-copying heuristic.

That is, if there are thousands of other women who find him attractive, women find him attractive.

And so that's why you have the groupie phenomenon.

If you took like a still photo of some of these rock stars and asked women how attractive the guy is versus tell him he's a famous rock star and show the thousands of women screaming at him...

They judge him entirely differently.

This is just an illustration of how circumstance-dependent women's mate attraction is for guys.

It depends on his status, the number of women that are attracted to him.

The attention structure is how he interacts with a puppy, whereas for men, it almost doesn't matter.

You know, context is more irrelevant.

They're honing in on the specific psychophysical cues that the woman is displaying and context be damned.

Jealousy is an evolved emotion

that serves several adaptive functions okay once you have long-term mating you need a uh a defense to prevent or preserve the investment that you've made or in our making in long-term mateship and so jealousy serves this um mate guarding function if you will or mate retention function and so jealousy gets activated when there are threats to that romantic relationship the threats

come from many sources.

So they could be you detect cues to your partner's infidelity or cues of a lack of an emotional distance between you and your partner.

So that's one set of cues.

But then there's another set of interested mate poachers.

So if you're mated to someone who's desirable, which many people are, other people still desire them.

So jealousy motivates people to be attentive to potential mate poachers