Note: I merely wanted people to discuss the evidence confirming or disconfirming SST or any alternative theories. This is not an endorsement of AFT, just noting that it may not necessarily be a choice between SST and creationism.

David Buss's Sexual Strategies Theory posits that owing to a fundamental gap between the sexes - the difference between minimum maternal investment vs minimum paternal investment as well as paternal uncertainty, pursuing many short-term mates offers a fitness benefit to a male that is inaccessible to a female. Hence one of the core predictions of the theory is:

  • There exists a general tendency for men to want more short-term relationships than women, and to invest more mating effort in STRs. (1)

Other predictions commonly derived from SST are:

  • In long-term mates, men care more about looks/youth/fertility, while women care more about resource-provisioning ability (insofar as ancestral women's provisioning was less on average than men's), making beauty-status exchange a viable strategy. (2) (Supported by many surveys and online dating studies, but see this.)
  • Given (2), the most dangerous type of infidelity for a man was sexual infidelity (he might invest into an offspring that is not his own), while women would stand to lose the most from emotional infidelity (he might invest into women other than her). Hence men's jealousy would react more to sexual infidelity, and women's jealousy would react more to emotional infidelity. (3)
  • Insofar as promiscuity predicts sexual infidelity, men will seek to avoid promiscuous women for long-term mates. Given the risk of sexual infidelity, a man will seek to establish exclusive access to a woman during her fertile years. Therefore virginity will be valued highly. To paraphrase, men have an 'anti-slut module', which women don't. (4)

I will discuss empirical evidence on sexually dimorphic jealousy in a future post.

One alternative theory, Attachment Fertility Theory emphasizes the importance of paternal investment in mating psychology. Since both sexes invest into offspring in humans, our sexual strategy will have establishment and retention of long-term (not necessarily monogamous) pair bonding as its primary purpose, and male and female mating strategies will not differ as much as SST predicts. However, some divergent outcomes, such as promiscuity, may arise as well. In other words, it theorizes one, sex-similar mechanism underlying all human mating, in lieu of separate, sexually dimorphic mechanisms for short-term and long-term mating. Proponents of this theory cite as evidence the fact that most men (and women) desire and invest into intermediate and long-term mateships, not short-term ones, and therefore the trend predicted by SST by no means describes median or modal male psychology. However, it suggests that short term mateships are a 'Plan B' adaptation, triggered by some kind of failure to have satisfying LTRs, a rather disturbing implication about promiscuous people, and also seems to gloss over the considerable frequency of extrapair copulations.

Am I, or AFT, concocting a straw-SST? Is there much evidence for AFT? Discuss.

See also: