Buss's Thirty-Seven Cultures Mate Preference Study

In a 1989 study, the evolutionary psychologist David Buss surveyed more than ten thousand participants drawn from thirty-seven samples across thirty-three countries on six continents, asking each participant to rate the importance of a range of qualities, including earning potential, ambition, physical attractiveness, chastity and relative age, in a potential long-term mate. Drawing on evolutionary theories of parental investment and reproductive strategy, Buss predicted and found a consistent pattern of sex differences across nearly all of the cultures sampled: women placed a significantly higher value than men on a prospective mate's financial prospects and earning capacity in the great majority of the cultures studied, while men placed a significantly higher value than women on physical attractiveness and relative youth, cues Buss linked to indicators of fertility and reproductive capacity, again across the large majority of cultures studied. Because these sex differences appeared with striking consistency across societies with widely differing economic systems, religious traditions and gender norms, Buss argued that the pattern reflected evolved psychological mechanisms shaped by differing reproductive pressures on ancestral men and women rather than differences attributable to any single culture's particular customs. The study became one of the most extensively cited pieces of cross-cultural evidence offered in support of evolutionary approaches to human mating psychology, and it has also drawn substantial methodological and theoretical debate, including disputes over how the results should be interpreted and how well they hold up in more recent replication attempts.