What Makes Men Undeniably Attractive to Women? | Dr Bill Von Hippel

What does evolution tell us about that that competitive sort of dating game? What does it tell us if I'm trying to be attractive as a man? What do I need to be demonstrating in order to attract the opposite sex as a human? Yeah, so what you want are what we call honest signals of quality and the thing is that We've all evolved to look through fake signals And so lots of animals will pretend to be things that they aren't They puff up their chest or raise up their shackles or do something to look big and intimidating We all we've human ways of doing that too, but in humans bizarrely Well in all animals actually one of the clearest on the signals for men to demonstrate for women is what is risk-taking? Now that seems bizarre. Why would taking a risk attract females? Well, it attracts females because there's two outcomes when you take a risk You either succeed showing just how skilled you are at whatever the domain is or you fail and either Turn into a real rash and therefore you remove yourself from the gene pool or you bounce right back up because you're such a robust Organism in either case you're demonstrating. That's an honest signal of quality when we follow the date over time We see that high testosterone men are more likely to pair up. They take these risks Women find them attractive at some level even if they don't personally feel like it's attractive at the moment But something about that is attracted to them and it may only be getting other men to back off when I take these big risks You may say well, I'm not gonna try to crowd in on Bill scene. He's too tough We don't know with certainty but they take these risks and then once they partner up then their Testosterone levels go back down and they because once you have a family taking risks are is foolish You want to take risk to get in the mating game? But you don't want to keep taking risk once you've got people depending on you. So I've got honest signals of did you say quality? Yeah, honest signals of quality is being attractive as a man. I've got risk-taking. What else? Things like physical size is an honest signal of quality things like wealth if you earned all that money, you know Well, there's inherited wealth. We live in this kind of funny world, but it still gives you all the advantages of wealth if you earned it yourself, there's Ambition things like that people look for ambition because it's if you are out there working hard all the time It's an honest signal that you're going to probably continue to do that provide for somebody etc I often think about like personality and why is humor a Attractive quality in men, that's a great example humor is an honest signal of quality now It's funny because you could think well, you could just be funny by memorizing jokes But if you think of your friends who are funny, they don't you don't sit down and go Hey, did I tell you the one about Pat and Mike? That's not how people are funny You know unless they're paid to do that up on stage people are funny by making connections that you hadn't thought of by twisting the world 90 degrees and Linking things together and that takes an agile mind and you know, there's more genetic expression in our brain than anywhere else in our body So it's a sign of good genes and also we're a cognitive species being smart is super important for men and women That's how you succeed but as humans We also care an enormous amount about kindness and if that person who has nothing else going for them is kind that person's gonna do Well in life because kindness ends up trumping everything just because there's a host of reasons for the bonus Which is that if you're a kind person, you're a great partner to me Even if you've got almost no other good qualities, you need some minimal levels of competence But once you cross minimal competence kindness means you're gonna look out for me and that matters a lot the nice guys finish last in the Evolutionary world they don't actually so the good thing about being a nice guy is they they tend to finish first And so when we look in hunter-gatherer communities and we look at people choosing their partners to go out on hunts in the morning They actually choose the nice guys over the better hunters. Now again, you need a minimal level of competence now They pay a big price to finish first because lots of people take advantage of them And so I share with you and you never share back with me, but if I'm a nice guy, I'm like, that's okay You know Steven will come around someday. He'll learn to share with me too, or if he doesn't that's okay He's a good guy and I like to give him half my rabbit that I caught so they They're in economist terms. They're suckers a lot They give a lot more than they get but as far as winning in the world, everybody wants to be with them