Biography on David Buss

David Buss was born on April 14, 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is the son of Arnold H. Buss and Edith H.
During his early academic years, Buss's records were undistinguished except for math which was his favourite subject. The rest of his grades were C's and D's. The activities that he pursued while in school were private fantasy, chess, and avoiding aggressive youth gangs that were in the school and on the streets. He dropped out of high school when he was 17. He worked a 12-hour graveyard shift at a truck stop in New Jersey pumping gas and bumping tires. After he was threatened by a truck driver, Buss decided to go back to school and earned his high school diploma by taking night classes. Buss has had an active teaching and research career. After completing his Ph. D. in 1981, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Harvard University. Throughout his career, Buss has received many awards and honors. He won the Hoopes Prize for Supervising Award-Winning Summa Cum Laude Honors Thesis at Harvard University in 1984. In 1988, he won the A. P. A. distinguished scientific award for early career contribution to psychology. Dr Buss applies the modern evolutionary theory to explaining human behaviour.

Buss theory

Buss's The Evolution of Desire (1994) portrays humans as remarkably similar to their ancestors in that they employ a set of hard-headed strategies designed to obtain the best mate possible, even if it means ruthlessly dumping a partner. He found that men and women seek out the mates who best suit their reproductive needs. Women look for men ho will commit to long-term relationships and men seek women who appear best able to conceive and give birth to healthy and strong offspring. He also described ways that humans end relationships that are unproductive throughout time.

3a/B Summery. Mate preferences
Method
The instrument used was a survey that had a lot of questions on it that described feature people had and how they can mate to who they want to. They asked people to deceive 32 characteristics were in a potential marriage partner and furthermore were ask to rank most desirable to least desirable characteristics.
Buss set out to research 37 cultures around the world to discover what people want in a mate, although the finding were difficult to explain due to government committees banning date collection in some of the culture, they did find universal preference and striking difference across cultures.
Finns were that nearly every culture had the same top few most desirable characteristics(kind and understanding). they also found out that love and attraction was not the most desirable attribute as once thought, it is not something seen in western Europe or even western world, love is just highly prized by the Chinese, Indonesians, sambaing, Nigerians, Iranians and Palestinians. they were surprised that men and women from the Netherlands, for example, don't care about chastity at all. Neither is virginity valued much in the Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway. Indeed, some people even wrote on the questionnaires that chastity was "undesirable" or "bad" in a prospective mate. In China, however, virginity is indispensable in a mate-marrying a non-virgin is virtually out of the question. People from India, Taiwan, and Iran also placed tremendous value on chastity. In between the Western European countries and the Asian countries were Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Japan, Estonia, Poland, and Columbia-they all saw chastity as only moderately desirable in a mate.

Strength. strength of this research is that it showed that most cultures are similar in the aspects of what is their most desirable attribute for a mate and this tells us that although we are not all from the same area we still have a universal aspects of what the “perfect mate” is and it shows a link between why cultures think different to other cultures and this gives us an insight in culture relationships and why some people act the way to do to their partners.

Limitations
The research is limited and not very detailed so it can’t be used to place a factual judgement and also the researchers came to an overall conclusion which was used to generalise people in that culture it doesn’t actually give an insight to individuals because everyone is different and everyone had a different taste in what they want their partner to be like. furthermore it is an old research and can not be used to represent the people of this time now because peoples taste can be altered depending on current circumstance