14 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
than the reproductive payoff for women. 
Since status leads to increased sexual access 
to partners, men are predicted to be higher 
in status striving than women.
This evolutionary reasoning produces 
a specific and testable prediction: Men in 
every culture around the world should have 
a greater desire for status, on average, than 
women. Among the many possible empiri -
cal tests that could be conducted are these: 
(1) Men should be more willing to take 
greater risks than women in order to achieve 
high status; (2) in the allocation of their ef -
fort across various adaptive problems, men 
should allocate more time and effort to sta -
tus striving than women; (3) men who lose 
status should engage in more desperate mea -
sures than women who lose status in order 
to staunch the loss; (4) the psychological 
pain that men experience after a loss of sta -
tus should be greater than the psychological 
pain women experience after a comparable 
experience. These are easily testable predic -
tions, but to our knowledge, none of these 
predictions has been examined empirically 
in a systematic fashion across cultures.
There are several key implications from 
this evolutionary analysis of status striv -
ing. First, evolutionary psychology provides 
a powerful heuristic that guides theorists 
and researchers toward motives and goals 
likely to be the products of species-  typical, 
evolved psychological mechanisms that form 
the building blocks of human nature. Sec -
ond, the evolutionary predictions derived 
are testable and hence potentially falsifiable, 
contradicting a common but mistaken idea 
that evolutionary hypotheses are not test -
able. Third, this evolutionary analysis sug -
gests that the outputs  of the building blocks 
of human nature can systematically differ 
for men and women, because the sexes have 
faced recurrently different adaptive prob -
lems over the long expanse of human evolu -
tionary history.
Mating  Motivation
A second motive that is a prime candidate for 
being the output of a species-  typical evolved 
psychological mechanism is mating motiva -
tion. At first blush, this may seem so obvi -
ous as to hardly warrant much comment— 
but first blushes can be misleading. Despite 
the obvious importance of sex and sexuality in the everyday lives of people (Buss, 1994), 
few personality theories explicitly consider 
sex. Freud (1905/1953), of course, was a 
major exception. Indeed, sexual motivation 
was the primary driving force in psychoana -
lytic theory, providing the raw energy that 
fueled nearly all other forms of human activ -
ity, from sports to cultural innovation. Since 
Freud’s theory, however, personality theo -
ries have minimized sexual and mating mo -
tivations. Evolutionary personality psychol -
ogy appears to be the only metatheoretical 
framework that predicts sexual motivation 
will be a fundamental component of human 
nature (Buss, 1991). Even personality frame -
works that restrict their focus to individual 
differences typically exclude individual dif -
ferences in sexuality, despite their preva -
lence and importance in the everyday lives 
of persons (Schmitt & Buss, 2000).
Evolutionary analysis provides a compel -
ling rationale for the importance of sexual -
ity. Evolution by selection occurs through 
differential reproduction caused by differ -
ences in design (Symons, 1992). Reproduc -
tive differences, in other words, are the en -
gine of the evolutionary process. Therefore, 
anything that resides in close proximity to 
reproduction and affects the probability of 
reproduction is likely to be a special target 
of the selective process. Perhaps nothing lies 
closer to the reproductive engine than sexu -
ality and mating.
Consider what it would have taken human 
ancestors to succeed in reproduction. The 
first task is mate attraction, successfully en -
ticing a member of the opposite sex to be -
come one’s mate. This task is more difficult 
than it might seem, for it includes at a mini -
mum selecting the “right” mates on whom 
to deploy one’s attraction tactics (e.g., those 
that are reproductively valuable rather than 
sterile), as well as embodying the desires 
of the targeted member of the opposite sex 
sufficiently to succeed in attraction (Buss, 
1994). Embodying or fulfilling the desires of 
the targeted other might include a prolonged 
effort at attaining a modicum of social 
status, establishing a favorable reputation 
among one’s peers, and displaying physical 
cues of desirability.
Successful attraction is not enough. In 
order to produce viable offspring, the an -
cestral human would also have had to be 
motivated to engage in sex with the targeted 