David Buss

David M. Buss (born April 14, 1953; age 63) is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, known for his evolutionary psychology research on human sex differences in mate selection.

Buss earned his PhD in psychology at University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Before becoming a professor at the University of Texas, he was assistant professor for four years at Harvard University, and he was a professor at the University of Michigan for eleven years.

The primary topics of his research include mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social status, social reputation, prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and—most recently—stalking. All of these are approached from an evolutionary perspective. Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards, including an APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in 1988 and an APA G. Stanley Hall Lectureship in 1990.

Buss is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose fourth edition was released in 2011. In 2005, Buss edited a reference volume, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. His latest book is Why Women Have Sex, which he coauthored with Cindy Meston.

Buss is involved with extensive cross-cultural research collaborations and lectures within the U.S.

Attempts to state the conditions that constitute a certain personality trait and attempts to exhaustively list all the acts that identify a bearer of a trait have not been very successful in providing exact definitions for trait-related terms (such as "creative", "humorous", and "ambitious"). The question of what exactly defines an individual as being—for example—courageous is an open one. Another difficulty is measuring how strongly a trait is pronounced in an individual.

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