THEORIST DAVID M. BUSS

Theorist David M. Buss



Theorist David M. Buss

Theorist David M. Buss: Biography

Bass holds a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Berkeley in 1981. Before becoming a professor at the University of Texas, he was an assistant professor for four years at Harvard University, and he was a professor at Michigan State University for eleven years.

The central theme of his research include mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, status, social reputation, prestige, jealousy, murder, against killing the defense, but in recent prosecutions. All of this is seen from an evolutionary point of view. Bass is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and received numerous awards. Some of these awards by the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for early career contribution to psychology in 1988 and the APA G Stanley Hall lecturer in 1990.

Bass is the author of several publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, Dangerous Passion, "Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and the killer next door, which introduces a new theory of murder from an evolutionary point of view. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: A new science of mind, which is now its third edition and was released in 2007. In 2005, Buss edited the final volume reference, Handbook of evolutionary psychology. [1] His latest book is entitled Why do women have sex, co-authored with Cindy Meston [2].

Bass is engaged with a large cross-cultural research and lectures in the U.S. [3]

Act Frequency Approach

In science, it has proven to be very difficult, if not impossible, to find exact definitions for concepts of layman psychology, by either stating the conditions that constitute a certain personality trait, or by exhaustively listing all the acts that identify a bearer of that trait. What exactly defines an individual as "creative", "humorous", or "ambitious"? Equally difficult is the measurement of how strongly a trait is pronounced in an individual. As a solution, Buss and K. H. Craik (1980) proposed to introduce prototype theory into personality psychology.

First, a group of people is asked to list acts that a person bearing the trait in question would show. Next, a different group of people is asked to name from that list those acts that are most typical for the trait. Then the measurement is conducted by counting the number of times (within a given period of time), a proband performs the typical acts.

Buss Theories

The scientific successes of evolutionary psychology have been most prominent in domains such as survival (e.g., evolved habitat preferences), sexuality (e.g., multiple functional motivations for intercourse), mating strategies (e.g., universal sex differences in mate preferences), sexual conflict (e.g., predictable patterns of sexual deception), parenting (e.g., adaptations in males to scale back on investment when faced with cues to paternity uncertainty), kinship (e.g., altruism preferentially channeled to kin as a function of degree of genetic relatedness), cooperation (e.g., discovery of cheater-detection and anti-free-rider adaptations), and aggression (e.g., predictable circumstances in which men adopt risky social strategies; Buss, 2008). These theoretical and empirical advances, however, have been achieved ...