David Schmitt

Correlations among distinct behaviors are foundational to personality science, but the field remains far from a consensus regarding the causes of such covariation. We advance a novel explanation for personality covariation, which views trait covariance as being shaped within a particular socioecology. We hypothesize that the degree of personality covariation observed within a society will be inversely related to the society’s socioecological complexity, that is, its diversity of social and occupational niches. Using personality survey data from participant samples in 55 nations ( N = 17,637), we demonstrate that the Big Five dimensions are more strongly intercorrelated in less complex societies, where the complexity is indexed by nation-level measures of economic development, urbanization, and sectoral diversity. This inverse relationship is robust to control variables accounting for a number of methodological and response biases. Our findings support the socioecological complexity ...

This article proposes a contextual-evolutionary theory of human mating strategies. Both men and women are hypothesized to have evolved distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie short-term and long-term strategies. Men and women confront different adaptive problems in short-term as opposed to long-term mating contexts. Consequently, different mate preferences become activated from their strategic repertoires. Nine key hypotheses and 22 predictions from Sexual Strategies Theory are outlined and tested empirically. Adaptive problems sensitive to context include sexual accessibility, fertility assessment, commitment seeking and avoidance, immediate and enduring resource procurement, paternity certainty, assessment of mate value, and parental investment. Discussion summarizes 6 additional sources of behavioral data, outlines adaptive problems common to both sexes, and suggests additional contexts likely to cause shifts in mating strategy.

ABSTRACT Reports an error in "Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures" by David P. Schmitt, Anu Realo, Martin Voracek and Jüri Allik (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008[Jan], Vol 94[1], 168-182). Some of the sample sizes presented in Table 1 were incorrectly reported. The correct sample sizes are presented in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2007-19165-013.) Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychologists have uncovered dozens of ways men and women differ in affect, behavior, and cognition. Social role theorists assume that men’s and women’s psychological differences solely result from sex role socialization processes and sociopolitical power differentials, and, as a consequence, social role theorists further assume psychological sex differences will be smaller in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. In this chapter, evidence is marshaled across 21 data sources that directly challenge this foundational assumption of social role theory. Empirically, sex differences in most psychological traits—in personality, sexuality, attitudes, emotions, behaviors, and cognitive abilities—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. Even sex differences in many physical traits such as height, obesity, and blood pressure are larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. Three alternative evolutionary perspectives on psychological sex differences—obligate sex differences, facultatively mediated sex differences, and emergently-moderated sex differences—appear to better explain the universal and culturally-variable sex differences reliably observed across human cultures.

How does the psychology of attachment relate to sexual permissiveness? Do some attachment–sexuality links differ as a function of biological sex? Are attachment–sexuality links truly universal across cultures or are some localized to Western populations? Across 10 world regions ( N = 17,837), using multiple indicators of permissive sexuality, we attempted to replicate and extend recent work on these questions. Unrestricted sociosexuality was consistently linked to positive Models of Self in men but much less so among women. Self-reports of having an unfaithful sexual personality were linked to dismissing attachment in both men and women, though additional associations were observed with fearful attachment suggesting infidelity as a form of sexual permissiveness may be more closely associated with negative Models of Other. A measure of short-term mating interests was more strongly linked to dismissing attachment in men than in women. Engaging in short-term mate poaching (i.e., steali...

In a recent 10-nation study, Zentner and Mitura (2012) reported observing smaller sex differences in mate preferences within nations that have higher gender parity. As noted in previous research, and in a re-analysis of Zentner and Mitura's own data, sex differences in some mate preferences (e.g., long-term mate preferences for physical attractiveness) are either unrelated to or actually get larger with higher national gender parity. It is critically important to distinguish among mate preference domains when looking for patterns of sexual differentiation across nations. Indeed, for many psychological domains (e.g., attachment styles, Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, personal values, depression, emotional expression, crying behavior, intimate partner violence, tested mental abilities, health indicators; see Schmitt, 2012 ), sex differences are demonstrably larger in nations with higher sociopolitical gender parity. By not distinguishing among mate preferences, Ze...

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N � 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed th...

ABSTRACT Attachment security is known to have various positive outcomes. Recent evidence, however, suggests that security, especially high levels of it, may also have negative outcomes. Three studies tested this possibility. Studies 1 and 2 showed a linear rather than curvilinear trend between security and positive outcomes, suggesting that even at high levels security correlates with positive outcomes. Study 3, which focused on secure behaviors, found that exhibiting high levels of secure behaviors was related to a higher frequency of negative outcomes. However, dispositional attachment security was negatively correlated with negative outcomes, and engaging in secure behaviors strengthened this correlation. These findings suggest that secure behaviors rather than perceptions associated with attachment security (i.e., working models) may be related with negative outcomes.

ABSTRACT Although previous research suggests Big Five (BF) and Dark Triad (DT) traits (Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy) are related to mate poaching, no studies have simultaneously examined the effects of both groups of traits on poaching. This study examined BF and DT personality traits, as well as their higher order factors as predictors of mate poaching behaviors in short-term relationships among a sample of 819 university students. Results showed DT better predicted mate poaching experiences than BF traits, though they better predicted poaching success in men. Regarding specific traits, psychopathy from DT, and extraversion from BF, were the most consistent predictors of mate poaching experiences. Considering sex differences, DT better predicted being the target of poaching in women, and being successfully poached in men. There were no consistent sex differences in the effects of BF traits on mate poaching. Generally, personality traits better predicted poaching attempts, poaching success, and being the target of poaching than other poaching experiences. Possible different roles of BF and DT traits for mate poaching experiences in men and women were discussed.

The target article author (MDG) rightly points to an area of psychology in desperate need of a reformulation along the lines of an evolutionary/functional analysis. For too long, the study of psychopathology, in all its forms, has suffered from a lack of parsimony and coherence. Indeed, to us—as outspoken proponents of the utility of evolutionary psychology—the major strengths or virtues of the adaptationist paradigm are that it provides a set of a priori assumptions concerning the most important questions to ask about mental health and illness (i.e., questions about adaptive mechanisms, ultimate functions, and ancestralmodern environmental mismatches; Buss, 2000; Nesse & Williams, 1994; Wakefield, 1992), provides the most appropriate methods for evaluating functional hypotheses (see Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004), and allows for a proverbial trimming of the various esoteric topics that undermine the scientific study of mental health and individual differences (Confer et al., 2009). MDG does a tremendous job at pulling together work from various subdisciplines of psychology to make his case that researchers can use life history theory to better understand the nature of psychopathology. In this commentary, we expound upon topics with which we agree with MDG, points where we think he did not go far enough, and discuss how the Dark Triad (i.e., psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) have been fruitfully studied from a life history perspective. The task of organizing the psychological sciences within evolutionary biology has some powerful implications for the study of psychopathology. It is important to note that by doing so we can distinguish the pathological “forest” from the “trees.” This is because evolutionary psychologists ask themselves “why” questions as opposed to “how” questions. “How” questions (a.k.a., proximal) involve the mechanisms that trigger a given response (viz., behaviorism, social psychology). “Why” questions (a.k.a., ultimate) are concerned with the reasons why people are responsive to certain stimuli in the first place. However, as MDG rightly points out, the most common way of diagnosing psychopathologies is the “community standard.” This presents scientists and clinicians with a moving target and slippery slope way of determining if someone has a mental disorder. From an evolutionary approach, dysfunction may take on a more stringent definition than the community standard or subjective wellbeing approaches. Once researchers have identified the function of a trait in its relevant context (which itself needs to be identified), they can go about ascertaining whether someone is suffering from a disordered version of that trait. Indeed, the term “dysfunction” alone assumes we already know what a given trait is supposed to do, an assumption we feel has not been sufficiently met outside of general personality traits like the Big Five. A dysfunction of an evolved physiological mechanism would be indicated, for example, if one’s blood failed to clot after one’s skin was cut, if one failed to sweat in response to external heat, or if one’s larynx failed to rise to close off the passage to the lungs when food is swallowed (see Buss, 2000; Wakefield, 1992). There are at least three criteria by which we could judge whether a psychological trait is not functioning as it should in its relevant context (Buss, 2000). First, the mechanism fails to activate in lieu of its triggers (e.g., a narcissist receives praise but fails to feel better about himself). Second, a trait is activated in an inappropriate context (e.g., being extraverted at a funeral). Third, the mechanism fails to coordinate behavior with other mechanisms (e.g., wanting social interaction but relying solely on Facebook instead of making actual friends). MDG rightly points out that most work on psychopathologies has focused on those on the fast end of the spectrum. Personality traits like psychopathy (along with narcissism and Machiavellianism) have received considerable attention lately as a potential adaptive strategy (e.g., Jonason, Koenig, & Tost, 2010; Jonason, Valentine, Li, & Harbeson, 2011). This is a rather obvious tendency among researchers for at least two reasons. First, work on traits like the Dark Triad have been glamorized by the tendency of both the media to portray them as hero or at least antiheroes (Jonason, Webster, Schmitt, Li, & Crysel, 2012; Leistedt & Linkowski, 2014) and for researchers to use various

Several features of human fertility, such as age of menarche, age at first marriage, and total number of offspring, vary in significant ways across cultures. At least part of this variation may be attributable to evolved psychological adaptations designed to facultatively respond to varying local environments with different reproductive strategies. Evidence is reviewed which suggests that stressful environments appear to

ABSTRACT Gannon (this issue) has critiqued several features of evolutionary psychology. Gannon concluded that because the assumptions of evolutionary psychology are not falsifiable - and in her view many of them are wrong - evolutionary psychology should not be considered a truly scientific enterprise. In this article, several reasons are presented for why evolutionary psychology should be considered a science. For one, the falsifiability criterion invoked by Gannon was incorrectly applied to the paradigmatic level of science. Instead, falsifiability should be used to evaluate low-level empirical predictions, not high-level paradigms. Moreover, a mounting body of evidence supports the utility of using evolutionary theories to generate hypotheses and their accompanying falsifiable predictions concerning much of human behavior. Finally, rationale is provided for why evolutionary psychology may be considered a more valuable science than competing alternatives. For example, the paradigm of evolutionary psychology contains a wide range of theories that explain both human and non-human animal behaviors. Most contemporary paradigms in psychology are not as comprehensive in explanatory scope.

Although people can bring personal attributes to their relationships that affect how satisfying and enduring those relationships are, it is more often personal attribute interaction that directly determines romantic relationship outcomes. In this study, three general perspectives on personal attribute interaction-similarity, complementarity and exchange perspectives-were contrasted empirically in their ability to predict dating relationship outcomes. Based on questionnaires completed by a sample of 44 heterosexual dating couples, feelings of relationship satisfaction were most closely associated with the interaction of socially valuable attributes, generally supporting the exchange perspective. Similarity of personal attributes was also connected with relationship satisfaction; however, this association was in the negative direction. That is, couples with dissimilar personality traits, attachment styles and sexual strategies were significantly more satisfied with their dating relationships. Complementarity of personal attributes had no link to satisfaction, but complementary couples experienced significantly higher ratings of relationship commitment, especially couples with complementary personalities. Discussion focused on the differences between personal attribute connections with romantic satisfaction and commitment and on the limitations of the present study.

My response to the commentaries highlights three main points. First, the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI) has demonstrated adequate reliability and validity across dozens of studies, and it deserves its reputation as a useful measure of basic human mating strategies. Second, the sampling limitations of the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP) do not negate the conclusion that sex differences in sociosexuality are likely universal across cultures. Third, the ISDP results support several theories of human sexuality, although some are based on faulty assumptions that render them less viable than others.

Jonason, PK, LI, Norman P., Webster, GD, & Schmitt, DP.(2008). An Adaptive Individual Difference Perspective on the Dark Triad. Paper presented at the Personality and Individual Differences Symposium at the 20th Annual Meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution ...

The Big Five Inventory (BFI; V. Benet-Martínez and O. P. John, 1998) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, the BFI was translated from English into 29 languages and administered to 17,837 individuals from 56 nations. The resulting cross-cultural dataset was used to address three main issues. First, we examined whether the factor structure of the English BFI fully replicated across cultures. We found the five-dimensional structure of the BFI was highly robust across major regions of the world, including North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Moreover, all five personality trait scales displayed high levels of internal reliability across world regions. The second objective was to evaluate the validity...

Evolved mate preferences comprise a central causal process in Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Their powerful influences have been documented in all sexually reproducing species, including in sexual strategies in humans. This article reviews the science of human mate preferences and their myriad behavioral manifestations. We discuss sex differences and sex similarities in human sexual psychology, which vary according to short-term and long-term mating contexts. We review context-specific shifts in mating strategy depending on individual, social, and ecological qualities such as mate value, life history strategy, sex ratio, gender economic inequality, and cultural norms. We review the empirical evidence for the impact of mate preferences on actual mating decisions. Mate preferences also dramatically influence tactics of mate attraction, tactics of mate retention, patterns of deception, causes of sexual regret, attraction to cues to sexual exploitability, attraction to cues to...