David Michael Buss (born April 14, 1953) is an American evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, researching human sex differences in mate selection.

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.

Buss is involved with extensive cross-cultural research collaborations and lectures within the U.S.[5] 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[citation needed] in providing exact definitions for trait-related terms (such as "creative", "humorous", and "ambitious").

As a solution to these problems of defining and measuring traits, Buss and K. H. Craik (1980) proposed to introduce prototype theory into personality psychology.

[clarification needed] The Gangestad and Simpson Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI) determines whether a person favors a short-term or long-term strategy (also termed as unrestricted and restricted).

[10] David Buss and colleagues conducted a study that attempted to uncover where priorities lie—concerning determinants of attractiveness—in short- and long-term mating strategies.

David Buss and his colleagues found that sociosexual orientation or favored mating strategy influenced which part of the portrait was revealed.

[11] David Buss and his colleagues found that favored mating strategies in women had no correlation with which part of the portrait was revealed but had to do with utilitarian aspects that make sense in terms of supportive and dependable resources, health and stamina.

[11] These findings add to David Buss' field of research by demonstrating differences in mating strategies across preferred relationship type.

Men, by contrast, have faced the challenges of paternity uncertainty, with its related risk of misallocating parental resources, and of maximizing the offspring onto which they pass their genes.

In a large cross-cultural study that included 10,047 individuals across 37 cultures, Buss sought first to determine the different characteristics each sex looks for in a mate.

[16] Buss hypothesized that women find emotional infidelity more threatening because it could lead to the woman losing the resources she had gained from that mate and having to raise children on her own.

[21] Buss has conducted numerous studies comparing the mate preferences of individuals by factors such as gender, time, parents vs. offspring, and type of relationship.

He and Chang, Shackelford, and Wang examined a sample from China and discovered that men more than women tend to prefer traits related to fertility, such as youth and physical attractiveness.

Women, however, favor traits related to resources, such as good earning capacity, social status, education and intelligence, and ambition and industriousness.

Swain's results indicated that Buss' mate selection traits could be used to accurately predict the nature of the reporting couple's current relationships status: classified in four opposing groups, (those couples where both partners identified their relationship as either happy or unhappy, combative or peaceful, exciting or boring, and respectful or disrespectful).

When a person's goals, desires, and strategies are compromised, his or her aroused anger and subjective distress serve four functions: (1) to draw attention to the interfering events, (2) to mark those events for storage in long-term memory, (3) to motivate actions that reduce or eliminate the source of strategic interference, and (4) to motivate memorial retrieval and, hence, subsequent avoidance of situations producing further interference.

[25] In this manner, SIT implies that anger and distress will be activated when a person is confronted with an event that interferes with his or her favored sexual strategy.