What drives powerful men to cheat?
Oh great, more sex scandals. Insert eye roll here. We know how this monkey business works.
Powerful, silver-haired man has a relationship with younger, less powerful woman. They break up, she spills the beans to the media, and we all shake our heads wondering why a guy who seems so smart would risk everything for a meaningless fling.
The media’s abuzz about the affairs of David Letterman and ESPN’s Steve Phillips. To be fair, Letterman wasn’t married at the time, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I admit that I find Dave hilarious, and since he didn’t cheat on me, I’m not inclined to quit watching him just because his personal life is less than perfect.
But Letterman and Phillips are hardly the first high-profile men to have this problem. Is there something about being on TV or making a stratospheric income that prompts men to cheat?
Evolutionary psychologists say yes.
Evolutionary psychology is the study of human nature. It’s based on the premise that our behavior is the result of evolved psychological adaptations and that we’re primarily driven by natural selection and sexual selection.
Said another way, we may gussy ourselves up; but we’re basically just a bunch of primates trying to survive and reproduce before we die.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, author of “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters,” writes, “The underlying motive of all human behavior is reproductive; reproductive success is the purpose of all biological existence, including humans.”
The challenge? “Reproductive success” is different for men than it is for women. For men it’s quantity; for women it’s quality.
From a purely evolutionary perspective, reproductive success for a man would be populating a small country. Yet for a woman, it means producing a small number of high-quality offspring that will lead a country.
If you buy into the premise that we’re basically instinct-driven animals, the biological impulse for men is to seek out lots of healthy, young women to increase their odds for producing lots of offspring. For women, the biological drive is to seek out a high-resources man who can help them care for their limited number of young.
In a section of his book titled “Life’s Not Fair, or Politically Correct,” Kanazawa says that from an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of gaining power (or anything else men do) is to have a large number of women to mate with.
When viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology, the question, “Why on earth would a powerful man risk it all for an affair with a young woman?” seems silly.
The evolutionary answer is: Why not? But are we really doomed to be slaves to our biology?
I don’t think so. My primitive instincts may be telling me to make a play for a chest-beating CEO so that I’ll have access to his vast resources in order to raise my two future leaders. But that doesn’t mean I have to follow that impulse.
Nor does a male have to act upon the urge in his head grunting, “Young woman, new opportunity, take, take.”
Just as you don’t have to grab for a treat every time you feel hungry, your biological impulses in other areas don’t have to trump your moral compass. We may be primates, but that’s no reason for us to act like apes.
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