young woman and powerful man

High Status Sex Scandals

From the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Anthony Weiner sexting incident, high-status men keep getting caught with their pants down. You might wonder why a congressman would send a photo of his crotch to a young woman, or why the leader of the free world would get tangled up with an intern. While evolutionary psychology doesn’t explain why any particular human engages in any particular behavior, it does explain our general tendencies. In this case, the indiscretions of high-status men make more sense when you understand that our ancestors evolved status in order to give stronger males more than their share of access to females. Evolutionarily, high status is largely about having sex with more women.

Millions of years ago, after we chimps* split with the gorillas and before we Hominina split with the other chimps, we evolved a system of male status.** Gibbons, orangutans, and gorillas do not have high- and low-status males living together, but we chimps do. This social system allowed stronger and weaker males to cooperate in a group, something you don’t see among other great apes. High status allowed the stronger males to get more than their share of the resources without having to drive the weaker males away or kill them. The most important scarce resource in the lives of our male chimp ancestors was females. That’s true of mammals in general, and we chimps are no exception.

A drive for status, especially among men, is a human universal, as noted by the world’s first evolutionary psychologist, Charles Darwin. We don’t consciously know that our quest for status is the latest chapter in the mammalian male’s quest for more mates. Once men get power, however, it’s easy to see what comes next.

For their part, women have their own evolutionary baggage. Our female ancestors have long preferred high-status males. The ones who didn’t prefer powerful males wound up bearing sons who were more likely to have low status like their fathers. Since high-status males reproduce at favorable rates, evolution leads females to favor them as mates because that strategy leads to their sons reproducing at favorable rates. If the leader of the free world gets messed up with a flirty aide, it’s partly because there's something about being the leader of the free world that gets a woman’s attention.

None of this is to say that any particular human is hard-wired to have unwise liaisons with any other particular human. Evolutionary psychology is about ultimate causes and population-wide patterns, not individual decisions. The pattern is easy to see, and it’s only a matter of time before another high-status male makes the day’s headlines by acting out yesterday's evolutionary imperative.

* Technically Hominini. (2020)

** Or maybe living in multi-male, multi-female bands goes back tens of millions of years to the early “monkeys” (technically simians). (2020)

PS: It turns out that extroverts in our culture are more promiscuous than average, and lots of powerful men are extroverts. (2019)

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017