Glenn Geher & Scott Barry Kaufman's "Mating Intelligence Unleashed"

Glenn Geher is Chair of the Psychology and Director of Evolutionary Studies at SUNY New Paltz, where he won the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He founded the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society (NEEPS) and is co-founder of the international Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Consortium. His work has been featured in many media outlets--ranging from Psychology Today to Cosmopolitan to the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Scott Barry Kaufman is the author of the forthcoming book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University, and Co-founder of The Creativity Post.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love, and reported the following:

Our book is about the complex and deep underlying cognitive processes that bear on human mating. Sure, human mating includes a great deal of physicality, but it also includes a great deal of psychological and behavioral complexity. Courtship in our species is extensive, and includes such disparate phenomena as writing love poems to the use of self-deprecating humor to driving flashy cars to using too much make-up. Mating in humans involves a great deal of cognitive processing that we refer to as "mating intelligence," and this book is dedicated to summarizing what modern scientists know about this topic.

Mating intelligence includes cognitive processes that may be shaped to unconsciously attract mates, such as humor, creativity, and artistic display (what we call "mental fitness indicators," vis a vis Geoffrey Miller's work on this topic) along with cognitive processes that directly bear on issues of mating, such as attempts to assess one's own mate value, assessments of mating-relevant judgments of potential mates, and accuracy in detecting if a mate is likely to be faithful for a long-term relationship - which is crucial to an individual's reproductive success from an evolutionary perspective.

Page 99 focuses on a summary of Cindy Meston and Davis Buss' work on why women have sex - summarizing their fascinating work that describes female sexual motivations in terms of basic dimensions such as physicality and the need for emotional closeness. Rationales underlying sexual motivations are clearly part of human mating intelligence - and this page, dedicated to helping understand female sexual motivations, summarizes important insights into some of the basic psychology of human mating.

Learn more about Mating Intelligence Unleashed at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue