Dr. Helen Fisher: 4 Personality Types in Men

Transcript: Helen: Hi, I’m Helen Fisher, and just to answer one question today, what is the natural place for a man? In three words, beside a women. People have long asked me, “Is monogamy natural?” In fact, I’ve studied it for 30 years, and monogamy? Yes, it is natural. We are a monogamous species. We are creatures that pair up to rear our young. Monogamy. And as a matter of fact, this makes us rather unusual in the animal kingdom. Ninety-seven percent of mammals do no pair up to rear their young, only a few do. Beavers do, wolves do, the tiny little African antelope called the dik-dik does and indeed, human beings do, men and women do. Even in societies were men and women are permitted to have several wives at once, the vast majority of men have only one wife at a time. Monogamy, or pair bonding. And in fact, this is a very ancient human strategy. We have new fossils that indicate that it probably evolved over four million years ago when women began to need a partner to help them protect and provide for their helpless babies. And in fact, to this day, I think that one of the main characteristics of men is the drive to be needed. I’m not of course suggesting that men and women are always necessarily sexually faithful to their partner, or indeed, that human marriages last forever, but monogamy, the human drive to form a pair bond, fall in love and rear your children as a team, is natural, and it’s just as deeply embedded in the male brain as it is in the female brain. But, there’s a lot of different kinds of partnerships, and indeed, there’s different kinds of men. I study the biological basis of personality and in fact I think we’ve evolved very broad styles of thinking and behaving, the stem from basic human biology. For example, those men who are very expressive of the dopamine system in their brain, I call them explorers. They tend to be risk taking, novelty seeking, curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic and often quite liberal and quite flexible. And in a study that I did with the dating site, chemistry.com, among 28,000 people, I discovered that those men who were explorers tended to gravitate to women who were explorers too. They want a woman who is just as curious and energetic as they are. Men who are what I call builders, who are expressive of the serotonin system in their brain, tend to be traditional, conventional, they tend to be cautious, but not scared, just cautious, social, they’ve got more close friends, they’re orderly and conscientious, and they tend to respect authority and follow the rules. And builders, a high serotonin type of man, goes for a woman like himself, another builder, someone who’s equally traditional. But the third and fourth type of man, what I call the director and the negotiator, go for their opposite. The director is a man who expresses a great deal of testosterone. These people tend to be analytical, logical, direct, decisive, tough-minded, very good at things like math or engineering, or computers or mechanics, and sure enough, they will go for a woman who is high estrogen instead, someone who sees the big picture, who’s imaginative, intuitive, has good people skills and verbal skills and is very compassionate. And in fact, of these four types, the last, the negotiator, also has a great many men in this category. In fact, a lot of football players have a great deal of estrogen in them as well as testosterone. In fact, a man can be high on estrogen and testosterone, low or both or high on one or high on the other. I think that Bill Clinton actually is a good example of a man that is very high estrogen as well as high testosterone. In short, men are not all alike, and this is one of the great myths that I would like to bust. I think our media, and certainly some women, tend to stereotype men they way they can stereotype women. So, in this video blog, I want to explore all four of these kinds of men: how they think, how they love, how they attach and commit, how they work and play, what they want and what they can give. But I will conclude by saying this: There’s one thing that I think almost all men want, and that is to be needed by a woman, and when they can figure out what she needs, most men will move heaven and earth to provide. Thank you, and see you soon.