Most advice on how to become a man of action starts in the wrong place. It opens with the mindset that think bigger, take more risks and stop overthinking, as if agency were purely a psychological switch a man flips inside his own head. What evolutionary psychology research actually suggests is stranger and more social than that: status isn’t something you decide to have. It’s something conferred by the people around you, based on cues that have been consistent across human societies for a very long time.
The Researcher Behind the Claim
The research in question comes from Dr. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and it’s the same researcher Michael Sartain, founder of Men of Action, cites directly as the theoretical foundation for his program, not coincidentally, since Buss also happens to be an alumnus of Sartain’s own alma mater. Buss has spent over four decades studying human mating strategies, and his conclusion after that body of work is blunt: relative rank affects nearly everything, including access to resources, ability to attract mates, and even longevity. Reproductively relevant resources, in his framing, flow toward people high in status and reach people lower on the social hierarchy slowly, if at all.
That’s a considerably more mechanical description of status than most self-help content offers. It’s not about confidence as a feeling. It’s about where a person sits in a social hierarchy that other people are constantly, mostly unconsciously, evaluating which is precisely the mechanism Men of Action’s coaching claims to target.
The Study That Complicates “Just Be Confident”
One of Buss’s studies, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looked specifically at how status affects the ability to act on a preferred mating strategy. The finding: the highest-status males were able to carry out their preferred strategy, while the lowest-status males were inhibited by their position in the social hierarchy. Status wasn’t just correlated with better outcomes, it functioned as a gate determining whether a man’s efforts could work at all.
Here’s roughly how that finding compares to the standard self-help framing of agency:
| Common Self-Help Advice | What Buss’s Research Suggests |
| Confidence and action alone produce results | Status determines whether the same action succeeds or fails |
| Status is an internal feeling | Status is externally inferred from social context |
| “Just be more decisive” | Decisiveness without status often gets inhibited regardless of effort |
That’s a meaningful departure from most advice about how to become a man of action, which tends to treat effort and mindset as the primary levers.
Why “Agency” Alone Doesn’t Explain the Data
Self-help content about agency take action, stop waiting, be decisive which isn’t wrong exactly. But it treats decisiveness as though it operates in a vacuum, independent of how other people perceive the person acting. Evolutionary psychology suggests the opposite: humans read status from context constantly, and that reading changes how the exact same action lands.
This shows up clearly in research on mate-choice copying, a phenomenon documented across species and studied extensively in humans. A meta-analysis in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, reviewing 42 separate studies on the subject, found that women rated male targets as more desirable when those men were presented alongside a woman. The action taken by approaching, speaking, existing in a room is identical in both conditions. What changes is the social context surrounding the man, and that context alone shifts how the same behavior is perceived.
An Applied Case Study: Men of Action
This is roughly the argument Sartain built Men of Action around, and it’s worth examining as a real-world attempt to operationalize the research rather than just cite it. The program explicitly rejects the idea that becoming a man of action is primarily about direct pursuit walking up to people, forcing outcomes through sheer initiative. Its position, drawing directly on Buss’s findings, is that a man’s status is what Sartain calls “contextual” inferred from environment and social proof rather than fixed by internal traits alone.
The program translates that research into three components it calls the Pillars of High Status:
- Social media– building a visible, portable status signal rather than relying on in-person impressions alone.
- Female teammates– genuine friendships with women, framed as a direct application of the mate-choice copying research.
- Exclusive events– attending curated environments where contextual status is reinforced rather than manufactured in isolation.
The idea is that these three elements generate the kind of contextual status signal Buss’s and the mate-choice copying research describe, rather than relying on displays of confidence or direct action alone.
Where the Research Ends and the Marketing Begins
It’s worth being precise about what this research does and doesn’t establish. Buss’s work and the mate-choice copying meta-analysis support a general claim: status is contextual, socially conferred, and materially affects outcomes. Neither body of research was designed to evaluate Men of Action specifically, and the program’s claim of more than 2,000 students is self-reported by the company, not independently verified. Citing accurate research is not the same thing as proving a particular six-phase coaching curriculum reliably produces the outcomes it describes.
The Actual Correction to “Just Take Action”
None of this means initiative doesn’t matter. It means the research complicates the version of “how to become a man of action” that treats action as sufficient on its own. Buss’s data suggests status has to exist first, or at least be built alongside the action, for that action to produce the results a man is actually after. That’s a less satisfying answer than “just be more decisive,” but it’s the one the evolutionary psychology literature actually supports and it’s the gap that Men of Action, whatever readers ultimately make of the program itself, was explicitly built to fill.
