Desire for social status affects marital and reproductive attitudes: A life history mismatch perspective

•Attending closely to cues of one's status within a group, and engaging efforts to increase or maintain status when cues suggested that status was lacking or waning, ensured having sufficient status that was crucial for the access to resources and reproductive success.•Cues within modern, economically advanced societies, chronically induce people to prioritize attaining social status at the cost of marriage and reproduction.•We argue that modern desire for social status hijack psychological mechanisms governing life history strategy, leading to maladaptive delays in marriage and reproduction.•A heightened desire to acquire higher social status led to preferences for investing heavily in fewer children rather than spreading one's resources across multiple children (i.e., offspring quality over quantity), and for delayed marriage and reproduction.•A slower reproductive life history strategy mediated the effects of desire for social status on delayed marriage and reproduction.