Human Mate Choice and Parenting

Chapter Study Outline

1. Psychology of Human Mate Preferences
   1. Evolutionary theory
   2. For women, an important mate is one who will be a good provider.
   3. For men, an important mate is one who will bear lots of children.
      1. For both, a mate has to be someone to get along with because of the lengthy period of infant dependence.
   4. The Buss study
   5. Covered over 10,000 people in 33 countries
   6. Found that mutual attraction or love was most important to people
      1. Males and females rank certain characteristics differently, such as "good financial prospect" and "good looks."
      2. Males tend to marry younger females.
      3. Females tend to prefer fewer, longer-term commitments than males do because of the costs they bear in terms of conception and child rearing.
      4. Men tend to overestimate women's sexual intent, whereas women tend to underestimate men's interest in commitment.
      5. Culture actually predicts mate preference better than gender does.
   7. Controversy about the evolutionary explanation
      1. Evolutionary analyses are only reinforcing Western cultural values. Advocates respond that cross-cultural beliefs reflect psychological predispositions.
      2. There are biases in the method of questioning and the people being questioned. Advocates respond that different kinds of data generate different conclusions.
2. Social Consequences of Mate Preferences
   1. Kipsigis bridewealth
   2. Men in this society have several wives.
      1. The groom compensates the bride's family for the loss of her labor in the form of bridewealth.
      2. The groom's father bases his bridewealth on how likely it is that a bride will bear his son many healthy children, and he will choose a bride who will devote labor to the household and who is from a more distant village.
      3. The bride's father prefers her to marry a relatively wealthy man but also prefers the bride to be nearby.
      4. Women whose menarche started at an early age and who are plump rather than skinny get the highest bridewealth payments.
   3. Nyinba polyandry
      1. Polyandry is generally rare but occurs in some societies in the Himalayas.
      2. In fraternal polyandry, several brothers are married to one woman, and the family estate is not partitioned.
      3. Often the most junior brother initiates a partitioning from the family. Any brother who leaves prompts the family estate to be parceled out, and each brother takes his own children.
      4. Men in polyandrous marriages, however, seem to ignore their kinship to the cohusbands when deciding whether to terminate their marriages, which is surprising from an evolutionary perspective.
3. Raising Children
   1. Parenting and mating effort
      1. Parental care functions as both parenting and mating effort; that is, husbands and wives both invest in their genetic offspring.
      2. Investment in one's children from a previous marriage equals parenting effort but not mating effort, whereas investment in step-children from a mate's previous relationship does not constitute parenting or mating effort.
   2. Grandparental care
      1. Maternal grandparents are likely to be closer to a grandchild than the paternal grandparents, which might reflect the greater certainty of maternity than paternity.
   3. Discriminative parental solicitude
      1. Evolutionary theory predicts that parents should invest more time in children with better prospects than they do in children with poor prospects.
      2. After birth, we might expect parents to be sensitive to the condition of the infant, the economic situation, and the parents' other opportunities to pass on their genes. This phenomenon is known as discriminative parental solicitude.
   4. Prenatal investment
      1. Pregnancy costs, such as the health of the mother, have to be weighed against benefits.
      2. Each pregnancy influences a woman's future reproductive success.
      3. In general, women who are unhealthy are at risk of having unhealthy pregnancies or risk the success of their infant thriving after birth.
      4. Miscarriages in some cases seem to be the mechanism of female physiology that maintains quality control over a pregnancy.
   5. Infanticide
   6. Children have been deliberately killed throughout history.
      1. Reasons for infanticide can include: the child is unlikely to survive, the parents can't care for the child, or the child is not fathered by the mother's husband.
      2. Decisions by parents to kill their children are often reluctant responses to extreme hardships in life.
   7. Adoption
   8. In Oceania, children are often adopted by relatives.
      1. In industrialized societies, children are usually adopted by strangers.
      2. In both cases, children are usually given up for adoption when their parents are unable to raise them for a variety of reasons.
4. Is Human Evolution Over?
   1. Because cultural change is much faster than genetic change, most of the changes we have seen in humans over the past 10,000 years have been the result of cultural evolution. In this sense, human evolution is over.
   2. Natural selection, however, has shaped our physiological and psychological mechanisms, so understanding evolutionary theory is still important for understanding contemporary human behavior.