Discuss Sex differences in Parental Investment (8 and 16 marks)

Parental Investment is said to be any investment by a parent in an offspring that increases the chance that the offspring will survive at the expense of that parent’s ability to invest in any other offspring.

One Sex difference in parental investment is that men are more concerned about cuckoldry than women. This is due to the fact that women know 100% that the offspring is theirs however a man does not know this and is therefore worried as they do not want to invest their resources in any offspring that is not their own.

Daley and Wilson (1982) conducted a study to support the fact that men are more concerned by cuckoldry than women by making recordings of spontaneous conversations in a maternity ward. They found that relatives are much more likely to comment on the baby’s resemblance to the father than any other family member. It was also recorded in one conversation a man commenting that is the baby looked like his partners ex-boyfriend, who was of a different race, he would not invest in it. This supports the fact that men are more concerned about cuckoldry than women as people comment on the baby’s resemblance to the father to reassure him that the baby is his and also they are shown to be more concerned about making sure that the baby is very like them.

This study however was a naturalistic observation and therefore there were many uncontrolled extraneous variables present which could have affected the results. Also the sample of participants is very unlikely to be representative of the whole population and therefore cannot be fully generalised across the population.

However Anderson (1999) conducted a study which would undermine the fact that men are more concerned by cuckoldry than women by looking at the investment of stepfathers in children that were not their own. He found that there was no discrimination between children that were their own and the children that were not. This would undermine the fact that men are more concerned about cuckoldry as it would suggest men are not as bothered as it has been suggested about investing resources in to genes that are not their own.   

Sex differences in  Parental investment can be seen to be reductionist as it is based just on evolutionary factors alone which is a very limited view of parental investment and has ignored things such as the media and our own upbringing that can also have an effect on how we invest in offspring in the present day. This therefore is a far too specific view and a better-rounded one should be looked at before any conclusions are drawn.

Another Sex Difference in Parental investment is that females are better prepared both physically and mentally for parenting. Geher suggested that this was the product of evolution and looked into this by asking none parent undergraduates to complete a scale of how ready they perceived themselves to be for parenthood. Although the scale found no difference in perceived readiness for parenting between males and females, when scenarios were given emphasising the psychological costs of parenting males showed significantly higher levels of autonomic nervous system arousal. Although this does not seem to support the fact that females are better prepared for parenting as  both showed the same on the scale, it could actually support this as a self-report method was used to gather results which means that participants could have given socially desirable answers rather than truthful ones on how they actually felt and the fact that males showed a so much higher level of arousal on the second part of the study suggests that they may have lied about how ready they were for parenting on the first scale. This use of self-report also causes the study to lack internal validity.

A criticism of Sex differences in Parental investment is that it stresses evolutionary factors which determine parental investment. This means that it is very on the side of nature in the nature/nurture debate. This is an issue as it does not recognise the value of approaches such as the social learning theory which would explain the influence of nurture in parental investment. Therefore Sex differences in parental investment can be criticized as being too simplistic an explanation and it could be argued that both nature and nurture are important in explaining parental investment.