Elements of Parental Choice: The Evolution of Parental Preferences in Relation to In-Law Selection

Abstract

With the exception of modern post-industrial societies, parents have primarily been in control of the mating decisions of their offspring. The selection of in-laws has important fitness consequences for parents. It is hypothesized, therefore, that parents have evolved specific preferences that enable them to select in-laws that will maximize their inclusive fitness. To test this hypothesis, data from 297 parents were collected. It is found that parents place differential emphasis on different in-law traits and that their preferences vary according to the sex of the in-law. In addition, parents are in agreement when they are selecting an in-law and their preferences are not contingent upon their sex.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 67 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.