Parental Investment Theory and Mating Behavior

Parental investment theory (Trivers 1972) proposes that the mating behavior of a species is shaped by the amount of parental investment by each sex.

According to Parental Investment Theory (Trivers, 1972), the relative proportion of parental investment—the time and energy devoted to the care of individual offspring—varies across the males and females of different species. In some species, males tend to provide more parental investment than females (e.g., the Mormon cricket; Gwynne, 1984). In other species, females possess the heavy-investing parental burdens (e.g., most mammals; Alcock, 1993; Clutton-Brock, 1991).One of Trivers’ keen insights was to note that sex differences in parental investment burdens are systematically linked to processes of sexual selection in ways that potentially relate to mating strategies. Namely, within a given species, the sex that invests less in offspring is intrasexually more competitive, especially over gaining sexual access to members of the opposite sex. That is, the lesser-investing sex (e.g., male elephant seals; Le Boeuf, 1974) is reliably more aggressive with their own sex, tends to die earlier, tends to mature later, and generally competes for mates with more vigor than the heavier-investing sex (see also Alexander & Noonan, 1979). Furthermore, the lesser-investing sex of a species is intersexually more indiscriminate in mate choice than the heavier-investing parent. The lesser-investing sex is willing to mate more quickly, at low cost, and with more partners than is the heavier-investing sex (Andersson, 1994; Bateson, 1983; Clutton-Brock & Parker, 1992; Maynard Smith, 1977).

Human Evolutionary Biology
UNIVERSAL SEX DIFFERENCES IN SEXUAL DESIRE

Wikiversity: Motivation and emotion/Book/2018/Parental investment theory

Human Mate Selection Theory: An IntegratedEvolutionary and Social Approach

Parental Investment Theory (MiddleLevel Theory in EvolutionaryPsychology)

Evolutionary Psychology 101

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