Lecture 5 (Marriage and Conflict) - Slides Flashcards
Marriage (Definition)
- Mutual obligations from both parties, legitimizes sexual contact, stigmatizes EPC (Mate Guarding), indefinite duration.
Common Aspects of Marriage
- Public ritual involving religious authorities - Entitlement of relatives to choose mates and terms - Cohabitation of husband/wife - Explicit trading between relatives for the bride’s re/productive output - Relatives also give direct payment for the wife - Less about love, more about getting resources while increasing lineage and obtaining reproductive success - Creates cultural residuals in modern time
Marriage in Humans (also why does conflict in marriage occur?)
- Bi-parental cares causes the relationship between mates to be like that of genetic relatives.
- Their common interests and mutual affection are grounded in correlated fitness Conflict
- Conflict in marriage occurs because fitness goals of each partner don’t always line up.
- This is different than strategic interference
Strategic Inferference
- An individual attempts a behaviour that will achieve a fitness goal but is blocked by someone elses
- E.x. Husband may want something that wife doesn’t want or will harm them
Ways in which one sex uses strategic inference on another
Imposing fitness costs on the other through: - Deception of intention or mate quality (dressing differently)
- Precluding alternative mating opportunities
- Reduced life expectancy or mate value (Physical damage, death, etc.)
- Parental Investment manipulation (reduced/removal of care in shared offspring or increasing investment in another union)
3 Types of Strategic Interference
(In Pair-bonding)
1 ) Sexual Over-Perception Bias
- Over estimate the degree of sexually desired and assuming friendliness as sexual intent.
- Due to the lower threshold for mating attempts for men. Because accurate hits are more beneficial than misses are costly, but this means this can be manipulated by female. Or female may be friendly and sexually receptive but not interested in that male.
- Company implemented friendliness training for cashiers, program had to stop because of the amount of sexual harassment complaints from customers that spiked.
2) Commitment Skepticism Bias - Women are skeptical because males have a lower parental investment and can easily false advertise investment for sex and leave
- Skepticism is good for women for this reason
- 71% Males exaggerate emotional commitment to partner for sex (39% for women)
- 97% of women declare they experienced exaggerated emotional commitment from male partner (59% in men) - this may be because if it’s a past partner we always think that
- Women have defences against skepticism bias through asking friends/family and sexual witholding to get more information
3) Sexual Witholding - “Leading on”
- More destressing for men by making sex more scarse and valuable
- Witholding damages marriages it seems however
Infidelity in LT
- Primary source of conflict in LT
- Has important fitness consequences that are likely to have exerted significant selection pressuresm individuals who have been able to detect and avoid infidelity would have reduced risks to cost
- Each sex has different costs:
Males = cuckoldry (investing in offspring that is not your own)
Females = loss of protection & provisioning
- Infidelity is considered a risky strategy because of retaliation from kin group, devaluation as a quality LT mate by others and STD risk
- Detecting infidelity is very important for males and females to make sure they increase and maintain investments.
- 3 sex differences for infidelity costs (see slide)
Why would women cheat or mate multiply?
- Increase genetic variety (Important because that’s basically the reason we have sex)
- Fertility back-up
- Getting additional males to invest, or backup LT mate.
- Transition to a higher mate value partner
- Dual Strategy
Paternity Uncertainty
- Every male experiences this because we don’t gestate the child.
Cuckoldry
(Why does it exist? What pressure created this in humans? and experiments)
- Jealousy & mate guarding may be solutions to this adaptive problem. Implementation of solutions depend on female fertile and mate value.
- Because of the bridewealth, and cultural practices, women are being treated as a commodity for reproductive success
- Thus, men may try to actively control fidelity and sex in women. To make their FERTILITY a commodity
- Survey questions: What would 1) upset/distress you more 2) difficult to forgive 3) more likely to break up with your partner if they had emotional or sexual intimacy with another.
- Men are more concerned with sexual fidelity because it may signal cuckoldry. Females are more distressed by emotional fidelity because it may signal resource loss.
- Among men who are 100% sure their child is theirs, 2-3% are not.
- Predicts that males will have false positives in suspecting females
Infidelity Estimates
(and what does it predict)
- 23% of men, 20% in women (same amounts) - during CURRENT relationship so could be higher
- When males are highly confident in paternity, 2-3% are wrong, low paternity = 30%
- Males are more suspicious of fidelity, but would be more likely to admit infidelity
- Predicts that males will have more false positives when suspecting mates
3 sex differences that fitness costs of infidelity predict
1) Jealousy to Infidelity (Goetz et al., Schutzwohl & Koch)
- Men and women are jealous and concerned with different things that are more costly to them.
2) Parental Attributions (Wilson & Daly 1982, Rhodes, Morly and Simmons)
- It’s possible that parental uncertainty in males created pressures where males can assess the likelihood they aren’t cuckolded.
3) Mate guarding & retention tactics
- Many behaviours can be considered mate guarding/retaining from love and care to violence
- Various tactics exist and are sex specific
Goetz et al. 2009
- Asked males/females if they will probably cheat on their partner, and if there partner will cheat on them
- Males question/suspect infidelity in their partner more than females but were also more likely to admit that they will commit infidelity themselves.
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Infidelity Perception Contingency Table
Target Perceptions
- Partner Actions Target Perceptions*
* *Suspect No Infidelity Suspect Infidelity**
No Infidelity Correct Inference False Positive
Infidelity False Negative Correct Inference
- Detecting a partner’s sexual infidelity an adaptive problem involving assymetry in the cost of the errors
- Become pregnant from a male who said he will invest, but leaves is extremely costly to the female
Paternity
