Sexual Selection and Parental Investment Theory Essays (Aqa A2 Psychology)

Outline and evaluate the relationship between sexual selection and human reproductive behaviour. (24)

Sexual selection is evolution psychology’s greatest contribution to the understanding of human behaviour (Miller (1998)). Sexual selection is defined as the process whereby individuals advertise both their own requirements in a mate and their own attractive characteristics. Reproduction requires an investment of resources i.e. energy. It is poor evolutionary sense to waste resources; therefore there must be an assurance of reproductive success or survival. Humans are anisogamous as they produce gametes of different sizes, the females ovum is large, long lived but short in supply, whereas the males sperm is very small, short lived but very numerous. This means that men invest less in the physical act of having a baby than females so evolution has created gender specific reproductive behaviour in terms of mating preferences and strategies. Therefore the females are selective and adopt a quality strategy choosing from males on offer, whereas the male is indiscriminate and adopts a quantity strategy competing with other males to reproduce with as many females as possible. The two types of sexual selection are the male ‘intra-sexual’ which entails competition for reproductive success between members of the same sex and the female ‘inter-sexual’ which is selection by female choice. Therefore reproductive behaviours have evolved around this idea, men have evolved to be responsive to females who are young and attractive as this indicates she is fertile and he has most chance of reproductive success. However women are responsive to males who have resources that are required for her and her offspring to survive.

Buss (1989) conducted a piece of cross-cultural research looking into evolutionary explanations of mate predictions in which he asked 10,047 participants from different countries to rate certain traits as 0-3 (0=undesirable, 3= indispensable), characteristic such...