Buss et al provides support. They found that male students showed a higher galvanic skin response (GSR -measure of emotional arousal) when asked to imagine their partner being unfaithful. Whereas female partners showed higher GSR arousal when presented with concerts about emotional infidelity. Therefore, this supports the claim that males are more likely to experience sexual jealousy and female more likely to experience emotional jealousy.
Harris, however, found that men respond with greater arousal to any sexual imagery, regardless of its context. Therefore questions if this is an adaptive response.
Another criticism is that the model emphasises the risk to men from cuckoldry. Women may face risks including abandonment and the use of mate retention strategies like partner rape. This shows that women also hold risk which the theory fails to consider.
Similarly, parental investment suggests investment is greater if the father is certain the child is theirs. However, Anderson found that men didn’t discriminate between children born to their current partners from her previous relationship and their own child. This goes against the theory by stating cuckoldry isn’t an issue like it suggests.
Overall, the theory says that men don’t contribute to parenting like women. But sometimes this isn’t the case. Research supports that men do contribute to parenting. Reid found that resources provided by men allow the family to live in healthier environments and provide more stable food supply.
Likewise, Dunbar argued that joint parental investment is desirable. If they do this, males can increase the chance of their offspring surviving by sticking around and providing instead of being promiscuous.
Overall, the parental investment theory is reductionistic. This is because it attempts to explain human behaviour down to a simple evolutionary explanation. Parental investment is more complex and there are elements from everything that contribute rather than one which is nature.
The approach only focusses on the nature debate rather than nurture. There must be social factors that contribute to parental investment which this theory fails to consider and therefore doesn’t explain parental investment as a whole.
The theory is also deterministic. This is because it doesn’t not factor in people’s ability for free will. Many females care about children even if they are not theirs as do men. Couples even adopt children putting the same amount of investment as a biological child.
Lastly, the theory suffers from gender bias as it portrays men to be more susceptible to infidelity. This isn’t the case as there are many cases of both cases behaving in this way not just females. Also, single fathers but as much investment in the child as a mother would and this theory doesn’t explain this.
In conclusion, although this theory provides useful information on parental investment between sexes. But not everyone acts in this way and therefore cannot explain all parental investment.
by
ellouise1997hotmailcom (student)
