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Factors influencing parental investment : does parental financial allocation vary as a function of perceived child sexual orientation?
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2013-06-26
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An evolutionary perspective on parental investment suggests that natural selection
might have favored mechanisms by which parents can evaluate the likelihood of a given
offspring’s chances of successful reproduction. Adopting such a perspective, an online
survey-based monetary allocation task was employed to test the hypothesis that parental
investment was positively related to likelihood of offspring heterosexuality, such that
vignettes describing heterosexual offspring would receive more money than vignettes
describing homosexual offspring. Results did not support this hypothesis, as investment
in offspring was unrelated to perceived offspring sexual orientation. However,
exploratory analyses revealed that increasingly negative attitudes towards lesbians and
gays predicted decreased investment in offspring. Such findings could serve to embolden
civil rights activists in their struggle for increased LGBT social rights. Future research in
this area would benefit from correlational research examining real familial relationships
and investment patterns, rather than experimentally simulated relationships, to increase
the external validity of findings and to reduce social desirability bias.
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