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Do Parents Favor Their Adoptive Or Biological Children? Predictions From Kin Selection And Compensatory Models, Nancy L. Segal, Norman P. Li, Jamie L. Graham, Steven A. Miller
Do Parents Favor Their Adoptive Or Biological Children? Predictions From Kin Selection And Compensatory Models, Nancy L. Segal, Norman P. Li, Jamie L. Graham, Steven A. Miller
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Evolutionary reasoning (Kin Selection Theory) predicts less favorable behaviors directed by parents toward their unrelated children, relative to their biologically related children. By extension, it may be argued that parents should also have less favorable perceptions of the intellectual, personality and other behavioral traits of unrelated children, compared with biologically related children. However, recent work has modified this expectation, given the distinction between unrelated adopted children (who are acquired intentionally) and unrelated stepchildren (who are acquired via mating effort). The compensatory model takes into account evolved desires for parenting and the evolutionarily novel availability of unrelated children. It predicts that …