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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Social Psychology

Evolution

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Long And The Short Of It: Testing The Conversion And Cuckold Strategies Of Ancestral Human Outgroup Mating, Joseph Frederick Salvatore Aug 2014

The Long And The Short Of It: Testing The Conversion And Cuckold Strategies Of Ancestral Human Outgroup Mating, Joseph Frederick Salvatore

Doctoral Dissertations

The human social group likely aided in ancestral human’s survival. However, the small-knit extended kin group in which human ancestors evolved posed a plausible reproductive threat in the form of inbreeding. The outgroup mating hypothesis (Salvatore, Meltzer, & Gaertner, under review) proposed that, as a solution to the inbreeding dilemma, ancestral females may have mated outside their social group. The current work examines two competing hypotheses by which ancestral females mated with outgroup males and balanced parental investment concerns. The conversion hypothesis posits that ancestral females mated with an outgroup male under the provision that he and his group would …


Strangers With Benefits: Ovulation And Attraction To Outgroup Men, Joseph Frederick Salvatore May 2012

Strangers With Benefits: Ovulation And Attraction To Outgroup Men, Joseph Frederick Salvatore

Masters Theses

The tendency for humans to behaviorally and attitudinally favor ingroups over outgroups is robust and pancultural. An evolutionary framework, however, provides reason to expect a systematic tendency toward outgroup-favoritism in a particular context. Ancestral females may have mated furtively with outgroup-males and returned to their cuckolded ingroup-male partner for child rearing, as a means of both maximizing genetic variability and promoting the long-term welfare of an offspring. The footprint of such a process may evidence in human females via increased physical attraction to outgroup (but not ingroup) males as ovulation approaches (conception-risk increases). Two studies of normally ovulating women tested …