Evolutionäre Theoriewoche: Sexual Strategies Theory etc (5. Tag)

Dieser Beitrag ist Teil der evolutionären Theoriewoche

Das heutige Thema ist:

Sexual Strategies Theory etc

Die Sexual Strategies Theory ist eine Konzept aus der Evolutionspsychologie von Buss und entwickelt Partnerwahl- bzw. Verhaltensstrategien aufgrund evolutionärer Grundlagen. Um diese oder andere Theorien, die aus evolutionären Betrachtungen hergeleitet werden, soll es heute gehen.

Aus einem Artikel dazu:

Men and women have evolved a strategic repertoire consisting of both short-term and long-term sexual strategies. Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, have primarily a short-term sexual strategy. Mating takes place primarily when the females enter estrus, and the males do practically nothing to help raise the offspring. Humans, in contrast, have evolved a more complex repertoire of strategies, including long-term mating characterized by attachment between parents and biparental care. Short-term mating, however, can occur before settling on a long-term mate, in between bouts of long-term mating, or during the course of long-term mating in the form of brief affairs.

Different adaptive problems must be solved when pursuing a short-term as opposed to a long-term sexual strategy. The successful pursuit of a strategy requires the solution of specific adaptive problems. A short-term strategy, for example, requires sexual motivation to mate with a variety of partners and the ability to identify partners who are immediately sexually accessible. A long-term strategy, in contrast, involves assessment of future trajectories of potential partners on dimensions central to reproductively relevant resources.

Because men and women differ in minimum obligatory parental investment, men devote a larger proportion of their total mating effort than do women to short-term mating. To produce a single child, women must undergo the burdens of a nine-month gestation, which is costly in time, energy, opportunity costs, increased vulnerability, and risk during childbirth. This is the minimum investment, and it is obligatory. Men’s minimum obligatory investment is a single act of sexual intercourse. Men typically invest much more, of course, but the key point is that these differences in minimum obligatory investment produce a different benefit structure, in the currency of reproductive success, to short-term sexual strategies. Specifically, men in our evolutionary past could increase their reproduction by mating with a variety of women directly resulting in an increased number of children. An ancestral woman having sex with 100 men in 1 year could still not produce more than a single child. Thus, men are predicted to devote a larger share of their mating effort, compared with women, to sexual access to a variety of partners.

A task analysis of men’s short-term sexual strategy suggests four relatively distinct adaptive problems that must be solved: (a) partner number, (b) identification of sexually accessible women, (c) identification of fertile women, and (d) minimal commitment and investment. Men who lack mechanisms such as a desire for a variety of partners, assessment of the degree of sexual accessibility, assessment of physical cues linked with fertility, and strategies for keeping time and investments to a minimum would have been out-reproduced by men who successfully solved these problems entailed by the pursuit of a short-term mating strategy.

Although women cannot benefit as much or as directly in reproduction from short-term mating, women can potentially reap a host of adaptive benefits: (a) immediate resources for themselves and children; (b) mate insurance should her regular mate become injured, die, or defect from the relationship; and (c) genetic benefits through mating with superior men. Because it is clear that women engage in short-term mating, and likely have done so throughout human evolutionary history, it is unlikely that they would have done so in the absence of benefits. The hypothesized benefits constitute some main advantages to women of a short-term mating strategy.

Task analysis of long-term mating suggests a different set of problems that must be solved: (a) identifying reproductively valuable women, (b) ensuring increased probability of paternity, and (c) identifying women with good parenting skills. Men who failed to solve these problems, for example, by being cuckolded and investing unwittingly in the offspring of other men, would have been replaced over evolutionary time by men who successfully solved these adaptive problems.

Women pursuing a long-term sexual strategy would benefit from solving the following problems: (a) identifying men who have the ability to acquire resources, (b) identifying men who display a willingness to invest those resources in them and their children, (c) identifying men willing to commit to a long-term relationship, (d) identifying men willing to protect them and their children from aggressive members of the same species, and (e) identifying men with good parenting skills. Women, in this analysis, are predicted to place a greater premium than men on a potential mate’s external resources, as well as the cues to such resources such as status, older age, ambition, and industriousness. Furthermore, women are predicted to shun men who emit cues that signal that they are pursuing a short-term, rather than long-term, mating strategy.

(…)

Two specific predictions about strategic interference can be derived from the fundamental differences in mating strategies pursued by the sexes: (a) Women will be more upset and angered by features of men’s strategy that interfere with their own, such as the male tendency toward greater sexual assertiveness or aggressiveness–initiating sexual advances sooner, more frequently, more persistently, more aggressively, or with more partners than women; (b) men, in contrast, will be upset and angered by features of women’s mating strategies that conflict with their own, such as those involving selectively withholding or delaying consummation opportunities-declining to have sex, desiring it less frequently, or requiring more stringent external conditions to be met prior to consummation.

Die Theorie zeigt aus meiner gut, wie man aus evolutionären Theorien in Verbindung mit biologischen Unterschieden Theorien entwickeln kann, die man dann im Folgenden überprüfen kann. Diese machen auch das menschliche „Paarungsverhalten“ aus meiner Sicht wesentlich verständlicher und zeigen gleichzeitig auch, dass auch hier wieder verschiedene Strategien von beiden Geschlechtern entwickelt werden können, damit auch Personen mehr auf die eine als die andere Strategie „optimiert“ sein können. Zudem können in der einen Gesellschaft eher diese Strategien sinnvoll und in einer anderen andere oder andere Mischformen und Ausprägungen der Strategien.

Als Schwerpunkt würde mich aber interessieren, wie schlüssig ihr die SST findet, welche anderen evolutionär geprägten Theorien ihr sonst kennt oder was ihr genau an diesen Theorien für falsch haltet.