Debriefing: Perceptions of Required Parental Investment and Mating Behaviors

Principal Investigator: Glenn Geher, Ph.D., Psychology Department, 845-257-3470

This debriefing is for a study you participated in this past semester.

This research is designed to develop a measure of individuals perceptions of the amount of required parental investment needed to successfully raise human offspring.Actual amount of required parenting needed to reproduce has been shown to affect the general mating systems of particular species as well as differential mating patterns between sexes within a species. In humans, perceptions of required parenting may covary with an individuals general mating behaviors. Specifically, it is predicted that individuals who perceive required parenting to be high would tend to demonstrate long-term mating strategies while individuals who perceive required parenting to be low would tend to demonstrate short-term mating strategies. This pattern is predicted to be particularly strong for females.

The Perceptions of Required Parenting Scale (PORPS), comprised of 18 Likert scale items, was designed for this research. Participants (who including 200 young adults (100 male and 100 female)) in this study such as yourself completed the PORPS, the Sociosexuality Inventory (SOI) created by Simpson and Gangstead (1991) to tap individual differences in promiscuity, and several existing measures of outcome variables relating to long-term and short-term mating strategies. It is predicted that the PORPS and the SOI will be negatively correlated. In other words, perceiving costs of raising an offspring alone as high is predicted to be associated with low levels of promiscuity. This pattern is expected to particularly hold up for females who, because of anatomical constraints, tend to bear most of the costs associated with child rearing. Further, the PORPS is expected to be significantly related to the outcome measures that tap different aspects of human mating. Specifically, people who perceive the costs of raising an offspring alone as high, relative to other participants, are predicted to (a) value characteristics in mates associated with reliability and resourcefulness, (b) be more concerned about emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity, and (c) use mate attraction tactics associated with presenting oneself as dependable and faithful (as opposed to physically fit and attractive).

This research is ultimately designed to add to psychologists understanding regarding how social perceptual variables that relate to specific evolutionary principles may shape human behavior.

Thank you for your participation. Please contact Dr. Geher with any questions or concerns you may about this research.