“And who do you love more, mom or dad?” This irritating and inopportune question that we have all been asked when we were children changes direction in a recent investigation by a multidisciplinary team (psychologists, biologists and anthropologists) from the University of Turku (Finland), the University of Arizona and Rutgers University (USA).
Now, the question could be directed to the parents of offspring of both sexes: “And who do you love more, your girl or your boy?”. As the study concludes, the parents prefer the baby; and the mothers, the baby.
But why? The question has more crumb than it seems.
War of the sexes
Parents rarely admit to having a favorite among their offspring, although they are often betrayed by their unconscious acts. He is human: affinities exist whether we want to or not, and can rarely be controlled.
What the authors of this work have done is analyze whether these preferences are marked by socioeconomic, educational level and the environment. What they have discovered is that the key is in the genre.
The research is based on the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, formulated in 1973 by the Americans Robert Trivers (evolutionary biologist) and Dan Willard (computational scientist). In short, his theory predicts that well-off parents will devote more resources (financial and otherwise) to raising boys, while those at the opposite extreme will do the same for girls.
The explanation for this phenomenon is based on our condition as primates struggling to survive and pass on their genes: in such a society, males are more likely to mate and produce offspring. If you do not have resources, it is better to have girls who are less likely to increase the number of mouths to feed. And vice versa.
It’s biology!
But the research at hand has discovered that it is not status that marks this preference, but gender. To reach this conclusion, the scientists tested the Trivers-Willard effect through an online experiment involving 347 women and 423 men with an average age of 36 years, married or divorced, and with children of both sexes.
Through very long and elaborate tests, the implicit and explicit psychological preferences of the parents that revealed an inclination towards their children were measured, taking into account the socioeconomic and cultural factors of the parents. They observed that it was much easier to predict which offspring each parent would lean toward based on gender, rather than because of other circumstances.
The pattern found in the responses to the test indicated that fathers tended to favor boys; and mothers, girls.
The authors hope that their study will shed light on the understanding of human breeding strategies and the evolutionary biology of our species.
You can read the research here, published in Nature.
