The current study provides the first evolutionarily-informed direct comparison of actual parents’ and offspring’s mate preferences. We compared students’ (N = 300) average rankings of 13 traits for desirability in an ideal mate with their parents’ (N = 238) rankings of the same traits for their offspring’s ideal mate. Parents ranked religion higher than offspring, whereas offspring ranked physical attractiveness higher than parents. Parents preferred earning capacity and college graduate more in daughters’ mates than sons’ mates. In the offspring sample, significant sex differences replicated those previously documented (e.g., attractiveness, resource acquisition). Parent-offspring differences may reflect evolved psychological mechanisms in parents that functioned to increase inclusive fitness by influencing offspring’s mate choice.
Much is known about human mate preferences: how they vary by sex (Buss, 1989, Buss and Barnes, 1986, Kenrick et al., 1990 and Wiederman, 1993), how some are considered necessities and others luxuries (Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002), how they change based on individual differences and context (Buss and Schmitt, 1993, Gangestad et al., 2002, Kenrick et al., 1994 and Li and Kenrick, 2006), how they show temporal stability over time (Shackelford, Schmitt, & Buss, 2005), and how some remain consistent over generations (Hill, 1945 and Hudson and Henze, 1969) while others have changed (Buss, Shackelford, Kirkpatrick, & Larsen, 2001). However, there are other individuals whose fitness historically was affected by the mate choices of genetic relatives, such as parents, about whose preferences less is known. The current study explored this context using the first direct comparison of parent and offspring preferences from an evolutionary perspective.
The theory behind parent-offspring conflict over mate preferences has been explained in detail elsewhere (e.g., Apostolou, 2007a and Buunk et al., 2008), so we summarize it only briefly. Parents and offspring are genetically related by 50%. Consequently, parents can increase their inclusive fitness by improving the fitness of their offspring (Hamilton, 1964), possibly through influencing their mate selection. Given this partial commonality in genetic interests, parents and offspring are predicted to agree on some of the traits in a desirable mate. This overlap is not complete, however, and parent and offspring diverge when their adaptive goals differ, leading to conflict (Trivers, 1974). Individuals, for example, can obtain different benefits from a mate than their parents can obtain from a son-in-law or daughter-in-law. An individual will share more genetic overlap with his or her own children (50%) than will that person’s parents (25%). Therefore, parents and their offspring might all prefer the offspring to choose a mate with good genes indicators, but the offspring will reap the greatest genetic benefit from good genes traits because he or she will share 50% of genes with their own children, whereas the parents will only share 25% with those same children (their grandchildren). Most traits show moderate heritability (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffin, 2008), so this prioritization would apply to traits that provide genetic benefits (Gangestad et al., 1994 and Thornhill and Gangestad, 1993). The benefits provided by the offspring’s mate may also differ by sex. For example, a son-in-law may have been able to increase the parents’ status by providing direct resources in a way that daughters-in-law could not (e.g., by providing meat through hunting).
