Does polygyny reduce fertility?

Josephson, Steven C.

doi:10.1002/ajhb.10045

Cited by 37 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…If men benefit at the expense of their wives, polygyny can only be explained through imbalances in bargaining power; in other words, men have the power to coerce women into entering polygynous marriages when they would rather be married monogamously. This argument has been well supported by studies of polygyny among non-foragers around the world, emphasizing higher costs in terms of fertility and child health for women married polygynously compared with their monogamous counterparts (Borgerhoff Mulder 1988;Dorjahn 1958;Hern 1992;Josephson 2002;Strassman 1997;Van Beek 1987), but coercive polygyny among hunter-gatherers is rare. The relative advantages of sororal polygyny have been well established (see White 1988 for a review), the most notable being a lower incidence of jealousy and conflict than exists between unrelated co-wives, evident by the fact that sororal cowives are much more likely to be co-resident (Murdock 1949:31).…”

Section: Implications For Understanding Polygyny In Australiamentioning

confidence: 90%

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

Scelza

Bird

2008

Hum Nat

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The division of labor has typically been portrayed as a complementary strategy in which men and women work on separate tasks to achieve a common goal of provisioning the family. In this paper, we propose that task specialization between female kin might also play an important role in women's social and economic strategies. We use historic group composition data from a population of Western Desert Martu Aborigines to show how women maintained access to same-sex kin over the lifespan. Our results show that adult women had more same-sex kin and more closely related kin present than adult men, and they retained these links after marriage. Maternal co-residence was more prevalent for married women than for married men, and there is evidence that mothers may be strategizing to live with daughters at critical intervals-early in their reproductive careers and when they do not have other close female kin in the group. The maintenance of female kin networks across the lifespan allows for the possibility of cooperative breeding as well as an all-female division of labor.

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Section: Implications For Understanding Polygyny In Australiamentioning

confidence: 90%

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

Scelza

Bird

2008

Hum Nat

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“…These women tended not to be relatives, and many were co-wives. Indeed, ancestral hunter-gatherer societies were mildly polgynous, as they are today, which means that social dynamics among women would have been rife with sexual competition (Dupanloup et al, 2003;Flinn & Low, 1986;Hammer, Mendez, Cox, Woerner, & Wall, 2008;Josephson, 2002;M. B. Mulder, 1992;Sellen, 1999;Strassman, 1997).…”

Section: Cooperation In Same-sex Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex differences in cooperation: A meta-analytic review of social dilemmas.

Balliet

Macfarlan

et al. 2011

Psychological Bulletin

269

234

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Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence for this assertion. Current theories of sex differences in social behavior suggest that it may be useful to examine in what situations men and women are likely to differ in cooperation. Here, we derive predictions from both sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives on context-specific sex differences in cooperation, and we conduct a unique meta-analytic study of 272 effect sizes-sampled across 50 years of research-on social dilemmas to examine several potential moderators. The overall average effect size is not statistically different from zero (d ϭ -0.05), suggesting that men and women do not differ in their overall amounts of cooperation. However, the association between sex and cooperation is moderated by several key features of the social context: Male-male interactions are more cooperative than female-female interactions (d ϭ 0.16), yet women cooperate more than men in mixed-sex interactions (d ϭ -0.22). In repeated interactions, men are more cooperative than women. Women were more cooperative than men in larger groups and in more recent studies, but these differences disappeared after statistically controlling for several study characteristics. We discuss these results in the context of both sociocultural and evolutionary theories of sex differences, stress the need for an integrated biosocial approach, and outline directions for future research.

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“…The latter 2 outcomes obviously affect the reproductive success of both parents but fall disproportionately on women, for whom they are not offset by the increased offspring number that men experience in polygynous marriages. The costs of polygyny seem to fall particularly on women of later rank in the union, and their children (6,13). Thus, it seems that polygynous marriage in African societies is most beneficial to men and most costly to women, especially wives of lower rank.…”

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confidence: 99%

Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda

Pollet

Nettle

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an alreadymarried man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men are more likely to own land than monogamously married men, that polygynous marriages become more common as the district sex ratio becomes more female biased, that owning land is particularly important when men are abundant in the district, and that a man's owning land most increases the odds of polygyny in districts where few other men own land. Results are discussed with reference to models of the evolution of polygyny.biological markets ͉ mate choice ͉ operational sex ratio ͉ humans ͉ land ownership M ost human societies historically have allowed polygyny, or the marriage of more than 1 woman to 1 man (1, 2). However, within polygynous societies, many marriages are monogamous, and across polygynous societies there is variation both in the mean and in the variance of the number of wives per married man. What, then, explains how many wives men marry?The payoffs to polygyny are not symmetric across the 2 sexes. Men always increase their reproductive success by adding an extra wife. In African agriculturalist and pastoralist societies, for example, every extra wife a man has adds to his number of surviving offspring, and most of the variance in men's reproductive success is explained by variation in number of wives (3-6). For women, being polygynously married seems less beneficial because each additional wife subdivides household resources and male investment. Compared with monogamously married women, polygynously married women have lower fertility (7-9), increased child mortality (10), and poorer child growth and development (11,12). The latter 2 outcomes obviously affect the reproductive success of both parents but fall disproportionately on women, for whom they are not offset by the increased offspring number that men experience in polygynous marriages. The costs of polygyny seem to fall particularly on women of later rank in the union, and their children (6, 13). Thus, it seems that polygynous marriage in African societies is most beneficial to men and most costly to women, especially wives of lower rank.Situations whereby individuals receive asymmetric payoffs from collaboration and yet continue to collaborate can be conceptualized using the theory of biological markets (14-17). Biological markets operate wherever there are 2 classes of individual (e.g., male and female), with distinct commodities to exchange (e.g., resources and fertility), and where each has the possibility of partner choice. This leads to competition within each class to attract members of the other clas...

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Does polygyny reduce fertility?

Cited by 37 publications

References 46 publications

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

Sex differences in cooperation: A meta-analytic review of social dilemmas.

Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda

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