Need for Alloparental Care and Attitudes Toward Homosexuals in 58 Countries: Implications for the Kin Selection Hypothesis

Abstract

Homosexuality is an evolutionary puzzle. Many theories attempt to explain how a trait undermining individual reproduction can be maintained, but experimental testing of their predictions remains scarce. The kin selection hypothesis (KSH) is an important theoretical framework to account for the evolution of human homosexuality, postulating that its direct cost to reproduction can be offset by inclusive fitness gains through alloparental assistance to kin. Consistent evidence in support of the KSH has only been garnered from research on Samoan fa'afafine (i.e. feminine, same-sex attracted males), whereas research in numerous industrialized societies has repeatedly failed to secure empirical support for the theory. Here, we propose an alternative test of the KSH by investigating how need for alloparental care influences women's attitudes toward homosexuality (AtH). AtH would influence the likelihood of women receiving alloparental care from homosexual kin. We applied logistic regression analysis to a large dataset (17,295 women in 58 countries) derived from the World Values Survey. As predicted by the KSH, women who are potentially most in need of alloparental support exhibit significantly more positive attitudes toward homosexuals. For single mothers who expressed parental care concerns, each additional child mothered was associated with an increase of 1.24 in their odds of exhibiting positive attitudes toward homosexuals. Our study is the first to provide circumstantial evidence in support of the KSH on a global scale.

Female bisexuality

“…This is because various manifestations of female same-sex sexuality can constitute an alloparental buffer that enables the fast life history strategies of masculinizing alleles as they appear both in females and males (Luoto et al, 2019a). A large-scale study on 17,295 women in 58 countries provides indirect support for the alloparenting hypothesis, as mothers who were most in need of alloparental care reportedly endorsed more positive attitudes toward homosexuality (Playà, Vinicius, & Vasey, 2017). The study did not, however, analyze the extent to which these positive attitudes were mediated by actual same-sex attractions rather than merely a positive attitude toward them, which would be a valuable avenue for future research.…”