ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
A model explaining the matrilateral bias in alloparental investment.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Care across generations and borders: grandparental role and wellbeing in Sri Lankan migrant households.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Psychiatric disorders following the clustering of family disadvantages in previous generations: a multigenerational cohort study.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Article
- Partner choice increases observed reciprocity-based cooperation but decreases unobserved stake-based cooperation.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Adult Children's Timing of Entry into Parenthood : Parental Investment, Education, and Gender.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Close and more distant relatives are associated with child mortality risk in historical Finland.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2024Article
- The Effect of Parental Caregiving on the Fertility Expectations of Adult Children.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2024Article
- Investment by maternal grandmother buffers children against the impacts of adverse early life experiences.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Grandmothers matter: how grandmothers promote maternal perinatal mental health and child development.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Differential grandparental investment when maternal grandmothers are living versus deceased.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Post-marital residence patterns and the timing of reproduction: evidence from a matrilineal society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Repercussions of patrilocal residence on mothers' social support networks among Tsimane forager-farmers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- An evolutionary perspective on the association between grandmother-mother relationships and maternal mental health among a cohort of pregnant Latina women.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2023Article
- The interplay of grandparental investment according to the survival status of other grandparent types.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Matrilateral bias of grandparental investment in grandchildren persists despite the grandchildren's adverse early life experiences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Cooperating to show that you care: costly helping as an honest signal of fitness interdependence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- In-Law Relationships in Evolutionary Perspective: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Article
- Does Transition to Retirement Promote Grandchild Care? Evidence From Europe.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Grandparental partnership status and its effects on caring for grandchildren in Europe.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Maternal grandmothers invest more in childcare than paternal grandmothers. This bias is large where the expression of preferences is unconstrained by residential and lineage norms, and is detectable even where marriage removes women from their natal families. We maintain that the standard evolutionary explanation, paternity uncertainty, is incomplete, and present an expanded model incorporating effects of alloparents on the mother as well as on her children. Alloparenting lightens a mother's load and increases her residual nepotistic value: her expected fitness from later investments in personal reproduction and in her natal relatives. The mother's mother derives fitness from all such investments, whereas her mother-in-law gains only from further investment in children sired by her son, and thus has less incentive to assist the mother even if paternity is certain. This logic extends to kin other than grandmothers. We generate several hypotheses for future research.
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