Obligatory parental investment

• Main Authors: KHENG, Courtney K., YONG, Jose C., LI, Norman P.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Obligatory investment; Parental investment; Applied Behavior Analysis; Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3186; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4443/viewcontent/Obligatory_parental_investment_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Obligatory parental investment refers to the amount of time, energy, and resource expenditures that organisms are minimally required to make in order to ensure offspring survival. Throughout evolutionary history, offspring survival has posed a main adaptive challenge. In some species, this selection pressure has resulted in sex-differentiated forms of parental investment. This chapter describes obligatory parental investment, explores asymmetries in obligatory parental investment between males and females, describes examples of such differences across a range of species, and briefly highlights the implications of such differences in terms of human sexual strategies and conflicts.