Will They Do As We Wish? An Investigation of the Effectiveness of Parental Manipulation on Mating Behavior

Abstract

Parents have vested interests in their children’s mating behavior. Accordingly, they employ a battery of tactics to manipulate the mate choices of their daughters and sons. This paper attempts to investigate how effective these tactics are in accomplishing this goal and which tactics are more effective than others. It aims further to investigate how accurately parents can assess the effectiveness of their manipulation tactics. Evidence from two independent studies indicates that parental manipulation has an effect which is, nevertheless, small with some tactics being more effective than others. It is also found that parents accurately assess the effectiveness of their manipulation on mating behavior. The implications of these findings are further discussed.