Children and Their Parents

The research aimed to examine whether people are capable of correctly identifying children from a set of possible parents. The independent variable in this study was photographs of children at age 1, 10 and 20 years old and three photographs of possible parents of that child. The dependent variable was ability to correctly identify the biological parent of each child. These variables were operationalised as percentage of participants who gave the correct biological parent the highest resemblance rating, on a scale from one to ten.

This was study was quasi-experimental research, based on an evolutionary rationale that it is advantageous for babies to look like their fathers in order to instill confidence in the father that the child belongs to him, thus ensuring resources necessary for the babies survival will be provided. Twenty-four Caucasian families each provided photographs of children at age one, ten and twenty. Half of these families provided photographs of male children, the other half female children. In addition, families provided photographs of the child’s father and mother, taken in the same year as when the children was one, ten and twenty years old. The sample consisted of 122 neutral judges where asked to rate the resemblance (on a 0 to 10 scale of increasing resemblance) between a black and white photo of a child and three separate photographs of possible mother’s or fathers, one of whom was the child’s true mother or father. Each combination of photographs was rated by between 18 and 21 participants and the order of the stimulus pictures, the three possible matches and the three child ages were counterbalanced.

In review of the studies introduction, overall it is far too short and fails to review past literature...

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... more easily than the many in the middle.

Finally, this research raises a number of ethical issues in both building paranoia in fathers regarding the paternity of their children, as well as placing blame and assuming fathers will not provide for their children unless they see a resemblance. To date there has been no evidence of this.

The paper is difficult to follow as it lack clarity and detail and does not employ the use of headings to break up the research into relevant sections. Whilst the study has the potential to contribute to understandings of evolutionary psychology; it’s lack of logical structure and methodological flaws prevent it from doing so.

For these reasons the results are most likely incorrect.

• mention seductive nature of evolutionary psychology

Works Cited

Christenfeld, N. & Hill, E. (1995) Whose baby are you?, Nature, 378, 669.