Abstract
The Reproductive Compensation (RC) hypothesis and the Differential Allocation (DA) hypothesis predict that parents who mate under constraint will either increase or decrease, respectively, their reproductive effort and investment in offspring. One possible type of mate choice constraint in humans is arranged marriage in which parents or others choose mates. To test the RC and DA hypotheses in humans, we examine whether there are differences in parental investment between women in arranged marriages and those in self-choice marriages using data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (n = 8393). Marriage type does not significantly correlate with parental investment except for fertility outcomes where women in self-choice marriages had more live births, living children, and greater marital fertility than woman in arranged marriages. Our findings better support the DA hypothesis than the RC hypothesis. We conclude that, like many other species, free mate choice is associated with increased reproductive success in this sample of humans.
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