Relationships - review of evolutionary theories and look ahead to economic theories

In today's lesson we reviewed the evolutionary theories which use the concept of sexual selection (behaviour which leads to successful reproduction, and offspring which will themselves reproduce successfully) to explain differences in male and female reproductive behaviour. There is lots of overlap here with the evolutionary aspects of gender we've already looked at - Parental Investment Theory and Sexual Strategies can be used for both.

Here is the presentation we looked at for the evolutionary theories.

You need to know some research studies that show there are differences between male and female reproductive behaviour, and some that can be used to support these theories (Clark & Hatfield, Buss & Schmidt).

The other theories we briefly looked at are dealing with a different set of questions: why do relationships form between some pairs of people but not between others? What factors lead to two people moving beyond casual 'dating' to become an established couple? Why do some relationships break up while others are maintained?

You need to know two theories of the formation of relationships - use the Filter Model and Reward / Need theory. Here's a presentation.

For the maintenance of relationships there are four different theories, but they are all similar to the simple idea of reward / need, and are given the general term 'economic theories' because they use the idea of a 'balance sheet'. Here's a presentation on them.