US evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald (1997) suggests that the trade-off between mating effort and parental investment is a central dimension of reproductive strategies that range from a high parental investment/low mating effort to a low parental investment/high mating effort. US psychologist Jean Philip Rushton (1985) used such an idea to develop his differential K theory. Within this theory, Rushton suggests that life history might be useful to understand human individual differences by looking at individual and group differences in life histories, social behaviour and physiological functioning. He referred to the central dimensions that represent the trade-off between parental investment and mating effort as K . US psychologist Aurelio José Figueredo and his colleagues (Figueredo et al., 2005) examined Rushton’s idea of K and MacDonald’s idea that K might be related to personality among a group of 222 university undergraduate students. First, Figueredo and colleagues had to measure K . They found that a number of variables correlate to measure an overall K -factor. These variables are as follows.
Happened to be reading a psychology textbook yesterday, and was astonished to find uncritical discussion of work by Kevin MacDonald and Philippe Rushton. Is it typical in psychology textbooks to cite race scientists without mentioning their work has been discredited?
