Consideration of how natural selection shapes social motives suggests the hypothesis that stepchildren will not be as well loved as the genetic offspring of their caretakers, on average, and will thus be overrepresented as victims of discriminative mistreatment of various sorts. This possibility was long neglected, but stepparenthood has turned out to be the most powerful epidemiological risk factor for child abuse and child homicide yet discovered. Moreover, non-violent discrimination against stepchildren is substantial and ubiquitous. We will review the relevant evidence, with particular attention to whether steprelationship per se is a risk factor rather than a mere correlate of other risk factors, and we will examine three further questions. Why does stepparenting exist at all? Why are unrelated adoptees much less likely to be victimized than stepchildren? And why, in the face of obvious reasons to predict it and overwhelming confirmatory evidence, does stepparental discrimination continue to be heatedly dismissed as myth? Prof. Margo Wilson and Prof. Martin Daly are Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada and Professors in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour; Martin is also a professor in the department of Biology. They both have served as President of the Human Behavior & Evolution Society and co-editors of that society's journal, Evolution & Human Behavior. They are co-authors of Homicide and The Truth about Cinderella: a Darwinian View of Parental Love. Their research focuses on interpersonal conflict and cooperation, the psychology of kinship, and the psychology of discounting the future. Links:
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