Abstract
By analyzing legacies in California from 1890 to 1984 Judge and Hrdy (1992) detected a gender-related difference: Men with children were statistically more likely to leave all of their property to a wife than were mothers to a husband. The authors argue that men were more likely than women to remarry and have additional children. Thus, in order to transfer their wealth to their mutual children, men can leave it to their wives but women can avoid risks by giving it to the children directly. This hypothesis was tested by two experiments in which subjects were asked to put themselves in the position of a person writing a will and allocate the wealth to the surviving spouse and the children. Age and sex of the heir/heiress were experimentally varied. The results support the inclusive fitness interpretation.
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References
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This research was facilitated by a research grant (Bo 695/5-1) of the Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft (DFG) to the author. I am very grateful to Eckart Voland and three anonymous reviewers for providing very helpful comments to this paper and to Ms. Beth Mayhew-Fiscus for eliminating most of the germanisms from the text.
Bernd Bossong is associated with the Social Psychology Unit at the University of Landau-Koblenz in Landau, Germany. His interests focus on volitional aspects of coping with stress and the influence of sociobiological factors in allocation decisions related to intergenerational resource transfer.
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Bossong, B. Gender and age differences in inheritance patterns. Hum Nat 12, 107–122 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-001-1019-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-001-1019-5