Exams May be Dangerous to Grandpa’s Health: How Inclusive Fitness Influences Students’ Fraudulent Excuses

Inclusive fitness theory states that maternal grandmothers are closest to their grandchildren because of their assured biological relation. Paternal grandfathers are the least close because of their two degrees of paternity uncertainty. The present study examined if this relationship influences undergraduate students’ fraudulent excuses. The present study provides the first evolutionary perspective regarding the explanation behind this fraudulent excuse making. Results support inclusive fitness theory. Participants indicated a greater willingness to lie about their paternal grandfather’s death as an excuse to miss an exam or class. They also indicate they are least likely to lie about their maternal grandmother’s death. INTRODUCTION It is theorized that cooperative behaviors among kin, such as investment in offspring and altruism among siblings, are the product of positively selected genes that promote the overall inclusive fitness of themselves and any other beings that may share copies of this genetic code (i.e., kin members) (Hamilton 1964). Empirical evidence has found consistent support for Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory, revealing that individuals indicate a greater preference to save close kin over distant kin and non-kin in hypothetical life-or-death scenarios (Burnstein, Crandall, and Kitayama 1994). Ultimately, people are willing to incur great costs to increase their inclusive fitness and thus the likelihood of passing on these altruistic behaviors – whether these costs consist of giving one’s time and/or resources to kin (e.g., raising one’s offspring), or risking one’s life to save kin (e.g., saving one’s sibling from a burning house). Internal female fertilization is said to play a key role in inclusive fitness among humans as well (Daly and Wilson 1988). Because fertilization is internal, males can never be certain that their putative offspring are in fact biologically related to them (Alexander and Noonan 1979). This allows for the ever-present possibility of cuckoldry. Thus, paternity uncertainty, coupled with greater maternal investment, influences the parent-offspring relationship in a way that decreases the amount of resources the putative father allocates to the offspring. Specifically, mothers invest more time, care, and available resources (Barash and Lipton 1997; Bjorklund and Pelligrini 2002), and are less aggressive (Daly and Wilson 1990), toward their offspring than