Life History Strategies of Male Criminal Offenders: Verifying Traditional Life History Patterns

Abstract

Life history (LH) strategies are results of trade-offs that species must make due to inhabiting certain ecological niches. Although it is assumed that, through the process of developmental plasticity, similar trade-offs are made by individuals in response to a certain level of harshness and unpredictability of their local environments, the study results on this matter are not consistent. In LH-oriented psychological research, such inconsistencies are often explained as a consequence of significant individual differences in phenotypical quality and owned resources, which make studying trade-offs difficult due to different costs and benefits of the same behaviors taken by different individuals. To verify if traditional LH patterns can be found among individuals with more comparable qualities, than in the general population, the current study was conducted on a group of male criminal offenders, who are typically associated with a fast LH strategy. Our results did not show any support for either LH trade-offs or unidimensional character of LH strategies in the criminal group studied. The traditional biodemographic LH traits, that we used to assess a LH strategy, merged into three well-known LH dimensions (mating, parenting, and somatic effort) that yet turned out to be entirely independent from each other. Moreover, each LH dimension turned out to be uniquely related to a different aspect of the developmental environment. The implications of the obtained results are discussed.