It seems to me that the most plausible estimate of the share of children in high-income Western countries who currently hold false beliefs about who their biological fathers are is roughly 5%. The share of men who don’t know who their biological children are likely differs from that figure by more than one or two percentage points. The Anderson paper doesn’t even recognize this important distinction.

Even eye-balling the charts in the Anderson review, you get a sense of higher rates as you move backwards through the 20th century (see coldequation’s comment). Is this maybe an artifact of less accurate methods of testing paternity? Probably not.

In the near future, ubiquitious sequencing applied to genealogy will supply the real numbers.

one issue might be that over the long term cuckoldry might not matter much if these lineages are low status. sykes, the macdonalds, genghis khan haplotype, indicate the high fidelity rates of women who marry into high status lineages (or perhaps the high level of control and monitoring these lineages can employ).

Jason Malloy: “A newer meta-analysis by Martin Voracek confirms that nonpaternity rates are about 2-3%, but also finds that nonpaternity has decreased by almost 1% per decade in developed nations, suggesting that the 5-10% estimate was more accurate in the not too distant past.”

gcochran: “Adultery was a lot easier for farm wives…. except, obviously, if they were named Sykes.”

He also seems to suggest it’s implausible that rural housewives in smaller, intimate communities are more adulterous than “liberated” women with jobs and independent social lives in larger, anonymous communities.

But I find the Voracek review convincing.

The rates 1%/ decade. But they are at least two major factors that could have decreased the rates:
1) a variety of contraception methods ( a huge factor)
2) single motherhood is also not as much of a taboo, anymore.

Given that these factors influence the absolute nonpaternity numbers, we should not use the the absolute non-paternity rates as proxy for the degree of cuckolding in the culture.

In fact, if you “correct” the absolute value for (1-2), then you will get a number that might be used as a proxy for “degree of cuckolding in the culture” – my guess is it will be far more than a “3%” increase – thereby lending some measure of credence to the traditionalist view.