Cross-cultural variation in type of marriage appears to be largely explicable in terms of specified patterns of socioeconomic organization. A study of preferred type of marriage for some 500 societies shows that whether a society is characterized by a cultural value of monogamy or one of polygyny is related to such structural traits as subsistence economy, social stratification, political integration, settlement pattern, and community size; but only indirectly related to such normative traits as religion and sex taboos. In general, monogamy is found to be favored by societies with more complex attributes of socioeconomic structure, while polygynous societies are more prevalent at the intermediate or simple range of a societal complexity scale.