A Closer Look at the Green-Eyed Monster
“Passion is a malady. It’s possession, something dark. You are jealous of everything. There’s no lightness, no harmony,” wrote the French author Georges Simenon.
Men and women are equally vulnerable to the sickening clutches of jealousy. But evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have long trumpeted the view that there are differences in what makes men and women most jealous. Women are most jealous when their mate forms an emotional bond with another woman, the theory goes, and men are most jealous of sexual infidelity. One widely reported study turned up these distinctions when asking the genders which scenario would evoke the most jealousy: a mate’s sexual infidelity or a mate’s emotional bond with another.
These gender differences, posit evolutionary theorists, emerged as ancestral females evolved to become highly attuned to signals that a mate was diverting resources (affection, food, money, time) to a rival woman, posing a threat to the survival of his original partner and her offspring. Men, though, evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to cues of sexual infidelity so as to fend off the possibility of raising offspring carrying an interloper’s DNA.
But a new study, in press for the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, challenges that widely held view about jealousy. The authors argue that the reason gender differences appear in jealousy studies that use either/or questionnaires (with phrasings such as: “Which would make you more jealous, x or y?”) is not evolution. They believe it’s because genders understand the questions differently.
“What we generally find is when you tell a woman, ‘Your husband is emotionally committed to someone else,’ she reasons that it means he is emotionally committed and he is having sex with her,” said the study’s coauthor Peter Salovey, the Chris Argyris Professor of psychology and chairman of the psychology department at Yale University. “So when you say to women, ‘Which would make you more jealous, your husband having a sexual affair or being emotionally committed to someone else?,’ she chooses the emotional commitment.” But, he noted, “When you say to a man, ‘Your wife is emotionally committed to another man,’ he doesn’t assume that she is having sex with him.”
This is what David DeSteno, assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern University and principal researcher and author of the paper, calls “the double shot hypothesis” (one probably predicts the other). In a 1996 study, DeSteno and Salovey asked women and men about what a partner’s emotional bond to another might mean. “The vast majority of women said that if a man had an emotional bond with a woman, there will probably be a sexual bond,” DeSteno said. “Men were about evenly split. Some believed a one-night stand for a woman implied emotional involvement, some did not.”
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In their most recent study, DeSteno, Salovey and fellow researchers hypothesized that both sexes would be most disturbed by sexual infidelity. Using 111 undergraduates, the researchers first were able to replicate the gender-difference findings by asking: “Which of the following two events would cause more distress? (a) Finding out that one’s partner had passionate sexual intercourse with another person or (b) finding out that one’s partner had formed a deep emotional attachment to another person.”
The researchers then asked the same 111 participants to rate the degree to which they would experience specific feelings (anger, jealousy, calm, relief, etc.) in response to their partner’s forming an emotional bond with another and to their partner’s infidelity.
They were next asked to rate themselves on a scale (from “1: strongly disagree,” to “7: strongly agree”) in response to questions about sexual and emotional infidelity. Finally, they were asked to check adjectives that best described how they would feel in response to both forms of infidelity (angry, jealous, worried, threatened, content and so on).
What the researchers found is that even when participants had given answers that were gender-biased on the question of which infidelity was most disturbing, they reported being most jealous about sexual infidelity in all the other surveys. Women, however, tended to report more intense emotions for both types of infidelity. The researchers were able to replicate their findings using an Internet survey with 22,000 participants, ranging in age from 18 to 65, culled from the Web site Emode.com.
“We thought that what was driving [the] forced choice [either/or answers] is analysis of the trade-off, and one is that women think that men can have sex without falling in love but if a man falls in love, there is probably going to be sex involved,” DeSteno said. This is based on a thoughtful analysis and isn’t an automatic, ingrained, instinctual response, he said.
An instinctual response is what evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists sometimes call hard-wired behavior, behavior that occurs beyond conscious control because it’s shaped by neural pathways and cognitive mechanisms that developed as our ancestors evolved. DeSteno and co-researchers hypothesized that sexual infidelity would rate as more distressing than emotional infidelity even if the test were set up to measure more automatic, less thoughtful responses.
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In the second part of their forthcoming study, DeSteno and his co-researchers divided 121 participants into a control group and an experiment group. Those in the experiment group were asked to view seven numbers that appeared on a computer screen and remember those numbers while choosing which hypothetical scenarios involving a partner would be most disturbing (i.e. was rude to my friend or was rude to my family ....had passionate sex with someone else or formed a deep emotional bond to someone else).
The control group chose its answers without the “cognitive interference” of trying to remember numbers at the same time. Women preoccupied with the memory task while answering picked sexual infidelity as more upsetting than women who answered without the distraction. Men’s choices remained unchanged. “On a gut level, sexual infidelity bothered everyone more,” DeSteno said, which undermines the argument that evolution has encoded gender-based responses to jealousy.
University of Texas at Austin evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss, one of the most well known researchers using either/or questions in jealousy studies, claims he never argued that jealousy is an automatically activated, gender-linked response to a partner’s behavior. After reading the DeSteno and Salovey study, Buss, who is author of “The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex,” (Free Press, 2000), was dismissive.
In an e-mail response, Buss wrote that “there is tons of empirical evidence in support of fundamental sex differences in the psychological design of jealousy.” Buss continued that the evidence includes sexual infidelity as a sex-linked cause of divorce. Men are more likely than women to divorce if their partner is sexually unfaithful, and women are more likely than men to forgive a sexual infidelity, Buss wrote, if there was no emotional involvement. When asked to spontaneously detail a time they experienced jealousy, Buss wrote, men reported sexual infidelities and women reported emotional bonds with others, which Buss detailed in his book on jealousy.
But not all social scientists are so ready to reject the findings.
“This study contradicts the party line,” said Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of “The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World,” (Random House, 1999). “Anthropologists for some time have been citing this conclusion that women are more disturbed and jealous by a man giving his resources to another woman and a man is more disturbed when a woman copulates with another man. But the fulcrum of both things is sexual infidelity. Jealousy is a basic emotion system of the brain that can be turned on in anybody. There is every reason to believe that sexual infidelity is a very powerful part of the mating emotions for both sexes.”
DeSteno and Salovey say they were inspired to test their hypothesis because they felt the evidence for gender differences in what triggered the most intense jealousy was weak.
“We are not opposed to the evolutionary view of human behavior,” DeSteno said. “In fact, we are sure that evolution was an important shaper of human thought and behavior. We just believe that the long-standing view put forth about human jealousy is wrong. We actually think that there may be evolutionary influences on jealousy, but we don’t think they are going to be different for men and women.”
