Have you ever wondered how well we understand jealousy in romantic relationships? A recent study in Evolutionary Psychological Science investigated this complex emotion, revealing new insights about how people perceive jealousy in others, especially in the context of infidelity. The findings indicate that people often use their own feelings and reactions as a template to infer how others might respond.
Prior studies have shown that men and women often react differently to infidelity, with women being more disturbed by emotional betrayal and men by physical betrayal. However, how accurately people perceive these differences in others remained a mystery. The new study aimed to understand whether our beliefs about jealousy are shaped by cultural influences, personal experiences, or our own emotional responses.
“We have been studying sex differences in jealousy responses using samples of Norwegian university students and high school students in three separate papers. In particular, we have been looking for moderators of the well-established sex difference,” explained study author Mons Bendixen, a professor of psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
“In this study, we wanted to study people’s beliefs about the jealousy responses of men and women as these beliefs have not yet been studied systematically. We also wanted to examine if people’s beliefs differed from what is known from self-reported responses to jealousy with regard to the sex difference. Finally, we wanted to examine if the beliefs people hold toward men and women’s jealousy responses are somehow influenced by the media, friends, teaching and personal experiences.”
The study used a snowball sampling method, where information about the survey was shared on Facebook, encouraging participation and further sharing. The final group consisted of 1,213 participants, primarily young adults, with a good mix of men and women, mostly identifying as heterosexual, but also including sexual minorities.
Participants were asked to imagine heterosexual intimate relationships among their friends and acquaintances and rate various behaviors on their likelihood of indicating infidelity. They showed a high level of agreement on behaviors that strongly indicate infidelity, with sexual behaviors being at the forefront. Roughly 93% of women and 92% of men considered having a sexual relationship with somebody else as cheating.
Women, in general, had a somewhat lower threshold for perceiving certain acts as infidelity compared to men. For example, 28% of women considered their partner creating a dating profile on an app such as Tinder to be a form of infidelity, compared to 14.5% of men.
The core of the study involved forced-choice scenarios that asked participants to consider what would make a man or a woman more jealous. These scenarios presented dilemmas involving either emotional attachment or sexual intercourse but not both. The scenarios were structured to assess the participants’ beliefs about men’s and women’s jealousy responses in a heterosexual context.
In addition to assessing beliefs about others, the survey also asked participants about their own jealousy responses using the same scenarios. This allowed for a comparison between personal feelings of jealousy and perceptions about others’ jealousy.
Participants generally believed men would be more upset by sexual aspects of infidelity than women, especially heterosexual men and women. This belief was less pronounced among sexual minority men. Interestingly, people’s beliefs about others’ jealousy reactions were somewhat exaggerated compared to their own responses, with men believing other men are more concerned about sexual infidelity and women believing other women are more concerned about emotional infidelity.
“People’s beliefs about what makes men and women jealousy correspond closely with self-reported sex differences but in a slightly stereotypical way,” Bendixen told PsyPost. “The sex difference in self-reported jealousy response is actually smaller than people believe it to be, and people believe men are more jealous following sexual infidelity than men self-report, and that women are more jealous following emotional infidelity than women self-report.”
The strongest predictor of what individuals believed about others’ jealousy responses was their own jealousy response. In simpler terms, how a person reacts to jealousy themselves significantly influences what they think about how others react to jealousy. For example, if a man tends to feel more jealous about the sexual aspect of infidelity (i.e., his partner being sexually unfaithful), he is more likely to believe that other men also share this heightened sensitivity to sexual infidelity.
“When people make appraisals of men and women’s reactions to infidelity, they anchor their beliefs in their own jealousy response, and particularly so for same-sex appraisals,” Bendixen said.
Surprisingly, the study didn’t find evidence of social influence on people’s beliefs about jealousy. Sources like family, education, media, or personal experiences had little to no impact on beliefs about jealousy or sensitivity to infidelity cues. “We could not find any indication of social influence on people’s beliefs about the jealousy response in other people or on their own jealousy response,” Bendixen explained.
As with any study, there are limitations to consider. The cross-sectional nature of the study means that it can’t establish cause and effect. For instance, while the study found a correlation between individuals’ own jealousy responses and their beliefs about others’ jealousy, it cannot conclusively say which influences the other or if a third, unmeasured factor influences both.
The study, “Factors that Influence People’s Beliefs About Men’s and Women’s Jealousy Responses“, was authored by Mons Bendixen and Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair.
