Friendship jealousy: One tool for maintaining friendships in the face of third-party threats?

Abstract

Friendships can foster happiness, health, and reproductive fitness. But friendships end-even when we might not want them to. A primary reason for this is interference from third parties. Yet little work has explored how people meet the challenge of maintaining friendships in the face of real or perceived threats from third parties, as when our friends inevitably make new friends or form new romantic relationships. In contrast to earlier conceptualizations from developmental research, which viewed friendship jealousy as solely maladaptive, we propose that friendship jealousy is one overlooked tool of friendship maintenance. We derive and test-via a series of 11 studies (N = 2918) using hypothetical scenarios, recalled real-world events, and manipulation of on-line emotional experiences-whether friendship jealousy possesses the features of a tool well-designed to help us retain friends in the face of third-party threats. Consistent with our proposition, findings suggest that friendship jealousy is (1) uniquely evoked by third-party threats to friendships (but not the prospective loss of the friendship alone), (2) sensitive to the value of the threatened friendship, (3) strongly calibrated to cues that one is being replaced, even over more intuitive cues (e.g., the amount of time a friend and interloper spend together), and (4) ultimately motivates behavior aimed at countering third-party threats to friendship ("friend guarding"). Even as friendship jealousy may be negative to experience, it may include features designed for beneficial-and arguably prosocial-ends: to help maintain friendships.

Competitive scenarios increase competition in women: A meta-analysis.

“…While this may seem like a simplistic prediction, there is a prevalent belief that women are unconcerned with same-sex competition (Beckmann & Menkhoff, 2008;Hennighausen et al, 2016;Puts, 2010Puts, , 2016, unless the competition is matingrelated (Arnocky & Piche, 2014;Davis et al, 2018;Fink et al, 2014;Klavina & Buunk, 2013). This misperception runs counter to research showing that women's competition occurs across the life course (Low, 2017) and in a variety of social relationships (Ayers et al, 2020;Krems et al, 2021;Nagamuthu & Page-Gould, 2017).…”

Fundamental Motives Illuminate a Broad Range of Individual and Cultural Variations in Thought and Behavior

“…Recent research on how feelings of friendship jealousy might be a tool to prevent the defection of friends is an initial foray into just one area of ally retention. Krems et al (2021) found that feelings of friendship jealousy spur individuals to act in ways that might prevent the loss of valued friends; for example, friendship jealousy can cause individuals to increase the physical distance between their best friends and potential "friend poachers." Other work remains to be conducted, to show the ways in which people engage in the maintenance of various affiliative bonds, including affinal bonds (with in-laws), neighborhood bonds, and so on.…”

Recommendations for improving causal inference of mediation analysis

“…It is regularly used by social and personality psychologists to understand the causal mechanisms of a treatment effect across a broad span of topics. For example, recent publications in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology use mediation analysis to understand: how experience of awe (treatment) affects life satisfaction (outcome) via appraisal of vastness in relation to the self, and changes in daily stress levels (Bai et al, 2021); how either support-or oppose-framed attitudes (treatment) affects sharing (outcome) via value expressiveness and impression management (Catapano & Tormala, 2021); how perceived target's extraversion (treatment) affects target's reputation of having leadership potential (outcome) via target's reputation of extraversion (Costello & Srivastava, 2021); how helping opportunities (treatment) affect moral outrage (outcome) via perceived reputation benefits of punishment, and general reputation concerns (Jordan & Rand, 2020); how friendship jealousy (treatment) affects intent to engage in friend guarding via jealousy, neutrality, happiness, sadness, and anger (Krems et al, 2021); and how search for meaning in life (non-randomized treatment) affects support for political violence (outcome) via sensation seeking and willingness to self-sacrifice (Schumpe et al, 2020).…”

“…In addition to mediator-outcome causal relations, researchers need to carefully consider the causal structure among the mediators when multiple possible mediators are present. Two common approaches are parallel and serial mediation models (Rucker et al, 2011;Hayes, 2018): see e.g., Catapano & Tormala (2021), Jordan & Rand (2020), and Krems et al (2021) for recent use of parallel mediation models; and see e.g., Bai et al (2021), and Schumpe et al (2020) for recent use of serial mediation models.…”