Sex Differences in Jealousy in Evolutionary and Cultural Perspective: Tests From the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States

Abstract

As predicted by models derived from evolutionary psychology, men within the United States have been shown to exhibit greater psychological and physiological distress to sexual than to emotional infidelity of their partner, and women have been shown to exhibit more distress to emotional than to sexual infidelity Because cross-cultural tests are critical for evolutionary hypotheses, we examined these sex differences in three parallel studies conducted in the Netherlands (N = 207), Germany (N = 200), and the United States (N = 224) Two key findings emerged First, the sex differences in sexual jealousy are robust across these cultures, providing support for the evolutionary psychological model Second, the magnitude of the sex differences varies somewhat across cultures—large for the United States, medium for Germany and the Netherlands Discussion focuses on the evolutionary psychology of jealousy and on the sensitivity of sex differences in the sexual sphere to cultural input

Estrogens and relationship jealousy

“…Empirical studies conducted in the United States, China, and a number of European nations have generally confirmed these predictions and have typically been interpreted as support for this evolution-based model (Buss et al 1992;Buunk et al 1996;Geary et al 1995;Wiederman and Kendall 1999; but see DeSteno and Salovey 1996;Harris 2000;Harris and Christenfeld 1996). Across all of these studies, males, more so than females, indicate that a partner's sexual infidelity is relatively more distressing than a partner's emotional infidelity.…”

Jealousy in a small-scale, natural fertility population: the roles of paternity, investment and love in jealous response

“…We also know from previous work that there is significant variation in the magnitude of the sex difference that is seen, as well as variation in how upset men and women are to different types of jealousy when it is measured continuously (Harris, 2003). For example, in Buss and colleagues' original study of American undergraduates, 60% of males reported more distress to a sexual infidelity than an emotional one, compared to only 17% of women (Buss et al, 1992); however, in both Germany and the Netherlands the majority of both men and women report more distress to the hypothetical emotional infidelity, and the differences between the sexes are less pronounced than they are in the U.S. sample (Buunk, Angleitner, Oubaid, & Buss, 1996). Similarly, in Romania men and women also had very comparable responses, with 36.6% of men and 30% of women being more upset by a sexual infidelity (Brase et al, 2004).…”

“…Those studies that do look at cross-cultural differences (e.g. Buunk et al, 1996;Buss et al, 1999;Fernandez et al, 2006) point to some trends in variation, but they do not offer a priori predictions grounded in evolutionary theory about jealous behavior. As we move forward with cross-cultural work on this topic it would be helpful to use existing theory about life history trade-offs to generate predictions about the expected intensity of jealous response and the magnitude of any sex difference.…”

Evidence for conditional sex differences in emotional but not in sexual jealousy at the automatic level of cognitive processing

“…infatuation and romantic attachment, Fisher, (Maner et al, in press) and the specifically female weighting of cues to emotional infidelity as especially alerting (Buss et al, 1992). Such a conceptualization can also easily account for the conditional nature of jealousy (as found by Buunk et al, 1996), since the sociocultural contexts in which individuals develop their jealousy modules might differ in a predictable way in how much they enforce the reliance of the general jealousy mechanism on certain competences.…”

“…Indeed, when comparing Germany to other countries (especially the US), sex differences in the classical forced-choice paradigm are somewhat attenuated, though still clearly existent (Buunk, Angleitner, Oubaid, & Buss, 1996;Hofhansl et al, 2004). The present study is consistent with that, suggesting that choices in the classical forced-choice paradigm are influenced by environmental factors.…”