Psychology Social cognitive theorists accept that men are more sexually jealous than women, and that women are more emotionally jealous than men, but do not believe this has anything to do with evolution. Just like girls are taught to love Barbie while boys play with GI Joe, beliefs about infidelity –both sexual and emotional- are socially constructed.
Several cognitive theorists have pointed out that most studies supporting the notion that jealousy evolved into an ‘innate module,’ making use of forced-choice models: subjects had to choose between sexual and emotional infidelity. Psychologist David DeSteno and his colleagues, who assumed this forced-choice model might have influenced the experiments’ outcome, chose an additional approach. They reasoned that if sex differences reflect wired-in, sex-specific differences, then depriving people of the opportunity to reflect on the choice should increase the difference between sexes. They imposed a ‘cognitive load manipulation’ on participants by asking them to remember a string of seven digits while answering questions. The cognitive load did not change males’ responses, but females’ responses shifted toward picking sexual infidelity as the more powerful jealousy trigger. Maybe, DeSteno argues, women respond different to forced-choice be-
cause it’s socially desirable to pick emotional infidelity over sexual infidelity. In addition, research psychologist Christine Harris, another critic of the evolution-based theory of jealousy, points to the fact that cultural differences exist when it comes to jealousy. For example, the differences found between European and American men, are just as large as those between American men and women. In some studies conducted in Asian countries the difference was even larger: only 25 percent of the Chinese men thought sexual infidelity to be more distressing than emotional infidelity. Harris also rejects the idea that that men are more likely to commit jealousy-motivated crimes, offerring evidence for the sex-specific jealousy module. “When we leave the pallid laboratory studies behind and look at people dealing with real infidelity, people driven by jealousy to commit crimes or people morbidly obsessed with the possibility of infidelity, we do
not find that particularly stark sex differences support the notion of a sex-specific innate module,” notes Harris. “Individuals of both sexes experiencing betrayal report that they focus more on the emotional rather than sexual aspects of the situation (in contrast to the physiological data). Men show a greater degree of violent or obsessional jealousy, but they do so only roughly in proportion to their general tendency toward violence and sexual obsession.”
I’m not mad that you had sex with her, I’m mad because you fell in love with her.
I don’t care that you love him, I’m mad because you had sex with him.