Abstract
Sex differences in how and to what extent jealousy manifests have long been documented by evolutionary psychologists with males showing more pronounced responses to sexual infidelity and females to emotional infidelity. With modern technology facilitating the opportunity for extra-pair relations and the means by which inclinations towards infidelity can be monitored, social media is a fertile ground to test hypotheses derived from evolutionarily informed theories. The current study presented male (n = 21) and female (n = 23) undergraduate participants with realistic, unambiguously sexual and emotional messages both sent and received that had been discovered (imagined) on their partner’s Facebook messenger. Distress scores in response to these messages were measured on a scale of 0–10. Broad support for the evolutionary interpretation of sex differences in jealousy was found with more pronounced sexual jealousy in males, and emotional jealousy in females compared to males being evident. Similarly, salient sex differences were observed highlighting the importance of the composer of the infidelity-revealing message. For example, in females, higher distress was found resulting from the discovery of received (female rival) when compared to sent (male partner) messages, and received messages across sex (females higher). The results are discussed in relation to previous findings and in the context of growing concern relating to relationship dissolution and partner-initiated domestic violence.
Highlights
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s epigram ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ encapsulates a belief espoused by evolutionary psychologists when referring to the human condition
The emotional messages were edited to be clear than no sexual activity had taken place, and the sexual messages were edited to be clear that only sexual activity had taken place without emotional attachment
Evolutionary psychologists have for many years documented significant differences between the sexes in how jealousy manifests (Buss et al 1992, 1999; Sagarin et al 2012)
Summary
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s epigram ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ encapsulates a belief espoused by evolutionary psychologists when referring to the human condition. The virtual worlds created by modern technology are fertile grounds to test the explanatory power of such fundamental tenets of evolutionary theory One such theory, sex differences in jealousy manifestation (Buss 2000; Buss et al 1992), can be explored by accessing social media such as Facebook and Snapchat (Utz et al 2015) or by measuring reaction to infidelity-revealing mobile phone messages (Dunn and McLean 2015). Whereas previous studies have implemented the use of paper questionnaire based jealousy eliciting scenarios (Buss et al 1992; Weiderman and Kendall 1999), the current study incorporated a novel development by presenting participants with imaginary Facebook messages revealing partner infidelity of either an emotional or sexual nature where the discovered message had been either sent (composed by participant’s partner) or received (composed by same-sex rival). Received (same-sex rival) whereas females will show higher distress to a received (same-sex rival) than a sent (male partner) message as females have been shown previously to focus their jealous sentiment more so on the rival compared to the partner
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