Men react more sharply to sexual infidelity, and women to emotional infidelity, psychologists have found. Details.
“From a psychological point of view, men and women are very similar. But not when it comes to sex and procreation,” said Mons Bendiksen, professor at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
In a team with Leaf Edward Ottison Kenayer and David Bass, he conducted a study that involved more than 1000 people. Although psychologists expected that men and women would respond differently to questions about infidelity, no one thought that the answers would differ so much.
There are two types of cheating: sexual (only sex and no affection) and emotional, when affection and interest in a lover are higher than in one’s own partner. Two types of reactions of men and women to infidelity were studied.
Jealousy of a man is an emotional reaction that is associated specifically with sexual infidelity.
The cultural-sociological approach says that jealousy is due to the different roles of the sexes in society. But adherents of the evolutionary approach argue that the whole point is that for hundreds of generations, men and women had to cope with a variety of problems related to issues of procreation, sex and adultery.
A man, for example, needed to be sure that a woman gave birth to a child from him, in order to then invest or not in his upbringing. Thus, male jealousy is an emotional reaction that is associated with sexual infidelity. Because of jealousy, he watches his chosen one more closely, which means that the chance that she will change and he will have to support someone else’s child decreases.
Women are different. A mother always knows that she has her child in her arms. But she must make sure that the father of the child can provide him with food, protection and other benefits. Therefore, it is worse for a woman not when a man has sex with another woman, but when he spends time with her and wastes his resource. It is because of this that, from the point of view of evolutionary psychology, women are more sensitive not to sexual infidelity, but to emotional infidelity.
Sexual infidelity brings more pain to men, emotional infidelity to women
Mons Bendiksen says: “The cultural-sociological approach convinces us that humanity has “learned” to be jealous as a result of cultural and social processes. We believe that such a reaction to infidelity is part of a mechanism that has become the result of the evolutionary development of the human brain.
In the latest study, participants were given one of four jealousy questionnaires. Half of the participants had to answer which betrayal – emotional or sexual – causes them more frustration. The second group was asked to rate on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very) the strength of their jealousy.
“As in our previous two studies, we noted an obvious difference in the response to sexual or emotional infidelity in men and women. Sexual infidelity brings more pain to men, emotional infidelity to women.
Source: PsychoCentral.