Evolutionary explanation of sexual jealousy
- Sexual jealousy refers to the emotions and behaviours involved in the perception (real or imagined) that one’s partner is engaging in infidelity or may be attracted to other males/females
- Anecdotal and research evidence suggests that males are more prone to sexual jealousy than females but females are more concerned about emotional infidelity (Kato, 2022)
- An evolutionary explanation for heightened male sexual jealousy is the paternity uncertainty phenomenon i.e. a woman is always 100% sure that the child she is carrying is hers but her male partner (short of a DNA test) can never share that certainty
- Sexual jealousy may be adaptive in that it may ensure that the male is able to protect his genetic line i.e. by keeping close tabs on his partner he may scare off other males (and possibly scare his partner into not straying - a rather unpleasant and toxic concept to a 21st century thinker)
- Strategies employed by males to ensure that a female partner does not stray are, according to Wilson & Daly (1996) as follows:
- Direct guarding - checking or even tracking her phone, watching for signs of interest in other men, asking her where she’s been, coming home at unusual times to see if she can be ‘caught’ engaging in suspicious behaviour
- Negative inducements - letting her know the potential consequences of her leaving him (e.g. I’ll kill you/myself/the children if you leave me) which may (and, sadly, inevitably do) lead to physical violence (intimate partner violence, IPV)
Exam Tip
This is a socially sensitive topic which is distressing to consider but try not to let emotion or an overly subjective viewpoint impair the impartiality of your response in an exam answer. Yes, IPV is wrong and abhorrent and it is fine to express this in a measured way i.e. by using terms such as ‘wrong and abhorrent’ but do guard against any tendency to ‘vent’ or to pour your feelings out on the exam paper: you will do the topic much more justice by writing about it in an objective and assured way.
‘Who is she texting? Why does she look so pleased?...’
Research which investigates evolutionary explanations of sexual jealousy
- Buss (2013) - a review article in which the author concludes that sexual jealousy is a basic emotion which has evolved because it solves adaptive problems of mating
- Larsen et al. (2021) - a survey of 1266 high school students aged 16–19 which found that adolescent males found the sexual aspect of imagined infidelity more distressing than adolescent females did
- Schutzwohl (2006) - two experiments which revealed that men are more occupied with thoughts about a mate’s sexual infidelity, whereas women are more occupied with thoughts about a mate’s emotional infidelity