According to University of Texas psychologist David Buss, jealousy is a necessary emotion, a potential deterrent to infidelity that arises in both men and women when a threat materializes to intimate relationships. Boyfriend talks to beautiful woman at party and smiles admiringly at her; to girlfriend, a rival is born, a flesh-and-blood warning that what she thought was hers might now be endangered. Or wife suddenly embarks on series of brief out-of-town trips with co-head of her team. What is at stake is survival of our most valued relationships and thus the future of our children—which is to say, the species.
The "crystalline logic" of evolutionary psychology, argues Buss in The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex, holds that men and women experience jealousy differently, and that it's the threat of sexual infidelity that most stirs jealousy in men. The burden of manhood is uncertainty of paternity; jealousy serves to keep a mate from straying, upping a man's confidence that he is the genetic father of his partner's children. Jealousy arose to keep him from the reproductive dead-end of investing his finite resources in raising some other man's children. Women respond most to the possible loss of love to a rival female, a way of protecting a partner's needed commitment to home and kids. And perhaps in the small bands in which humans lived for most of evolutionary history, jealousy was effective in keeping a mate from straying.
Yes, says Buss, jealousy can cause men, especially, to "explode violently," although that's just a way "to reduce the odds that their partners will stray." Jealousy is not just the main motivation for spouse battering. Sexual jealousy is the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide. Even then, it's not really jealousy that's to blame, contends Buss. "It is the delusion that a loved one has committed an infidelity when none has occurred." But "this double-edged defense mechanism" wouldn't exist if long-term love hadn't emerged among primates. Jealousy is love's necessary protector—even if, given the cognitive biases built into the brain, it errs on the side of seeing betrayal where it does not exist. Delusion is jealousy's yes-man.
Not Inevitable
However much Buss sees jealousy as a necessary evil, his newest work suggests that it isn't quite as inevitable as it's been made to appear. In a not-yet-published study of nearly 1,000 people in various stages of commitment—married, engaged, dating, or single—he and a colleague in Spain find that the individual inclination to jealousy is strongly influenced by two of the so-called big five personality factors. It is positively associated with neuroticism, or emotional instability, the liability to such unpleasant emotions as anger, anxiety, and depression. The higher the level of instability, the more one is prone to jealousy.
And it is negatively related to agreeableness; the tendency to be cooperative and compassionate rather than suspicious and antagonistic. Like all the major personality factors, neuroticism and agreeableness are both influenced by heredity and environment, including early experience, in roughly equal proportions.
"What we find," says Buss, "is that neuroticism is positively correlated with a whole slew of mate-retention tactics"— defense maneuvers, like increased vigilance, intended to guard a partner from straying. "Agreeableness is negatively correlated, and low-agreeable people tend to use cost-inflicting mate-retention tactics," like yelling at a partner for talking to someone else, cutting a partner off from friends and family, derogating the partner, undermining a mate's self-esteem, or threatening violence against a partner or perceived rivals. "We view these as abhorrent," says Buss, "but sometimes they work to keep a mate in a relationship."
As Exhibit A in the neuroticism category, Buss cites his own experience long ago with a former partner. "She thought that every female graduate student was coming on to me, and after I had a meeting with a student, she would tear into my office and interrogate me. Who knows; maybe her neuroticism or hyper-jealousy in fact deterred other women."
Not all jealousy is activated by immediate threats of sexual infidelity or loss of a partner to a rival—so-called mate poaching. It also responds, says Buss, to such factors as subtle indicators of discrepancy between the "mate value" of two partners—one partner is more attractive than the other.
Or, by sheer genetic chance, one partner (think: John Edwards) stays far more youthful-looking than the other. But it works in both directions. "Some men luck into a woman who is higher in mate value than they are," reports Buss. "And on some level such a man has some realization that he is not going to be able to replace her with someone of equivalent value. So he is on jealousy hyperalert."
The thing is, neuroticism itself is not a very appealing attribute in a mate; on its own it lowers an individual's mate value. But, as with Elliott and Buss' former partner, it's not a trait that's necessarily on full display when one enters into a relationship; it tends to reveal itself only over time. The more emotionally stable you are, says Buss, the higher your mate value.
"The formula for jealousy," says psychologist Steven Stosny, "is an insecure person times an insecure relationship." But it's insecure people who tend to destabilize relationships and make them insecure. And a person who is very insecure is not just sexually jealous but jealous of any kind of friendship or even of a child—"anything that takes attention off them," he adds.
Tags:
anger,
apples to apples,
business situations,
coincidence,
desire,
disappointment,
giving feedback,
lunch,
negative connotations,
negative criticism,
negative feedback,
negative feelings,
odds,
patience,
pronoun,
specifics,
synonyms,
willingness
