How the Threat of Online Infidelity Powers Jealousy

Jealous woman

Source: Antonio / Shutterstock

Jealousy in a romantic relationship may occur or result from real or even imagined threats of infidelity. These may include kissing or flirting with a rival, or even some kind of emotional transgression, such as spending time with someone else. In terms of sex differences, men have reported being more jealous of situations of a sexual nature, whereas women tend to respond more jealously to situations involving emotional infidelity.

Online infidelity

The internet is now used widely for the purposes of relationship initiation and relationship maintenance, although it has also created a further avenue for individuals to engage in unfaithful behaviour, with online infidelity commonly cited in divorce proceedings. Accordingly, online infidelity has forced a re-examination of the nature of infidelity and its effect on romantic jealousy. Guadagno and Sagarin (2010) noted that online and offline infidelity elicited the same gender differences in jealousy as found by Buss et al. (1992), with females reporting more jealousy to scenarios involving emotional infidelity and males reporting more jealousy to scenarios involving sexual infidelity in both online and offline conditions.

In addition to feelings of jealousy, people report experiencing other emotions such as anger, hurt, and disgust in response to both emotional and sexual infidelity. Furthermore, jealousy is also related to the attractiveness of a rival, with attractive rivals triggering more jealousy in women than in men. In our study, we predicted that jealousy, anger, hurt, and disgust would be reported more often when a partner is unfaithful with an attractive rival than with an unattractive rival. If online infidelity is perceived as real, then judgements of jealousy would increase when a rival is described as attractive. However, if online infidelity is not perceived as real, then rival attractiveness would be irrelevant. Consistent with the findings of Buss et al. (1992), we also predicted that female jealousy would be primarily triggered by emotional infidelity, whereas male jealousy would be triggered by sexual infidelity, and that this effect will also be evident online (Guadagno & Sagarin, 2010).

Our investigation (Graff, 2021) involved presenting 104 male and female participants with scenarios which varied in terms of infidelity context (offline or online), rival attractiveness (attractive or unattractive) and infidelity type, (emotional or sexual). Participants responded in terms of how jealous, hurt angry or disgusted they would feel to each scenario.

Gender and rival attractiveness

Firstly, overall, our results indicated that females, compared to males, report stronger emotions of jealousy, anger, hurt, and disgust at the thought of their partner being unfaithful. We found that overall, participants reported more anger at a partner being unfaithful with an attractive rival than an unattractive one, but perplexingly not more for jealousy, hurt, or disgust. We observed no effects for infidelity context (online/offline), suggesting that participant responses to online and offline infidelity are similar.

Rival attractiveness and infidelity context and infidelity type

Participants reported more anger, hurt, disgust, and jealousy from attractive rivals in the online condition, whereas there was little difference in anger, hurt, disgust, and jealousy scores between attractive and unattractive in the offline condition

The findings indicate that significantly more anger, hurt, and disgust, but not more jealousy, was reported when respondents considered a partner being sexually unfaithful as compared to a partner being emotionally unfaithful.

So why is there an effect for rival attractiveness in the online condition and not in the offline condition? Two further hypotheses were proposed. Firstly, there might be a higher imagined threat effect in the online condition. Secondly, participants might experience a heightened sensitivity to the description online, but not offline. Furthermore, it is possible that people believe that individuals do not always believe that online affairs will be confined to an online context and may well progress into a face-to-face affair. In addition, the fact that participants reported significantly higher levels of disgust in response to the prospect of their partners forming close emotional attachments online, may be due to the secrecy, relative anonymity, and convenience that online relationship formation affords.

For gender overall, it was found that females were more jealous, angry, hurt, and disgusted than males. These findings are consistent with the previous research of Sheppard, Nelson, and Andreoli-Mahie (1995), who found that males report being more accepting of infidelity than females, and Parker and Wampler (2003), who noted that females judge online sexual activities to be more serious, than males.

The effect for infidelity type showed that respondents reported more anger, hurt, and disgust to sexual infidelity than to emotional infidelity, but not more jealousy. However, there was a greater difference in the male responses between the emotional and sexual conditions than there was for the female responses. This is consistent with the evolutionary explanation of gender differences in emotional responses to infidelity. In both contexts, males reported more distress than females at the prospect of their partners being sexually unfaithful than at the prospect of their partners being emotionally unfaithful. Alternatively, the finding that females were more jealous at the thought of their partners forming an emotional attachment in both infidelity contexts is perhaps unsurprising because an emotional attachment formed online may be just as threatening to parental investment as one formed offline.

Jealousy Essential Reads

Strategies to Overcome Workplace Envy

It's Time to Re-evaluate Envy

This study goes some way to increasing an understanding of jealousy, anger, hurt, and disgust in online romantic interactions. In terms of methodology, this study measured participants’ judgements of infidelity scenarios, and therefore future research could incorporate additional methods in order to ascertain further assessments of jealousy. However, the results provide some insight into an understanding of emotional responses to infidelity in an online context.

Facebook image: fizkes/Shutterstock