Jealousy and Rational Responses to Ineidelity across Gender and Culture

Buunk, Angleitner, Oubaid and Buss (this issue) offer even more evidence for our contention that responses to infidelity are based on a rational interpretation of the available evidence. They find that in cultures with less strict sanctions against extramarital sex than in the United States, people are relatively less troubled by sexual infidelity compared with emotional infidelity. The evolutionary argument proposed by Buunk et al. and by Buss, Larsen, Westen, and Semmelroth (1992) provides no ready explanation for this finding, but the rational argument does. People who think that sex can occur without love should be less troubled by sexual infidehty than people who think sex implies love because sexual infidelity does not imply to them that emotional infidelity has occurred as well. We have suggested that this "two-for-one" reasoning can explain the difference between men and women (and DeSteno & Salovey, this issue, suggest that this "double shot" can explain variability within the genders). The new evidence from Germany and the Netherlands suggests that this reasoning might explain the difference between the cultures equally well. If the Dutch indeed do think that a sexual indiscretion is less likely to be accompanied by emotional infidelity than Americans do, they should be less troubled by it. Of course, it would be nice to see the same questions that we used on Americans asked also of Dutch and German subjects, but there is reason to suspect the results would support the two-for-one hypothesis. Another piece of evidence that argues against the evolutionary position is the repeated finding that most men do not, as the theory predicts, find sexual infidelity more troubling than emotional infidelity. According to Buss and his colleagues, men have a specific innate mechanism for sexual jealousy that, in the ancestral past, developed as a means of reducing cuckoldry; emotional infidelity should be less bothersome to men because it had far fewer consequences for their inclusive fitness. However, the data do not support this view. At best, American men are equally divided on which form of infidelity is more distressing. The data from Germany and the Netherlands are even more problematic for the theory; The majority of men found emotional infidelity more distressing. For example, on one question, approximately 75% of Dutch men found emotional infidelity more distressing than sexual infidehty. (Similar results are reported in an earlier study of mainland Chinese; Geary, Rumsey, Bow-Thomas, & Hoard, 1995.) If avoidance of cuckoldry led to males developing a specific mechanism for sexual jealousy, why are the majority of men reporting greater distress over emotional infidelity? In the original article. Buss et al. (1992) suggested that although men have evolved to care about sexual infidelity, they