Aporia magazine likes to link to what they call "classic" articles from social psychology, presumably because they believe those ideas are less-known than they should be. From this morning's email
Sex Differences in Jealousy In a classic article from 1992, David Buss and colleagues examine sex differences in sexual jealousy. Consistent with predictions from evolutionary psychology, they find that women are more jealous when their romantic partner becomes emotionally involved with another woman, while men are more jealous when their romantic partner has sex with another man...
I have two takeaways from this:
1. This is a great example of social psychology discovering things your grandmother could have told you, except
A. I cannot imagine having this conversation with either of my grandmothers (or grandfathers, for that matter) My mother or father, maybe.
B. It might actually be a useful thing to give such evidence for obvious ideas, because human beings, perhaps even especially in modern times, are fond of convincing themselves of non-obvious things, usually because they are making excuses for themselves.
2. I don't want to even be part of research that asks me to think about these things.
1 comment:
I wonder how much any data from before the era of smartphones is useful. The young of 1992 were much more like your granparents than they are like the young of today: now I suspect jealousy among young women is likely to be produced by liking someone's photo on Instagram, even if you've never spoken with her and never will. If you were chatting with her in DMs, that's tantamount to cheating even if you've never met in person (and don't really care about her).
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