Evolutionary psychology helps us to understand instinctive human behavior and gives a wide perspective on psychological research.
Keywords: sex differences, sexual and emotional infidelity, evolutionary psychology
This study is revealed the differences between men’s and women’s perceptions on sexual and emotional faithless in Turkish community, based on the article of David Buss “Sex Differences in Jealousy.” David Buss (1992) predicted that, while both sexes should be distressed over both sexual and emotional infidelity in their partners, the two should be weighted differently in their importance to men and women. According to Buss; males will be most protective of paternity certainty and thus should be most upset by sexual infidelity of their partners. However, females should be most protective of retaining male investment and thus females should be most upset by emotional infidelity of their partners.
In our research we examined the reasons of different response to sexual and emotional infidelity that the result of sex differences or the result of various experiences that people lived before. We predicted that the experiences (like to deceive, to be deceived, sexual experiences, emotional relationships….) which have effect on sexual and emotional infidelity, is related to response of different types of infidelity situations.
80 students at Istanbul University, ages between 18-26 (40 men, 40 women ) participated in this study. For this study in addition to Buss’ force-choice questions, 7 checklist questions followed by the 1 Likert-scale measure, are given to participants.
The findings supported the evolutionary view of jealousy when Buss’ forced-choice questions are used as men find more stressful sexual infidelity whereas women find more stressful emotional infidelity. However; contrary to our hypothesis, experiences that we have examined with our questions do not effect finding more stressful sexual or emotional infidelity. Daha onceki arastirmalara dayanarak finding more stressful sexual or emotional infidelity can be related with some concepts such as culture, socialization and expectations.
* Presented at 8th National Psychology Student Congress, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey, 2003
