In a study typical of this research, Buss and his colleagues asked 1,122 people to imagine their partner becoming interested in someone else. They asked, “What would upset or distress you more: (a) imagining your partner forming a deep emotional (but not sexual) relationship with that person, or (b) imagining your partner enjoying a sexual (but not emotional) relationship with that person?” In studies like this conducted on college campuses around the United States and Europe, Buss and his colleagues consistently got more-or-less the same results. They found that men and women differed by roughly 35 percent in their responses, seeming to confirm their hypothesis. “Women continued to express greater upset about a partner’s emotional infidelity,” Buss writes, “even if it did not involve sex. Men continued to show more upset than women about a partner’s sexual infidelity, even if it did not involve emotional involvement.”8
But despite the apparent cross-cultural breadth of this research, it lacks methodological depth. Buss and his colleagues succumb to the same temptation that weakens so much sexuality research: reliance on a subject population more convenient than representative. Almost all the participants in these studies were university students. We understand that undergraduate students are low-hanging research fruit—easy for graduate students to locate and motivate (by offering partial course-credit for filling out a questionnaire, for example), but this does not make them valid representatives of human sexuality. Far from it. Even in supposedly liberal Western cultures, college-age people are in the early stages of their socio-sexual development with little, if any, experience to draw on when considering questions about one-night stands, long-term mate preferences, or their ideal number of lifetime sexual partners—all questions explored in Buss’s research.
But Buss is not alone in this distorting focus on undergrads. The majority of research on sexuality is based upon the responses of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old American university students. While one could make a case that a twenty-year-old guy is more or less like a turbocharged fifty-year-old, few would argue that a twenty-year-old woman has much in common with a woman three decades older in terms of her sexuality. Most would agree that a woman’s sexuality changes considerably throughout adulthood.
Another problem with using college students in the sort of multicultural study Buss conducts concerns class distinctions. In underdeveloped countries, university students are likely to be from the upper classes. A wealthy Angolan student may have a lot more in common with a Portuguese undergrad than with someone his or her own age living in the slums of Luanda. Our own field research in Africa suggests that sexual beliefs and behavior differ greatly among social classes and subcultures there—as they do in other parts of the world.9
Beyond the distorting effects of age and class, Buss and his colleagues skip over the crucial fact that every one of their subjects lives in post-agricultural societies characterized by private property, political hierarchies, globalized television, and so on. How can we expect to identify “human universals” without including at least a few foragers, whose thoughts and behaviors have not been shaped by the effects of modern life and whose perspective represents the vast majority of our
species’ experience? As we’ve established, plenty of research on foragers demonstrates important similarities among unrelated societies and dramatic differences from
post-agricultural norms. Swedes and upper-class Nigerians may see themselves as different from one another, but from a forager’s perspective they would seem similar in many ways.
Granted, it is no easy matter to airdrop questionnaires and #2 pencils to foragers in the Upper Amazon (The Grad Students Must Be Crazy). Still, the difficulty or impossibility of including their perspective does nothing to lessen its vital importance to the integrity of this sort of research. This broad yet shallow research paradigm is like claiming to have uncovered “universal fish truths” after conducting studies in rivers around the world. What about the fish in lakes? Ponds? Oceans?
Psychologist Christine Harris has noted that Buss’s
conclusions could easily be nothing more than confirmation
of old news: that “men are more reactive to any form of
sexual stimuli than they are to emotional stimuli [andl are
10
more interested in, or better able to imagine, such stimuli.” The men get more agitated by the sex, in other words, simply because they imagine it more clearly than the women do.
When Harris measured the bodily responses of people being asked Buss’s questions, she found that “women as a group showed little difference in physiological reactivity,” but they still predicted, almost unanimously, that the emotional infidelity would be more disturbing for them. This finding suggests a fascinating disconnect between what these women actually feel and what they think they should feel about their partner’s fidelity (more on this later).
Psychologists David A. DeSteno and Peter Salovey found even more fundamental flaws in Buss’s research, pointing out that the subjects’ belief system comes into play when answering questions about hypothetical infidelity. They note that “the belief that emotional infidelity implies sexual infidelity was held to a greater degree by women than men,” and that therefore, “the choice between sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity [at the heart of Buss’s studies] is a false
dichotomy..”11
David A. Lishner and his colleagues honed in on another weak point: the fact that subjects are given only two options: either thoughts of sexual infidelity hurt more or thoughts of emotional infidelity do. Lishner asked, what if both scenarios made subjects feel equally uncomfortable? When Lishner included this third option, he found that the majority of respondents indicated that both forms of infidelity were equally upsetting, throwing further doubt on Buss’s conclusions.12
Buss and other evolutionary psychologists who argue that some degree of jealousy is part of human nature may have a point, but they’re overplaying their hand when they universalize their findings to everyone, everywhere, always. Human nature is made of highly reflective material. It is a mirror—admittedly marked by unalterable genetic scratches and cracks—but a mirror nonetheless. For most human beings, reality is pretty much what we’re told it is. Like practically everything else, jealousy reflects social modification and can clearly be reduced to little more than a minor irritant if consensus deems it so.
Among the Siriono of Bolivia, jealousy tends to arise not because one’s spouse has lovers, but because he or she is devoting too much time and energy to those lovers. According to anthropologist Allan Holmberg, “Romantic love is a concept foreign to the Siriono. Sex, like hunger, is a drive to be satisfied.” The expression secubi (“I like”) is used in reference to everything the Siriono enjoy, whether food, jewelry, or a sexual partner. While “there are, of course, certain ideals of erotic bliss,” Holmberg found that “under conditions of desire these readily break down, and the Siriono are content to conform to the principle of ‘any port in a storm.’ “13
Anthropologist William Crocker is convinced that Canela husbands are not jealous, writing, “Whether or not Canela husbands are telling the truth about not minding, they join with other members in encouraging their wives to honor the custom . [of] ritual sex with twenty or more men during all-community ceremonies.” Now, anyone who can pretend not to be jealous as his wife has sex with twenty or more men is someone you do not want to meet across a poker table.