Sexual Jealousy

Research Project: Gender Differences in Sexual Jealousy

Reason: Sexual jealousy is likely an evolved human emotion that is encoded in our genes and has important adaptive functions. To show support for this idea, we will try to see if there are differences in sexual jealousy between males and females. Males and females possess enormous physiological and behavioral differences with respect to sexual relationships and parenting throughout most of human history, when they were still hunters and gatherers. Physiologically, a male produces millions of sperm daily, whereas a female only has hundreds of eggs in her lifetime that she releases one per month. Behaviorally, males go out hunting, whereas females stay at the camps to gather fruits and care for the children. If sexual jealousy is an evolved biological adaptation, it should be designed differently by natural selection between males and females to maximize their respective reproductive successes. If sexual jealousy is somehow acquired through culture during a child’s development, then one would expect little difference between males and females in sexual jealousy in egalitarian societies.

Hypothesis: Sexual jealousy is different between males and females.

Null Hypothesis: Sexual jealousy is the same between males and females.

Procedure:

1.        Collect research articles online regarding differences in sexual jealousy between males and females.

2.        Select the articles with data that can be analyzed.

3.        Combine the data from these articles and analyze them using statistics methods such as X2.

4.        Calculate the results to determine if disprove the null hypothesis.

After this initial research proejct, we will use the following questionnaire to collect original data on gender differences in sexual jealousy.