‘Cheating’ Study Claims Men Resent Sexual Infidelity, Women Jealous Of Shared Love

The Huffington Post:

How would you react if you found out that your partner had cheated? Would the emotional betrayal outweigh the physical one, or would the sexual infidelity hurt more than the undermining of your love?

A new study says that the answer might have a lot to do with your gender.

According to evolutionary psychologist Barry Kuhle’s recent study, which was published in Personality and Individual Differences, while men are more likely to interrogate their partners about the sexual nature of an affair, a woman will often ask her partner whether he is in love with the other woman.

How did Kuhle discover which aspect of infidelity bothered men and women most?

Well, since it isn’t exactly ethical — or possible — to require one group of study participants to go and cheat on their spouses and another group to remain faithful, researchers used the reality television show “Cheaters” to collect observational data about how partners react when confronting their partners about infidelities.

Kuhle, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, had student researchers catalogue the different tactics used in 75 affair confrontations featured on the show — 45 in which the victims were women, and 35 in which the victims were men. The results showed that while 57 percent of men versus 29 percent of women were likely to ask about sex, posing questions such as “Did you have sex with him/her?” and “Was he/she better than me in bed?,” 71 percent of women — versus 43 percent of men — asked if the cheater was in love with the other man or woman.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post