The Scary Nature of Male Jealousy from a Physiological Perspective
Jealousy is a troublesome emotion: it is painful for the person who is jealous, and unpleasant for the person they are jealous about.
We hear that men’s jealousy is nastier than women’s, and that jealousy is especially strong in the world of politics with its swirling masculinity, but how can the strength of male jealousy be interpreted physiologically?
The paper I discuss today summarizes research about the functions of hormones on human sympathy.
One of human’s most significant characteristics is altruism. Altruism is the behavior of working hard for another without repayment, and the hormone that encourages altruistic behavior is oxytocin, which is a female hormone.
Conversely, the hormone that suppresses the kindness hormone oxytocin is testosterone, a male hormone. Testosterone operates to make people aggressive, and this paper discusses research investigating how people’s behavior changes when they are injected with oxytocin or testosterone.
In the experiment, male and female subjects were injected with oxytocin or testosterone and played a money game called the “ultimatum game”.
In the game, two subjects each decide how much money they want to give to their partner, and whether they want to accept what their partner gave them or reject it and punish their partner (if your partner was entitled to distribute 100 dollars and only gave you 10 cents, you’d surely get angry).
The results show that subjects who where injected with oxytocin, whether male or female, distribute readily to their partners, while subjects who were injected with testosterone displayed increased punitive behavior, but only in the case of males. In other words, they tended to punish their partners if the amount they received was small.
Male jealousy often occurs when a person feels that they have been outwitted, and I thought that the powerful jealousy and suppressed drive to attack that males feel might be related to testosterone.
title: The physiology of moral sentiments.
