Support for female honor norms as ideological mate guarding tactic: Sexual jealousy and reproductive strategy shape support for female honor norms

In many cultures, women are expected to cultivate a reputation for pure and chaste behavior such as wearing modest clothes and maintaining virginity before marriage. The dominant explanation for people’s support for female honor norms is that female infidelity and promiscuity threatens her male partner’s reputation and masculinity. Beyond this, the literature affords little understanding of the individual-level psychological mechanisms which produce support for female honor norms. We propose that beyond masculine reputation concerns, reproductive strategy also contribute to support for female honor norms, and that people, motivated by sexual jealousy, support female honor norms as an indirect ideological mate guarding tactic. Two correlational and three experimental studies revealed that reproductive strategies (monogamous vs. promiscuous mating orientation) predict support for female honor norms, beyond masculine honor norms, religiosity, political conservativism, and age. Support for female honor norms positively related to tendency to experience sexual jealousy (i.e., dispositional jealousy), and inducing a state of sexual jealousy increased support for female honor norms. These results applied both to men and women (albeit more strongly to men). These findings enhance understanding of the origins and maintenance of female honor norms and other ideologies that enable the control of women’s reproductive behavior.

Socio-ecological conditions and female infidelity in the Seychelles warbler

Within socially monogamous breeding systems, levels of extra-pair paternity can vary not only between species, populations, and individuals, but also across time. Uncovering how different extrinsic conditions (ecological, demographic, and social) influence this behavior will help shed light on the factors driving its evolution. Here, we simultaneously address multiple socio-ecological conditions potentially influencing female infidelity in a natural population of the cooperatively breeding Seychelles warbler, Acrocephalus sechellensis. Our contained study population has been monitored for more than 25 years, enabling us to capture variation in socio-ecological conditions between individuals and across time and to accurately assign parentage. We test hypotheses predicting the influence of territory quality, breeding density and synchrony, group size and composition (number and sex of subordinates), and inbreeding avoidance on female infidelity. We find that a larger group size promotes the likelihood of extra-pair paternity in offspring from both dominant and subordinate females, but this paternity is almost always gained by dominant males from outside the group (not by subordinate males within the group). Higher relatedness between a mother and the dominant male in her group also results in more extra-pair paternity—but only for subordinate females—and this does not prevent inbreeding occurring in this population. Our findings highlight the role of social conditions favoring infidelity and contribute toward understanding the evolution of this enigmatic behavior.

Correction

Regarding Gorelik, G., & Shackelford, T.K. (2011). Human sexual conflict from molecules to culture. Evolutionary Psychology, 9, 564–587: The authors wish to correct an omission in citation to the existing literature. In the final paragraph on p. 570, we neglected to cite Burch and Gallup (2006) [Burch, R. L., & Gallup, G. G., Jr. (2006). The psychobiology of human semen. In S. M. Platek & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Female infidelity and paternal uncertainty (pp. 141–172). New York: Cambridge University Press.]. Burch and Gallup (2006) reviewed the relevant literature on FSH and LH discussed in this paragraph, and should have been cited accordingly. In addition, Burch and Gallup (2006) should have been cited as the originators of the hypothesis regarding the role of FSH and LH in the semen of rapists. The authors apologize for this oversight.