How Jealousy Works

Shakespeare referred to jealousy as a "green-eyed monster," a beastly emotion that brings out the worst in us. But why do we feel jealous? Are women more jealous than men? Find out how jealousy works in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told you?
From House to Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen, I have something

(00:22):
pretty cool to brag it up. Okay, So before we
came in here, I was taking a little quiz on
Discovery Health dot Com about my levels of jealousy, and,
as it turns out, based on a ten or so
question uh quiz, I am not a jealous person. Apparently
on a scale of one hundred, I am only three

(00:43):
jealous twenty three out of a hundred. Apparently according to
the test results, it says you appear to have a
complete lack of jealous feelings. Um, that sounds kind of inhuman, Molly,
But I guess, uh, kudos, because I took that same
quiz and I scored a twenty eight, So it looks
like I am being more jealous of the two five

(01:05):
points more jealous. I will say I had a few
problems with some of the questions. Um. There was a
question that said, accidentally you find out that your boyfriend
slash husband confided confided in his friend that he had
a sexual dream about his favorite actress, and you're asked
to rate how much would it bother you? From extremely
do not at all. Now, it's not gonna bother me

(01:26):
if a guy has a dream about his favorite actress,
because he's probably never going to meet his favorite act
it could have been a dream about his ex girlfriend.
I mean I might have rated it a little higher
than I did. Yeah, I found a problem with the
question asking what would you do if you were at
a party with your boyfriend and you notice that he
was flirting with a girl. I said that I would.
I would approach them and make a sarcastic comment about

(01:48):
them flirting, which, once again, it all depends on the girl.
You know. If it was, like you said, like an
ex girlfriend, I would probably fly into his screaming rage
and leave the party, and i'd I did find some
of the options they provided for us a little humorous.
Um For example, would you uh tell your mate that
you were not feeling well and leave the party with

(02:10):
or without him? No? Would you find someone to flirt
with but not really enjoy it? Could be would you
approach them? Is this what you had to make an
ironic remark about their flirting exactly. Yeah, that's what I
would like myself to do. That's what I'd like the
cool Christian to do. I would like to get up
and beat the crap out of the woman, which is
a direct quote from the quiz by the way, Um.

(02:32):
But before we get into things, I would beat the
crap out of Why don't we talk more about what
jealousy is and why some people think that women experience
it differently than men. Okay, well, I think the first
thing that we have to talk about, Molly, is a
difference between jealousy and envy, because those words are used
interchangeably a lot, and and the fact of the matter
is they are completely different. Right. Jealousy comes from the

(02:55):
Greek word zelos, meaning ardor intense desire or eagerness, or
as envy is in short, you know, a desire for
something that's not yours. Right. It's basically what you have
and what you're afraid of losing versus what someone else
has that you don't have. That's envy. And losing a
potential like job or partner or possession that you already

(03:19):
own to someone else, that's jealousy. So now that we
know the difference between jealousy and envy. Well, the next
question is our women more jealous than men? Because I
think that that's a cultural stereotype. It that I at
least hear a lot sure, And I found on AskMen
dot Com that my cultural will go to for men
the top time, top ten sign, she's psychotically jealous. There's

(03:40):
not any sort of equivalent for males on cosmos. So
I think that it's more a problem that men worry
about um in terms of their ladies than vice versa.
What's the number one sign just out of curiosity? It's
she keeps tabs on you. For example, if your man
comes in and says that he was late because of traffic,
and then you get on the computer to check traffic reports. Um,

(04:00):
that's a sign apparently that you're psychotically jealous. M hmm.
But you know, while that's sort of um aggravating behavior
that ask men dot Com recommends that men get rid
of jealousy is actually pretty hard to study. Um, you know,
it's hard to do sort of a long range study
about an emotion like this. But right now, the theory
is that women are more inclined to be jealous because

(04:22):
this is sort of a compliment. We're more honest and
in touch with our emotions than males. And I have
to take a point though, with that, with that rationale
behind women being more jealous, because I think just because
we might be more inclined to be in touch with
our emotions and express jealousy, I don't think that in
any way that means that we experience jealousy more than men. UM. Well,

(04:47):
you know, you might be onto something because men and
women get jealous over the same thing. They have the
same jealousy triggers. Basically, anything valuable to them is going
to trigger jealousy. One difference, though, that people have noted,
is that when let's say relationship is threatened, women are
more likely to aim their jealous behavior at the other
women than at their partner as a way to sort

(05:10):
of protect their relationship by getting rid of all known enemies, right,
And those results tend tend to stay the same across
younger age groups as well. That that study was dealing
with jealousy and adult women. The similar study of ninth
graders found that UM girls have higher standards of loyalty, kindness, empathy,

(05:32):
and commitment than boys, and so they exhibited more jealousy
towards um friendship relationships as well. Right, So if you
know you're supposed to go shopping with your friend and
all of a sudden she shows up, but another friend,
this higher level of loyalty and commitment feels violated and
you act out in a jealous way as opposed to
have like a guy shows up with another guy, they're
more likely just all go shopping together to the arcade.

(05:55):
So why do you think that this is smally, why
do you think that they're these under ring gender differences
between jealousy and men and women. Hormones, that's our answer
to everything. It's actually not hormones. According to some of
the older studies about gender differences and jealousy, scientists used
to just chalk it all up to natural selection, evolution, evolution. Yeah, Basically,

(06:21):
the rationale was that women were more um emotionally jealous
and romantic relationships because they wanted to prevent the resource
loss of you know, the man straying and um being
unfaithful hook to her, whereas men's jealousy triggers or focus
more on physical infidelity in order to prevent um, you know,

(06:41):
in order to protect there I guess, um, reproductive success. Right,
they can't have their women running around and being impregnated
by everyone. But these those types of theories have largely
been discredited because of like you said, jealousy is a
really difficult emotion to you to actually study, because it's
a pretty complex combination of fear, shame, anger, self esteem,

(07:07):
and just general life events at all maybe lead up
to adult patterns of jealousy. Right, But you know, I
know one guy who would say that, um, we can
track a specific moment at which women might start acting
a little bit more jealousy. Would that be Sigmund Freud?
It would apparently. Old Sigmund has a theory that you've
probably heard of called penis envy, which is when the

(07:30):
female envy's male characteristics are capabilities, especially the possession of
a penis. So as soon as young girls figure out
that they don't have a penis, they spend the rest
of their life over compensating for it. And Old Sigmund's
theory has also been pretty widely discredited, beginning um particularly
in the nineteen seventies with the with the feminist movement.

(07:52):
At some point, if if Sigmund Freud's penis MV theory
was correct, that would mean that girls would have to
understand and be able to relate to the experience of
having a penis, which is kind of impossible. But isn't
that Isn't that what he's saying The whole root of
our deficiency is, and that's why we're so compelled to
have children and overcompensate in other areas well. Molly, I

(08:17):
think that um, Stigmund Freud's kind of concept about women
having to overcompensate is sort of not valid these days,
because women really don't have to. Um. You know, there
are more options open to us to you know, make
our own way rather than just bearing children. So um.

(08:37):
And another study in two thous published in two thousand
four in UH the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, found that
when asked about sexual versus emotional infidelity, both men and
women reported more jealousy about their partners emotional infidelity. So
it looks like at some point this whole idea of

(08:58):
women being the more jealous set isn't necessarily true. It
all kind of evens out, is what you're saying. Well,
we've been talking a lot, mainly about romantic jealousy, but
there are a few other types of jealousy we should
probably mention. Um, it's very common. Sibling rivalry all comes
from jealousy of your siblings, and that's perfectly normal and natural.

(09:18):
Unfortunately there's not much you can do about it. Um,
there's also work jealousy. I mean, if Kristen were to
find a new partner for this podcast, I'd be extremely jealous.
And then, um, there's friend jealousy that we kind of
talked about earlier with the with the studies of the
ninth graders with you know, if you think that a
friendship is in jeopardy, you'll become jealous if you know,

(09:39):
so your best friend starts hanging out with with a
new girl or God, if you found a new friend,
I'd beat jealous Christens. And then there is family jealousy,
which I think ties into sibling rivalry and things like
that if you think that one, um, you know sibling
is being favored by parents more than you. Yeah, and
especially in blended families, there's gonna be some thing that's

(10:00):
very tricky to navigate when you know new families are
coming together and they're sort of competition for a stepfather's
time and things like that, and I think the thing
to remember about jealousy when we're going over all these
different types of it is the fact that jealousy is
a very innate human emotion. Um. There's evidence of um,
jealous feelings in children as young as six months old.

(10:23):
I mean, I think that it's something that that we're
almost born with. But um, even though it's a natural
emotion for ux to experience, it can tend towards the
abnormal side, psychotically jealous, as ask men dot Com would
put it, right, although that's probably a little bit of
an exaggeration, right, but I mean, people do exhibit abnormal jealousy. UM.

(10:43):
And this you know, you know for better for where
some of these issues are tied to women, like extreme insecurity, UM, immaturity.
I'm not going to count them because most women, I
think I'm mature, but being a control freak. I mean,
that's something that sometimes we associate with women is they've
got to have things their way, and when doesn't happen,
then jealousy can occur. Right. And the higher students of

(11:03):
body image cultural standards like that I think can also
play a big role. But the good thing about jealousy
is that when experienced sort of in a normal scenario,
it can drive you to kind of accomplish greater things,
sort of like anger can be a useful emotion. It
can be a very motivating force if you use it

(11:24):
for the right reasons, if you use your powers for
good and not evil. Right. If you, for instance, with
workplace jealousy, if I think that one of my co
workers is going to be up for promotion that I
think that i'm due instead, that will probably make me
come into work earlier, get more done, get my boss's
attention more hopefully in good ways. Um, that will make
me compete more for for that promotion. Right. And it's

(11:48):
really more interpersonal jealousy within friendships and relationships that can
be a little harder to navigate. And the advice we
have for that is kind of simple. It may not
always sound like the most practical advice, um, but it's
it's pretty reckon and buy experts that if you do
have jealousy that's sort of interfering with your relationship with someone,
you really just have to sit and talk it out
and explain what's making you upset, um, how you can

(12:10):
deal with it. And I think that's what the quiz
that we were talking about earlier was trying to get
at um with some of their options, even though a
few of them were things that were kind of silly,
like eating the crap out of another woman. Yeah um.
Over being overly aggressive or completely passive aggressive not healthy
with good ideas to Jella Chelsea. So if you want

(12:30):
to learn more about jealousy and the other complex human emotions,
you can go read about that on how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot Com brought to you

(12:51):
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