Preprint on jealousy online!

A lot of other things have happened and I have sadly neglected the blog. But I’ll start posting new things from time to time. This post is about a new paper on PsyArxiv. This project started out as a student Bachelor project, well actually two. Two students of mine wanted to replicate this paper. by Dijkstra and Buunk. Dijkstra and Buunk (1998) found support for a sex-specific rival mechanism: men, rather than women, responded with more jealousy when a rival was presented as dominant, as opposed to not dominant. In contrast, women, rather than men, responded with more jealousy when the rival was attractive, rather than unattractive. In two studies, we do not find full support for this. We do find some suggestion for a “gender x attractiveness of rival” interaction, but not for a “gender x dominance” interaction. We thus conclude that we do not find good evidence for a sex-specific rival mechanism in our data. We also discuss how the field can move forward. This paper is now online with PsyArxiv. Feedback welcome. This student project was the accelerator and this approach will hopefully lead to more student projects kickstarting replications.