From Mate Retention to Murder: Evolutionary Psychological Perspectives on Men's Partner-Directed Violence

Abstract

In response to the tragically high incidence and negative consequences of female-directed violence in intimate relationships, a large literature has been dedicated to the investigation of the proximate and the ultimate or evolutionary predictors of men's partner-directed violence. Evolutionary psychology offers a framework for investigating the design of evolved information-processing mechanisms that motivate costly behaviors such as men's partner-directed violence. We review several forms of men's partner-directed violence, including insults, sexual coercion, physical violence, and homicide, from an evolutionary psychological perspective and with a particular focus on the adaptive problem of paternity uncertainty. The problem of paternity uncertainty is hypothesized to have selected for the emotion of male sexual jealousy, which in turn motivates men's nonviolent and violent mate retention behaviors. We review empirical evidence for the relationships among paternity uncertainty, male sexual jealousy, and men's partner-directed violence. We propose that a comprehensive understanding of men's partner-directed violence will be achieved only by careful consideration of both proximate and ultimate causes.

The Evolution of Violence

“…Early evolutionary approaches to intimate aggression focused almost exclusively on male violence towards female partners, and male jealousy was the main explanatory factor (see Dobash et al 1992;Kaighobadi et al 2009). The argument is as follows: Because fertilization takes place inside the female body, men can be deceived into investing in children who were sired by other males-at the expense of their own fitness.…”

“…A recent review estimated that between 10 % and 14 % of all married women had experienced rape at the hands of their intimate partner (Martin et al 2007). Other reviews that include cross-cultural data estimate the marital rape rate to range even higher, from 10 to 26 % (Kaighobadi et al 2009). These statistics do not include psychological and emotional abuse, which is likely to be even more common.…”

The Roles of Body Mass Index and Jealousy in Women’s Perpetration of Sexual Coercion

“…Research by Goetz, Shackelford, and colleagues (Goetz & Shackelford, 2009;Goetz, Shackelford, Romero, Kaighobadi, & Miner, 2008;Kaighobadi et al, 2009) suggests that men's perpetration of sexual coercion may be a tactic for mate retention. More specifically, when a man is suspicious of his partner's infidelity, he becomes jealous and engages in sexually coercive tactics to retain his partner and decrease the likelihood of paternal uncertainty.…”

“…Although researchers have hypothesized that women with higher BMIs engage in these aggressive behaviors because of jealousy (Gallup & Wilson, 2009), this model has not been evaluated empirically. However, jealousy has been shown to be related to women's perpetration of other forms of aggression, including dominance and psychological aggression (Kar & O'Leary, 2013). In addition, in an experimental paradigm, researchers demonstrated that in both men and women, when an individual's self-esteem was threatened via a hypothetical threat to a romantic relationship, selfesteem ratings decreased and jealousy ratings increased, which led to more intense aggressive behavior toward a confederate (DeSteno et al, 2006).…”

“…More specifically, we combined several areas of research to develop a model of women's sexual coercion perpetration, including (a) a body of research on men's use of sexual coercion for mate retention (e.g., Kaighobadi, Shackelford, & Goetz, 2009;Miner, Shackelford, & Starratt, 2009), (b) a theoretical model proposing that women with higher body mass indexes (BMIs) are more likely to feel jealousy and then exhibit aggression (Gallup & Wilson, 2009), and (c) an experimental study that demonstrated that threats to one's self-esteem lead to increases in self-reported jealousy, which in turn lead to increases in aggression (DeSteno, Valdesolo, & Bartlett, 2006). In particular, we proposed that within-couple differences in men's versus women's BMI (a measure of obesity; National Institutes of Health [NIH], 1998) are related to women's increased jealousy, which, in turn, are related to women's sexual coercion perpetration.…”