Jealousy increases men’s support for feminine honor norms, study finds

A recent study found that men become somewhat more supportive of feminine honor norms when they feel jealous. This was not the case with women. Additionally, individuals with a more restricted mating orientation also showed greater support for feminine honor norms. The paper was published in Cognition and Emotion.

Feminine honor norms are cultural expectations about how women should behave to be regarded as respectable and honorable. They typically require women to uphold a reputation for sexual purity through behaviors such as dressing modestly or maintaining virginity before marriage. A woman’s behavior may be seen as reflecting not only on herself but also on her family or wider social group.

These norms can therefore encourage women to avoid actions that might attract gossip, criticism, or accusations of impropriety. They may also prescribe traditional gender roles, such as being caring, loyal, obedient, and devoted to family responsibilities.

Feminine honor norms are often reinforced by relatives, peers, religious teachings, and community expectations. In many cultures, it is considered that a woman abiding by feminine honor norms also protects the honor of her partner. Feminine honor norms can sometimes provide women with a valued social identity, but they can also restrict autonomy and justify unequal monitoring or control.

“I wanted to understand the psychological roots of feminine honor norms — the expectation that women be sexually pure, chaste, and loyal to their husbands and family,” said study author Pelin Gul, an assistant professor of social psychology in the Department of Sustainability and Well-Being at the University of Groningen’s Campus Fryslan.

“These norms underpin the social control and restriction of women’s access to work, education, and health, and they underlie many harmful practices, such as honor-based violence, forced marriage, and virginity testing. So, understanding support for feminine honor norms felt like a natural first step toward understanding these broader harmful practices against women,” Gul told PsyPost. “I also have a personal connection to this question. As a woman from Turkey, a so-called honor culture, I’ve long wondered why some people endorse these norms while others don’t, and I wanted to know whether there’s a deeper psychological explanation behind that variation.”

While researchers often cite protecting the honor of male partners or upholding patriarchal dominance as explanations for these norms, some scientists suggest an alternative view: feminine honor norms may serve as a form of “ideological mate guarding.” Because humans evolved in environments where paternity uncertainty was a reproductive risk for men, men developed adaptations to guard their mates. By promoting cultural norms that restrict female sexuality, individuals can deter infidelity without relying solely on direct, physical mate-guarding tactics.

“The common explanations people are usually aware of, such as cultural explanations, social learning, or accounts framed purely in terms of patriarchy and male power, aren’t the only way to understand why some people support feminine honor norms, and why some support them more than others,” Gul explained.

Gul and her main collaborator, Tom Kupfer, an associate professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent University, hypothesized that higher levels of sexual jealousy, elicited via exposure to a threat of infidelity, would increase support for feminine honor norms. They also wanted to know whether individuals with a more restricted mating strategy would show greater endorsement of feminine honor norms.

These researchers conducted two experiments. Participants in the first experiment were 388 men recruited via an online research platform. Their average age was 33 years. About 44% were married.

Participants were randomly assigned into two groups. Participants in the jealousy induction group were instructed to think of their romantic partner or someone towards whom they have strong romantic feelings, and then imagine that person flirting and being intimate with another person at a party. While imagining this scene, they paused and wrote about how they imagined it at specific points. The other group was a control group tasked to imagine an anxiety-producing scenario in which they took an important academic exam and failed.

As a check of the effect of the experimental scenario, participants completed an assessment of jealousy, which doubled as an indicator of participants’ subjective experience of jealousy. They also completed an assessment of support for feminine and other honor norms.

The second experiment aimed to test whether women also support feminine honor norms when they are induced to feel sexual jealousy. Participants were 551 U.S. adults. Among them, 264 were women. Participants’ average age was 33 years. The experimental procedure was identical to the one used in the first experiment.

Results of the first experiment showed that participants in the jealousy group felt much more jealous than participants in the control group, indicating that the experimental manipulation worked as intended. However, the support for feminine honor norms did not differ between the two groups.

In spite of that, participants who reported feeling greater jealousy tended to report stronger support for feminine honor norms. A more restricted mating strategy was also associated with stronger support for feminine honor norms. A more restricted mating strategy means that an individual is more selective about their romantic partners, has stronger preferences for long-term commitment and exclusivity in a relationship, and is less willing to engage in casual or short-term sexual relationships.

“A relatively monogamous or sociosexually restricted mating strategy is associated with greater support for feminine honor norms among both women and men, equally,” Gul said of the findings. “This is surprising because feminine honor norms are typically thought of as something promoted and enforced by men, particularly in patriarchal societies. Interestingly, though, the underlying psychology suggests these norms can also be motivated by women’s own restricted sociosexuality. This doesn’t rule out that men may have more opportunities to promote and enforce feminine honor norms in practice, but at the psychological level, it appears that both men and women can be motivated to support them.”

“This may be surprising from a traditional social science perspective, which often frames men as the hegemonic, patriarchal sex enforcing restrictions on a lower-power gender,” she continued. “From an evolutionary perspective, however, it’s less puzzling: women pursuing a restricted mating strategy — trying to maintain a stable, monogamous relationship — may benefit strategically from discouraging unrestricted mating behavior in other women, since that behavior increases the risk of losing their own mate to a rival. In that sense, it’s not surprising that individuals with a more restricted mating strategy (lower sociosexuality) would be more supportive of restrictive norms such as feminine honor.”

Results of the second experiment confirmed that individuals feeling greater jealousy tended to show higher support for feminine honor norms. Interestingly, men—but not women—in the jealousy group tended to report somewhat greater support for feminine honor norms compared to the control group, indicating that the experimental induction of jealousy likely increased their support for feminine honor norms. The association between jealousy and support for feminine sexual norms was also stronger among men than among women.

The researchers note that these associations persisted even after controlling for state masculinity threat, religiosity, political conservatism, age, and other types of honor norms, such as masculine and family honor.

“Our findings point to a psychological factor, namely, jealousy, which is an evolved emotion that all humans share to some degree, but that some people experience more intensely than others. When people experience heightened jealousy, this can make them more supportive of norms, values, and practices that reduce the likelihood of unfaithful or ‘impure’ types of behavior. We argue that, over large groups of people and across time, this is partly how strong cultural value systems, such as feminine honor, can take hold.”

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of jealousy and human mate retention strategies. However, it should be noted that all assessments were based on self-reports leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the results. The study also focused exclusively on heterosexual participants, and the findings may not generalize to other sexual orientations or non-Western cultures with different honor traditions.

“This is one of the first lines of research examining whether jealousy is associated with support for norms and values that restrict sexual behavior in society,” Gul pointed out. “So far, these studies have been conducted with Western participants, primarily from the U.S., to establish the basic findings. It remains to be seen whether the same patterns hold in societies that are more strongly honor-based, such as those in the Middle East.”

Future research will look to expand the scope of these findings globally.

“We aim to build a fuller understanding of the psychology underlying support for these norms, particularly the roles of mating strategy and jealousy,” Gul said. “We believe these patterns are likely to generalize across cultures, since mating strategy, mate guarding, and jealousy are species-typical adaptations that humans share, so we’d expect these findings to apply in many cultures, not just in Western samples. Along with this, our next steps are to extend and replicate these findings cross-culturally in more traditional honor cultures, such as Iran and Turkey. We also want to investigate whether ideological mate guarding predicts not just attitudes, but actual enforcement, including real-world punishment and other behaviors people engage in to uphold feminine honor norms.”

The paper, “Effects of experimentally induced jealousy on support for feminine honor,” was authored by Pelin Gul, Stephen Foster, Sajad Sojoudi, and Tom R. Kupfer.