Man and Woman, Casual Sex and Jealousy:

Insight from the Field of Evolutionary Psychology

'Our modern skulls house a stone age mind."

Cosmides and Tooby, 1997

If questioned today, many people might agree with what seems to be an illogical coupling of statements: (1) A man is more likely than his female mate to feel comfortable about having casual sex with multiple partners, but (2) the same man is likely to feel jealous about his mate having sex with someone else. Yet, when the underlying causes for a male's apparently inconsistent behavior are explored from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, a logical explanation emerges.

Evolutionary psychology is a branch of study focused on the problems and stress factors that ancestors of humans faced, the "psychological mechanisms" that natural selection developed to address these problems and stresses, and the ways in which these ancient mechanisms work today (Crawford and Anderson, 1989,...
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