Jealousy and Cheating Detection Theory (EN)

(Lee esta entrada en español aquí)


In a previous post Fränk Romeo asked me for some advice to avoid feeling jealous in a long distance relationship.

First of all, I would like to talk about the importance of distance and how it affects relationships in general.

We tend to interact more with people that are closer to us. In an office space, in a school, even in the house of Big Brother, people who are closer together tend to interact more and that interaction leads to other things. Our friends are probably people who we met in our near environment. Research studies show that most people choose as a partner someone who lives nearby (or at least in the same city). In the classroom it is more likely that we become friends with the students that sit next to us, and if we are already friends with someone before we enter a class, we will probably sit together when we attend it.

Social experiments have been conducted to observe how distance affects relationships. We need to distinguish between:

• Physical distance: this is a no brainer, how many meters stand between two people
• Psychological distance: how close we feel to someone or something.

Another thing to take into account is that physical and psychological distance affect each other, as I already mentioned above. We tend to be close to the people we feel close to and get away from the people we dislike or have nothing in common with. However, the opposite is also true. This has been explained in psychology by the feeling of familiarity we get for the things we see more often.

Exposure Effect

The mere exposure effect is a tendency to develop more positive feelings towards objects and individuals the more we are exposed to them. No action or interaction with the object is required, and we do not need to possess or even develop any explicit beliefs about the object.  This also happens on a subliminal level. A classic experiment went like this:

Several geometric figures appeared on a screen for two milliseconds each.  Participants were not aware of those figures. Later they were given a bunch of figures (some were new and some had been presented already) and they were asked to point out which figures they had seen before during the projection. None could remember any of them and they just guessed at random.

However another group was asked to choose out of the figures which one they preferred or liked more, and guess what? They chose more the ones that had been presented before even if they were not aware of them.

The implications of this finding were considerable and wide-ranging. It suggested that familiarity does not, as the old adage says, breed contempt, nor does absence make the heart grow fonder. On the contrary – it appears that, quite simply, the more we see something, the more we like it.

So, regarding relationships it is very clear that if there is distance between two people that distance must disappear sooner or later. So, the question you need to ask yourself, Fränk Romeo, is “what are the chances to reduce that distance between you and your partner in the future?” “What can you do about it?” If it is not the physical distance, at least the psychological distance must be reduced. Nowadays thanks to the Internet, Skype and the mobile phone it has never been easier to stay in touch with people who live far away.

On jealousy

Regarding jealousy, as I mentioned in my previous post, most of the time is a projection of someone’s unfaithful desires. If someone flirts with other people, meets new people through the Internet, talks in chat rooms where people meet for sex, etc., a chronically accessible construct will be formed around that issue and that will be projected onto the current partner. Therefore the person will see 'cheating' where there is none.

Jealousy can also have its origin in a sense of insecurity often related to low self-esteem. There is also jealousy in the form of obsessive compulsive behavior, which needs to be addressed with the help of a professional.

At any rate, jealousy is not a healthy feeling and may even turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy by turning your partner away from you and closer to another person who might understand him or her better.

The first thing we need to ask ourselves is how we would feel if our partner behaved like we do regarding flirting and meeting other people (or even cheating!) and  maybe we will have found the answer to our feelings of jealousy.

Cheating Detection Theory

A friend of mine broke up recently with her partner because she found a sign of cheating in the trash can. She went on a holiday for a few days and when she came back she found a condom wrapping in the trash can. She confronted her boyfriend about it and he denied everything (of course!).

If you confront your partner with proof and he or she denies it, you only have two options: you believe your partner, or you do not and act accordingly, but arguing over it again and again leads to no satisfactory ending.

Signal Detection Theory studies people’s ability to discern between a signal and noise. Every day we have to make decisions about uncertain events like, "Is that my phone ringing or one on the television?", or, "Is the person talking to me telling the truth?" Signal Detection Theory (SDT) models how people make decisions about uncertain events. Let me give you a simple example of a psychological experiment about memory.

You are presented with a list of 10 words to study for 1 minute. Then you are presented with a second list of 50 words from which you have to circle out the words that you studied in the previous list. So, you have to detect which words are known (signal) from the words that are totally new (noise).

You know that there will be a maximum of 10 known words in the list of 50 words. Let’s say you point 8 words as already known, but only 7 of them are from the list you studied and 1 is a new word that you mistook with another word from the first list. You also left 3 words unchecked that you couldn’t identify.

• 7 are the hits (correct responses)
• 1 is a false alarm (an answer that you think was correct, but isn’t)
• 3 are the misses (correct responses that you missed and did not identify)
• 39 are the correct rejections (the other words you did not circle because you correctly knew they were new and not presented in the first list)

	Response "studied"	Response "new word"
Studied word	7 (hit)	3 (miss)
New word	1 (false alarm)	39 (correct rejection)

Applying this to cheating, detection theory will measure the ability to distinguish between the proof of cheating (signal) and any other behavior that is not cheating, but may seem to be so (noise), e.g. your partner working late at the office. According to the theory, there are a number of psychological factors that will influence our threshold detection levels: previous experience (e.g. chronically accessible constructs), expectations, physiological state (e.g. fatigue), and many other factors.

Sensitivity or discriminability

Conceptually, sensitivity refers to how hard or easy it is to detect a target stimulus from the background noise. For example, in the previous memory test having a longer time to study the words makes it easier to recognize them later, i.e., a longer time would have increased your sensitivity to detect the signal. In contrast, having to remember 30 words rather than 10 makes the discrimination harder.

Bias

Imagine this: you have a child at home and you install a fire alarm. You would probably prefer that the fire system had a higher sensitivity even if it went off causing a false alarm, because the damage of a miss (your house and child burning inside) is higher than the inconvenience of false alarm (turning it off). 


Bias is the extent to which one response is more probable than another. That is, an individual may be more likely to respond that a stimulus is present (the wolf is coming! the wolf is coming!), so the number of false alarms will increase, or more likely to respond that a stimulus is not present, so the number of misses will increase. Bias is independent of sensitivity, which means we might detect something and decide to let it pass. If there you are given a penalty for either false alarms or misses, this may influence bias. 

Regarding bias in the case of cheating, we can distinguish between:

• Non confrontational: These people who may be scared to confront their partner with a “signal” of cheating. They’re more likely to respond that the signal is not present, and therefore they will have more misses.
• Jealous: These people, on the contrary, will see cheating “signals” everywhere. They are more likely to respond that the signal is present and therefore increasing the number of false alarms.

Psychology studies why these biases happen, and that is what you, Fränk Romeo, need to do, too.

The question is not what to do to avoid the feeling of jealousy, but rather to acknowledge that feeling and investigate why it happens. Is it because you are flirting with other people and you are projecting that onto your partner? Is it because cheating is a chronically accessible construct which makes you see signs of cheating which, in reality, are just false alarms? Is it because your communication with your partner needs to be improved, because maybe you and your partner have not talked about infidelity yet? Or is it because your partner gives you too many signals that anyone will interpret as a sign of cheating?

Whatever the reason I wish you the best in solving this matter. Good luck!