In many cultures, women are expected to cultivate a reputation for pure and chaste behavior such as wearing modest clothes and maintaining virginity before marriage. The dominant explanation for people’s support for female honor norms is that female infidelity and promiscuity threatens her male partner’s reputation and masculinity. Beyond this, the literature affords little understanding of the individual-level psychological mechanisms which produce support for female honor norms. We propose that beyond masculine reputation concerns, reproductive strategy also contribute to support for female honor norms, and that people, motivated by sexual jealousy, support female honor norms as an indirect ideological mate guarding tactic. Two correlational and three experimental studies revealed that reproductive strategies (monogamous vs. promiscuous mating orientation) predict support for female honor norms, beyond masculine honor norms, religiosity, political conservativism, and age. Support for female honor norms positively related to tendency to experience sexual jealousy (i.e., dispositional jealousy), and inducing a state of sexual jealousy increased support for female honor norms. These results applied both to men and women (albeit more strongly to men). These findings enhance understanding of the origins and maintenance of female honor norms and other ideologies that enable the control of women’s reproductive behavior.
Female infidelity is constrained by El Niño conditions in a long-lived bird
