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Written By: Admin | Updated : October 3, 2013 11:32 AM IST
A recent study suggests that despite all the talk of being supportive about one's partners' achievements, men prefer to see their significant others wives and girlfriends perform badly at work or in personal life. On the other hand women's self-esteem seems to be unaffected by their husbands' or boyfriends' failures or successes.
This is truer when the men see their women perform in tasks in which they've failed. But even in situations where the two aren't competing, a man's ego takes a hit when their partners do well because they feel it reflects badly on them.
Dr Kate Ratliff of Florida University, who led the study, said: 'It makes sense that a man might feel threatened if his girlfriend outperforms him in something they're doing together, such as trying to lose weight. But this research found evidence that men automatically interpret a partner's success as their own failure, even when they're not in direct competition.'
Researchers studied 896 people in five experiments designed to test how one partner's achievements or failures affected the other's feelings about themself. The findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In one experiment, 32 American student couples were asked to sit a problem-solving test designed to score their 'social intelligence', and were then falsely told that their partner had been among either the very highest or lowest scorers. Participants did not admit to being affected by their partners' scores, but tests designed to measure subconscious self-esteem suggested otherwise.
Men who believed their partners had performed well in the prior test were found to have significantly lower self-esteem than those who thought their partners had done badly.
Even when the tests were repeated in the Netherlands, where there is a smaller gender gap in workplaces, schools and politics, the results were the same. In a final pair of experiments, 657 Americans including 284 men were asked to recall any situation in which their wife or girlfriend had succeeded or failed. Men felt worse about themselves after recalling their partner's achievements than their failures, and their self-esteem was most damaged if their partner had succeeded in a situation where they had not.
