Minnesota State University Mankato
Research Project: Different Sexes and Perceived Severity of Emotional and Sexual Infidelity
For my PSYC 211W class, I had conducted an experiment that looked at the perception and severity of emotional and sexual fidelity between the two sexes. I hypothesized that women will be more uncomfortable with emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity while men would show the opposite effect. Along with that, participants would overall be less uncomfortable with infidelity if they are the ones committing it than when it is their partner. The paper goes further in depth about the method, results, and discussion of findings.
From this experience, it meets levels 1 through 3 for Original Research.
Infidelity is a popular field in psychology, and specifically, there is a famous David Buss study which examines gender and infidelity. His study found that women saw higher distress with emotional infidelity while men displayed the opposite. For my study, I wanted to take that theory and look at how perception would also play a role in how severe people believed the act of infidelity was (Original research level 1). To do so, I had decided that an experiment would be the best way to test my hypothesis. This way I could directly say situation A caused result B instead of basing it on a relationship like it would have been if I went with a correlational design instead (Original research level 2). For the study, I recruited participants through an online survey I had distributed. There were four different vignettes measured emotional and sexual infidelity and perception infidelity. Perceived severity was measured by having participants measure how “uncomfortable” they were using a Likert-type scale (Original Research Level 3). For more about my research model, please refer to the artifact. This was an important study for me as it was the first time I had facilitated my first experiment that was based on a research question which I was interested in. In showed the different steps it takes to bring a curiosity into a testable hypothesis to a functioning experiment. The ability to implement my ideas is an important skill to have, and this study helped me practice those skills. These skills will be transferable when I move forward into my professional career.
Below is a link to the paper: