The American Psychological Association today issued a news release with the headline: “Men Feel Worse About Themselves When Female Partners Succeed.”
Here’s a quote: “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,” says the study’s lead author, Kate Ratliff, PhD, of the University of Florida. “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.”
Ratliff and her research team arrived at this conclusion based on several related experiments. In one of them, men who were told that their partners scored in the top 12 percent on an intelligence test suffered lower levels of implicit self esteem than men who believed their partners scored in the bottom 12 percent. In another experiment, men who were asked to think about their partner’s success felt worse about themselves than men asked to think about their partner’s failures.
