Dark Side of Commitment

Commitment is essential to the long-term maintenance of romantic relationships. Commitment promotes relationship maintenance strategies and a variety of other positive relationship outcomes. However, when paired with jealousy, commitment may heighten people's concerns about infidelity and trigger vigilance toward romantic rivals. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that commitment and jealousy would interact to promote negative implicit evaluations of attractive same sex targets, reflecting a basic cognitive attunement to potential relationship threats posed by romantic rivals. Across both studies, priming feelings of commitment and love toward one's partner led people high in chronic jealousy (but not those low in chronic jealousy) to negatively evaluate attractive same sex individuals at implicit levels of cognition. The current research thus provides insight into an understudied negative consequence of being highly committed to a relationship: the more committed one is, the more one has to lose, and thus the more concerned one becomes about having one's partner stolen away by a potential competitor.