Men interpret a female partner's success as their own failure

Men feel a failure when their wives or girlfriends succeed at something, and feel even worse if their partner succeeds where they failed, U.S. researchers say. Lead author Kate Ratliff of the University of Florida said the findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, involved a series of experiments involving heterosexual couples. "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 said in a statement. For example, in one experiment, 32 couples from the University of Virginia were given what was described as a "test of problem solving and social intelligence" and then told that their partner scored either in the top or bottom 12 percent of all university students. Hearing that their partner scored high or low on the test did not affect what the researchers called participants' explicit self-esteem -- i.e., how they said they felt. Participants were also given a test to determine how they felt subconsciously about their partners' performance, which the researchers called implicit self-esteem. Men who believed their partner scored in the top 12 percent demonstrated significantly lower implicit self-esteem than men who believed their partner scored in the bottom 12 percent, the researchers said. In two more studies, Dutch men who thought about their romantic partner's success subconsciously felt worse about themselves than men who thought about their partner's failure, but they said they felt fine while their test of implicit self-esteem revealed otherwise. In two final experiments, conducted online, 657 U.S. participants, 284 of whom were men, were asked to think about a time when their partner had succeeded or failed. It didn't matter if the achievements or failures were social, intellectual or related to participants' own successes or failures -- men subconsciously still felt worse about themselves when their partner succeeded than when she failed, the researchers said. However, men's implicit self-esteem took a bigger hit when they thought about a time when their partner succeeded at something while they had failed. The findings also showed women's self-esteem was not affected by their male partners' successes or failures.