Deceptive Affection is Strategically Expressed Under Relational Threat—But Not Towards Partners with Low Mate Value

Abstract

Individuals sometimes express affection that they do not feel. This describes deceptive affectionate messages and occurs when communicators express affectionate messages that are not consistent with their internal feelings of affection in the moment. They are commonly expressed in romantic relationships (about 3 times per week) and are argued to function as relational maintenance and retention. The present work (N = 1993) demonstrated that deceptive affectionate messages are the behavioral output of an evolved psychological system that strategically operates to maintain significant pair bonds (i.e., high mate value partners) but not non-significant pair bonds (i.e., low mate value partners). This system is uniquely and nonrandomly designed to increasingly generate deceptive affectionate messages when the individual’s highly valued partnership is perceived to be under relational threat and decreasingly deploy deceptive affectionate messages when the highly valued partnership is not under threat, but the system does not apply this relational strategy in low-valued partnerships. This supports evolutionary psychological reasoning that affectionate communication should be predicated on a cost–benefit ratio, such that deceptive affectionate messages are expressed to high value mates because the substantial costs of losing a highly valued partner outweigh the smaller risks of enacting them (e.g., discovered deception, temporary relational conflict). By establishing that deceptive affection is predicated on a cost–benefit ratio, the present work better solidifies deceptive affection, and affection exchange theory more broadly, in the human evolutionary sciences.