How To Detect A Digital Aggressor

University of Wolverhampton's Manpal Bhogal, an evolutionary psychologist, discusses his new research on online dating abuse.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | August 12, 2021

A new article published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence explores why people engage in abusive behavior on online dating websites and apps. The answer, according to the researchers, has to do with two well-known evolutionary phenomena: mate value discrepancy and intrasexual competition.

I recently spoke to Manpal Bhogal, the lead author of the research, to better understand how evolutionary psychology can explain digital dating abuse. Here is a summary of our discussion.

What inspired you to investigate this topic and what did you find?

The inspiration to study cyber dating abuse from an evolutionary perspective came from an undergraduate student who I supervised back in 2016. I was aware of the area; however, it was only after researching the area that I began to fully understand the serious nature of what cyber dating abuse is, and the detrimental effect it can have on partners. The student wanted to explore cyber dating abuse from an evolutionary perspective and she suggested mate value (how you rate yourself as a romantic partner) was a contributing factor to whether people perpetrated online dating abuse. She suggested people who see themselves of lower quality compared to their partner, would engage in cyber dating abuse to a greater degree compared to those who saw themselves as being better quality partners than their partners. Interestingly, she was spot on, and we found exactly that; this was novel. We published that work, and I then began researching online dating abuse, examining several other mating-relevant factors such as relationship contingent self-esteem, intrasexual competition, romantic jealousy, and aggression to name a few.

I've conducted several studies over the past few years where we have been looking at cyber dating abuse from an evolutionary perspective. Essentially, we've built a story where we've argued people perpetrate cyber dating abuse to retain a romantic partner and deter romantic rivals. We've shown that there are strong relationships between seeing your partner as having better mate value than you and the perpetration of cyber dating abuse. In this paper, two graduate psychology students and I conducted two studies where we wanted to replicate the finding that mate value contributes to cyber dating abuse, as well as examining factors such as intrasexual rivalry.

We found that it's not only this discrepancy between yourself and your partner that drives perpetrating cyber dating abuse, but intrasexual competition is also an important role. The studies in this paper are the first to show that being highly competitive towards romantic rivals is also related to the perpetration of cyber dating abuse. The inspiration I guess has come from my previous study into evolutionary psychology, particularly mate choice and applying these theories to an applied behavior that is prevalent in today's digital world.

What do you think needs to be done to make online dating safer?

There's a lot of disadvantages and advantages to online dating. One of the primary advantages is that so much is done online, made more prevalent with the Covid-19 pandemic. It's the way people meet in today's world. I do believe more can be done to protect people from issues such as catfishing, cyberstalking, and ultimately (when in a romantic relationship), cyber dating abuse. If we take cyber dating abuse as an example, I'm not convinced people know what cyber dating is and what behaviors constitute abuse. This is one of the drivers for me to conduct this research; to eventually give people more knowledge on what constitutes cyber dating abuse, so people can recognize it as abuse and take necessary steps to address the situation.

I've recently been awarded some funding to examine cyber dating abuse prevalence and victimization in adolescents in the United Kingdom. Adolescents are a population which have been neglected in the research on cyber dating abuse in the UK.

What might an evolutionary psychologist expect to see when online dating works well?

I guess to me it's not what we expect; it's what behaviors evolutionary psychologists can expect when people engage in online dating and using an evolutionary framework to explain these behaviors. I guess the only real answer to this is when people of similar mate value are attracted to one another, engage in benefit-provisioning mate retention tactics (mate retention tactics which are positive and beneficial to a partner and relationship), which then leads to sexual reproduction.

Do you generally find that evolutionary psychology is as applicable to online behavior as it is to real-life behavior? Or do we need new theories to understand and explain online behavior?

I believe that evolutionary psychology has a lot to offer in understanding online behavior as well as offline behavior. Let's take intimate partner violence as an example. Researchers have examined the role of mate retention tactics (both negative and positive mate retention tactics) and intimate partner violence, looking at intimate partner violence from an evolutionary perspective. In this paper and previous work, we have examined cyber dating abuse (an online form of intimate partner violence) and find online dating abuse can be explained and explored from an evolutionary perspective. I believe more research needs to be done to understand online behaviour from an evolutionary psychological perspective. We need to bridge the gap between evolutionary psychology and cyberpsychology.

A link to the paper reported in this interview can be found here.