Examining Relationship Jealousy Towards Artificial Intelligence Using the Response Escalation Paradigm in Virtual Reality

This study applies the Response Escalation Paradigm (REP) to examine jealousy scores across five stages of increasing relationship threat (Huelsnitz et al., 2018). Participants rated their jealousy in scenarios involving a romantic partner with either a human or AI rival in virtual reality (VR), among other conditions. Consistent with hypothesis 1, jealousy rates increased across the stages in each condition. Consistent with hypothesis 2, people reported higher jealousy for the human rival in VR compared to the AI rival in VR at Stage 1. Inconsistent with hypothesis 3, participants did not experience faster escalation (the rate of increase in jealousy as the level of threat increases across the scenarios) for the human rival in VR relative to the AI rival in VR. Exploratory analyses did not reveal significant gender differences in jealousy responses. Overall, results indicate that individuals feel jealous about AI rivals as they do with human rivals.