The Science of Online Infidelity

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1:06The last show with David Cooper. Thanks for having me. So the very existence of a platform like Ashley Madison feels almost like a social experiment to me in human temptation. What does it say about us that millions of people are signing up for a service like this designed for affairs? It means that a lot of people are cheating on their significant others. It means that infidelity and adultery are common. Certainly not everyone cheats, but a lot of people do. I think a lot of us pretend that we don't, but if throughout all of human history

2:06cheating is not been an uncommon thing. But the data breach in 2015, for those who don't remember like many, if not all of the users who'd use the platform or ever signed up, were posted online. And I think there was a lot of shocks there, right? Like a lot of people got looked up. People respected in their communities were found on the website. Having that real data of millions of users did scientists look into that so they could kind of study infidelity? Yeah, I mean, people looked into what people were doing on Ashley Madison. That was part of my research as well. It was trying to figure out what are people hoping to gain by signing up and looking for an affair partner on Ashley Madison. And we find that a lot of people are just, they're looking for a sex partner. They're dissatisfied with their primary relationships in a sense because they're not having sex. That was one of the key findings from our research was that I think about 50%. So like half of our participants

3:07said that they were not sexually active at all with their partners. But their relationships were otherwise at least decent if not good. They expressed high levels of satisfaction, high levels of romantic love and intimacy with their partners. So their relationships were otherwise, I think at least moderately well functioning, if not highly functioning. It was the sexual dissatisfaction that was a key factor for those folks. There's a small fraction of relationships that report being happy even though they know their partners are with other people. What do they call it? Like polyamory or open relationships. But I imagine those people aren't on Ashley Madison. This is a website for really finding a person in secrecy. How can someone say that like I love my partner and then sign up for an affair website when they know that their partner would be devastated if they found out? Well, let me say something first about the people in polyamorous or open relationships. We did find some of those in our sample that did that signed up on Ashley Madison. So it was not very common,

4:09but I think between 15% and 20% of the participants in our sample told us that they knew or their partners knew that they were on the site. And so they had some kind of understanding with their partners that they were doing this. I can see how someone like that could say that they love their partner if there's the communication. But I'm talking about the ones that don't. It's wild to me that you can report being in love and satisfied and happy and all that and still do this. Why would people do that? Love is complicated and people are complicated. And in a sense, I think if you think about love as intimacy and connection and attachment, those things can be there, especially for people who have spent the majority of their adult lives married to their spouse. And that doesn't go away just because you have an affair. It could be that the affair is just motivated by something different. It's not about love. I think for young people, they often say like sex and sexual satisfaction is paramount

5:10to the importance of a relationship. But as we age, that kind of falls by the way side. People say it's less important. It's more about your family, your kids, or how well you know each other or having a best friend or all that. I recently spoke to someone who interviewed people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s for a psychology study. And their paper basically showed that elderly, the elderly are still doing it and it's still as important as young people. Do we underestimate how central sex is to relationship satisfaction? Maybe. I think humans are very horny, sexual creatures. We have sex even in situations when we know that procreation is impossible, which is uncommon in the animal kingdom. So we're doing it all throughout our lives, all throughout the day, all throughout the month, all the time. And that's in part because sex is just intrinsically good. It's just pleasurable and it helps us in terms of connection and bonding.

6:11So yeah, people of all ages are having lots of sex. I would imagine if I used a platform like this inside and out to my girlfriend Miranda, if you're listening, I'm not on the platform. But I would imagine feeling a lot of regret if something like this happened in secret. Do the people who use these platforms report having regret after these affairs? Or do they just kind of do this thing that humans are so good at doing, which is like push it out of your head, don't think of it cognitive dissonance, all that? Of the people we surveyed who said that they had an affair, meaning they signed up and actually met an affair partner and did the deed. On average, those people said that they were highly satisfied in emotional terms and in sexual terms and felt little regrets. So that doesn't mean nobody felt regret. It just means on average, the people who were there felt like they were not doing anything wrong. There's like a disconnect here because the narrative we tell about ourselves is someone in that position, even if they don't get caught, should feel regret.

7:11But yet, on average, like you say, not everyone, but on average, people aren't. How do we explain this kind of gap between what we would expect people to feel and what people do feel? That's a great question in general for us to answer from a moral perspective. Like why do people do things that they think are immoral in a general sense? Because if you look at national surveys, the vast majority of people, like over 90% will say, infidelity is wrong. And yet you have the occurrence of affairs. And so it could be that people are trying to justify it somehow in their minds. They're trying to carve out some kind of exception. Maybe they're cheating because they feel like they have no other option. They feel like sex is important to them and their partner doesn't want to have sex and they don't want to break up their relationships. They're going to do the least bad thing possible, which is to have an affair. So it could be that. It could be that maybe they found out their partner was cheating and they thought, well, now I have a free pass to go and do it.

8:13And it could be that they feel like infidelity is generally wrong. But in this specific situation, maybe it's okay. They're kind of making some, doing some mental gymnastics there. The truth is that we don't really know to the extent to which people are going through those kind of mental gymnastics because it's hard to assess that on a one time survey. Now, did mate poaching come up? Like, is that something that happens on Ashley Madison? You meet someone, you think it's going to be discreet. And then all of a sudden, you find yourself out of your marriage, out of your long-term relationship and in a new relationship, not expecting that to happen because the person pursued you in a way that was different than what you agreed to meet up for for the first place. That's an interesting idea. Some people do have affairs as a way to test the waters and explore what else is out there in terms of possibilities before breaking up with their partner. So it could be a chicken or an egg kind of thing. I mean, poaching seems to imply that everything was going well. And then some seductress just swoops in

9:14and grabs you from your partner. And I think it's more like an interplay where someone's initially dissatisfied in some sense with their relationship. Most people, though, if they have a one time of affair, they might not want to break up and end their relationship. I think that the people who stay together are the ones who have this initially high level of commitment and intimacy. And they're just not necessarily sexually satisfied. After the big data leak in 2015, the public was so ready to name, shame, guilt, blame, punish those in the list of people on Ashley Madison. Why are we the public, maybe not you and me, but why are we so eager to morally punish people who cheat? Yeah, I think in general, people are excited about condemning those that they feel have done something morally wrong. There's something like a moral righteousness that people have when they have successfully identified the rule breakers to try to shame them.

10:15But of course, again, we know that infidelity is, it's common, it does happen. So it's the kind of thing where you're asking a majority of people to think about this thing that's common. But we don't want to believe that it's common. We want to believe that it's rare. So, and only the bad people do it, it kind of helps us make sense of the world. Like those who cheat, they're bad and we should punish them somehow. Well, Dylan Selterman is a social psychology researcher who works at Heterodox Academy. Dylan, I've enjoyed the chat. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game long.

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