17. The Psychology of Cheating

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big changes and transitions about twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Great another week, another episode. This week the people have spoken and what they want to hear it is drum will please. The psychology of cheating, So buckle and friends, because I don't think this is an easy or light topic like last week's. We are talking about dishonesty, on faithfulness and hurt that occurs in our most precious relationships. And if you've been cheated on, if you haven't, hope you still kind of find something interesting about this. I've kind of brought in a lot of different theories. This one is actually really interesting to research. We've got theories from biological psychology, behavioral psychology, personality psychology, social psychology. So it's a bit of a doozy. Additionally, if you hear some rockers in the background, it's Christmas season and for those who know me, I live across the road from a pub, so everyone's parting. Actually Bill Shorton there the other day, so Bill Shorton's getting in on the Christmas spirit. But yeah, there might be some noise filtering in doesn't matter. We're here to learn. So yeah, the psychology of cheating. So I had the statistic on this podcast I was listening to the other day. Fifty percent of relationships will involve an act of infidelity. And I think we hear about cheating a lot in our twenties as an explanation for why people have broken up or why you shouldn't date someone. Oh you know, you know he cheating on their last partner, like he's a scumbag, that kind of thing. So let's deep dive into why. Why does this occur? Are people who cheat bad? Bad people? Is the phrase wants a cheat, always a cheater? Correct? I think it's time to investigate. So cheating for those who have experienced this is pretty terrible. I think it's a lot like a big trope in movies and songs, pop culture, folklore. We see it all around as we see it quite often up for discussion, and I feel like it's quite ubiquitous. But for people in those situations, I think nothing about it feels like something someone else could understand or rationalize. To you. It's one of those experiences that is common. I would say, what we fifty percent of people or fifty percent of relationships, but really isolating and unique in how emotionally destructive and undermining it can be. And I think the emotional aftermath is much like the stages of grief, the shock, denial, anger, but hopefully the acceptance obviously pending maybe some long term into personal damage. I think something that is really interesting when we talk about cheating is that people have different conceptions of it. Often we think of cheating as like a physical act, but cheating isn't just sex. It can also be emotional disclosure. And I think we have this idea of cheating as a physical act or sexual intimacy, and that's actually not probably I would say the most important area of our romantic relationships. Sex is just one part, but it's the emotional closeness that sex kind of comes along with its just a natural expression of that. So I think the thing that we also need to talk about whilst we be talking about physical cheating is emotional cheating, and that can kind of look like secretive, sustained closeness with someone who's not your primary partner, and in some ways I can imagine that it's worse. Sex without emotion is not uncommon, but a deep, at times non sexual emotional intimacy can mean so much more and possibly undermines the relationship more than a mere physical act. And I think the reason why we react to physical cheating is firstly the absolutely affront to notions like loyalty and trust and honesty that we want in our romantic relationships. But also it's the idea that sex could lead to more. It could leave to someone leaving, It could lead to your relationship breaking down, and that emotional intimacy between you and your partner kind of crumbling. Interestingly fun fact, but not that fun. Men tend to get more upset about physical infidelity, whilst women are more concerned with cheating that is associated with intense emotional disclosure, and some psychologists have suggested that this stems from the primitive reason behind why we take partners or accept monogamy to begin with. So men want to ensure monogamy so that they know their offspring are actually theirs for genetic purposes, whilst women, you know, biologically this is a genetic evolutionary argument. But women they want a partner or a mate who will be loyal and stick around and provide support. And I think with most evolutionary explanations, this does tend to be a bit outdated and doesn't really keep up with how we understand gender roles in reproduction and makeship nowadays. But it's still an interesting theory from kind of an evolutionary area of psychology. I think with emotional cheating, we do have to be careful about calling any type of emotional attachment to someone isn't your primary partner a form of cheating. I think it's really important to have people who aren't your partner you can share things with and that have that level of openness. But it's about boundaries. You know, if your partner is spending hours alone with someone having deep, meaningful philosophical conversations about death and your parents divorce, that might upset you, but it might not upset someone else. It's all about what you expect from that person and how you have defined the emotional boundaries of your relationship. But I can see why that would be very frustrating and upsetting and worth communicating about them in a healthy way. Obviously, always using eye language as is an idea in therapy, So let's talk about why people cheat. This is really interesting from a psychological perspective. There are obviously many reasons why people cheat, but according to this woman, Kelly Campbell, she is I think an associate or a professor of psychology at CSU, they usually fall into three categories. So the reasons people might cheat might be individual, based on the relationship, or situational. So when we talk about individual reasons, these often have something to do with a person's personality, which may make them more likely to cheat. So this is often fact as like your personality, traits, your beliefs, your religion. For example, someone who is narcissistic is more likely to cheat. There was this big study of four thousand people and they asked them about their sexual history, did a bunch of personality tests and assessments, and they found this that narcissism more likely to cheat. Side note, I did a whole episode on this if you want to know how to identify these narcissistic people and steer clear of them in your dating life. But a quick summary, A narcissist can't naturally feel empathy and often uses people as means to an ends. So maybe that's their partner or the person they're cheating with, so they may be more prone to not being able to consider or even care about the consequences of their sexual infidelity. I think it's often worth noting that it would be sexual infidelity more often than not, because emotional cheating would probably be verily rare for a narcissist and someone who can't relate to other people on an effective and emotional level. Another individual factor is people with attachment, commitment, or self esteem issues. They also seem to be more likely to cheat, as this twenty sixteen study I was talking about has suggested, so wanting a boost to self esteem can motivate infidelity. Having sex with a new person, getting to know a new person can lead to really positive internal feelings. You might feel empowered, attractive, confident, or successful, and these feelings all kind of build up your self esteem when you may not have had much previously. People who have a hard time with commitment may also be more likely to cheat in some cases. I think also importantly, because commitment it just doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. You know, it's possible for two people in a relationship to have very different ideas about the relationship status, such as whether it's casual, exclusive, and so on. I think it's also possible to really like someone and still fear making a commitment to them, and in this case, one partner might end up cheating as a way of avoiding commitment, even if they would naturally prefer to stay in that relationship. So this was the type of cheating. The reason people cheat is from an individual perspective, and the second type of cheating is due to relationship issues rather than something internally about the person who's been cheating. It's about the state of things between you as a pair, the state of your relationship. Researchers have found time and time again the partnerships that are characterized by dissatisfaction, unfulfilling sex, and high conflict, they're often at a higher risk for infidelity. Also, the more dissimilar partners are in terms of personality and education level and things in common, the more likely they are to experience infidelity. If there are unmet needs, or this glimmering euphoria of falling in love is no longer kind of sustaining your bond, cheating may become more likely because the rush and intensity of endorphins and dopamine from you as a partner is fading for that other person, but still you don't have to cheat in these situations. If you don't love someone anymore, you can always break up with them or discuss an open relationship instead of betraying your partner's trust in you or loyalty in the monogamy of your relationship. I think that's something I always say, like, if you're going to cheat on someone, why don't you just break up with them? I think that's something a lot of us think, like, why don't you just break up with them? And this kind of leads to the third reason people cheat, which is situational reasons. Sometimes people aren't going out there looking for someone else to validate them, looking for sex, looking for emotional disclosure, So situational reasons. This refers to someone who cheats, but they don't have a personality that's prone to cheating. Your relationship is fine, but something about their environment puts them at a risk for infidelity. So, like, consider this scenario. You're really frustrated with the recent distance in your relationship. Maybe you're doing longer stance and you're dealing with feelings of low self estiement and your appearance, and one day, like a coworker or someone at UNI becomes really friendly with you, and catches you alone and says something like I'm really attracted to you, like, let's get together sometime. You might not choose to cheat if only one or two factors were involved. So, for example, if it was just the situation, but this combination of motivating factors, you know, the distance in your relationship, which is a relationship issue, your feelings about your appearance self esteem a personal individual issue, and that situational factor, the attention of your coworker, can make infidelity more likely. So which reason is the worst? I guess maybe that's a question we want to ask, but I don't think we're really here to pass judgment on that. I think the emotional outcome is all the same, especially in our twenties when many of your relationships are highly formative. A relationship in which you've been cheated on can have many second order consequences on your ability to trust in the future and your own perceptions of commitment, which I think is why it's so important to kind of chat about how it's probably not your fault and don't cheat on your partners. Maybe that's something that needs to be said. Hopefully we all are on the same page there, But there is another idea that we can apply to cheating specifically why people cheat. That I found really fascinating and it comes up a lot in psychology around relationships and sex and things like that. And it's called the triangular theory of love. So the triangular theory of love suggests that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be kind of viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. So if you put put your hands up in a triangle, I'll explain. So on one side we've got intimacy, the next side we have passion, and the final side we have decision and commitment. This is what creates a good relationship. But when one of these sides fails, for example, intimacy or you no longer feel that passion for someone, or things like conflict and cheating piers the harmony of the triangle, that's when the relationship is probably going to fail and we might see greater degrees of infidelity. So, talking again about this amazing psychologist Kelly Campbell, there are a myriad of reasons that people cheat, but she's really quick to point out in this article that she wrote that it shouldn't actually be demonized. She makes this point, we don't know if humans are even meant to be monogamous. It's just that some people are naturally more in line with those views and others are not. So that's kind of the age old question does cheating make you a bad person? And our natural instinct might be to say, yes, of course it does. You shouldn't cheat on someone you love when you have a bond with someone, when you have agreed on exclusivity, Not honoring that and hurting the other person is pretty terrible. But like everything, there's a lot of gray area, and I think in some ways there's gray area about whether if you've cheated before that makes you a cheater for life, or whether cheating on someone is forgivable. Do we kind of allow people to make mistakes in relationships if we can call cheating that? And something else is like what constitutes cheating? And another huge question when really loading them off on you is is the evil that we kind of assign to cheating purely cultural because of the institution of monogamy that's been created by property riots and the church and religion. That's what we're going to discuss next. The phrase once a cheatah, always a cheatah. Might not be true. People can make mistakes, and whether they reoffend our guess or cheat again on the same or a different partner depends on how they rationalize their actions internally and at times unconsciously, And this has a lot to do with the psychology behind cognitive dissonance. So whether you cheat again will depend on how you change your attitude towards commitment or your partner after that first act. So dissonance reduction following a difficult moral decision can cause people to behave either more or less ethically in the future. So, using the cheating example, after you cheat on someone, whether that behavior becomes more or less likely your cheat in the future will differ based on your attitudes and how you attempt to justify your ethical choice. So if you cheat on someone, especially if you get caught, you'll probably feel really terrible. And if you're a good person, a moral person, I guess it will conflict with how we like to see ourselves trustworthy in a relationship, as good as respected, as loyal, So we experience this dissonance between the perception of ourselves and our actions. Cognitive dissonance is the term in psychology, and we're going to try to justify an action by minimizing aspects of the action you have chosen. So that's one way that you get over that dissonance of cheating. You might say, oh, it's not that bad, everyone does it. You minimize the aspects of the action. So someone chooses to justify their actions using this logic, they will probably do it again because they have some form of external justification or validation that is brought on by the reinforcement of the belief that it's not that bad because other people are doing it, because everyone does it, because you know, what do you expect? However, if you abscribe cheating to a personal flour and recognize that that you know that maybe it's because of your self esteem, maybe it's because you know there's tension in your relationship that you might be responsible for, you don't have open communication that external validation is no longer there. If you say to yourself that you've cheated because of situational and internal factors, you can control that behavior and you can see that it was a mistake that you don't want to make again. This is when long lasting change is possible because you've created and you counter belief about yourself that does not include cheating on a partner. You've decided this is not who I am. It was because of a situational factor or because of something I can control, like poor levels of confidence, and I can change that. So this is called self persuasion, and it creates a long lasting attitude change that results from this self justification. So if someone's cheated on you and you've decided to forgive them, firstly, God bless you forgiveness always, but if you're worried about whether they're going to cheat again, it's probably important to talk to them about how they see their now. If they say, oh, you know, it wasn't that bad, I think it's a lot more common than you think. I guess it was just to slip up, they probably will do it again. But if they say, oh, my gosh, it's just not who I am. That was such a mistake. I think it was because of this issue in our relationship that I want to fix. I've decided that, like, this isn't who I want to be. It was because of this, then it's unlikely that they'll do it again. So it really depends on the route a person chooses to take. Do they seek external or internal justification for their actions in order to minimize their guilt. And if that person feels no guilt, well, it might be because the relationship, well, the relationship you're in is with maybe a narcissist or someone with a pretty sinister personality trait that has manifested in infidelity, and you probably shouldn't stay with that person if they've hurt you and they don't feel guilty. Red flag, big red flag, get out of there. I think it is always important, though, to remember that humans make mistakes, and that includes your partner. There is no use, ever, I think, holding your partner to the standard of perfection because you'll kind of always be let down. You've got to love someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. And while infidelity is far from perfection, far I don't think you should always totally write off your partner because they've cheated in the past or they cheated before in your relationship. Obviously this is your call, but like we've said, sometimes cheating can be because of low self esteem, or they might feel as if they need attention from someone outside of the relationship to feel desirable or worthy. I think that kind of makes it seem like it's your fault that you should have been like hyping them up day and day night. But I think it's important to recognize that whilst the cheatah is ultimately at fault, there are things that can drive someone to cheat. So while we are evaluating the mistakes that cheats are making, it's also important to consider the type mistakes that lead people to cheat and whether it maybe you could have done it as well. And if you are in a relationship, you should be sure to kind of encourage your partner and communicate to them that they are good enough and deserving of your love. You know, I think your kind of role is to provide the security in a relationship. But again, not your fault. If someone cheats on you, it's not because you didn't love them enough. That's kind of stupid. But again I think if someone oversteps your boundary or hurts you, like I said, not your fault, I think, And in no way does the philosophy of people make mistakes mean you should just forgive and forget, especially if it's caused lasting damage or you think this person could do it again. I think your peace is probably not worth staying with them, and maybe it will cause you guys to reassess your relationship and communicate better, but that might not always be an option. Now, let's introduce some social psychology into the mix, which is my favorite. So we've looked at by all or evolutionary psychology. We've looked at personality in terms of narcissism, and at behavioral psychology. But what constitutes cheating and why is it that we are so disproving of it? So there are obvious reasons we don't like cheating, because it hurts us and it's awful and it sucks. But is that reaction only because we have been trained to expect monogamy? Is the rejection of cheating behaviors something that is culturally ingrained in us. I also think people have different conceptions of what cheating is, and that's important to set up first. For some, if their partner were to spend time with someone else in a non sexual way, but you know, for a company, that could be you know, something just non sexual, like I said, that could be deemed as cheating, whereas for others, things like kissing or floating might not be a big deal or in context where you know, maybe they go and see strippers or they're making out with a friend or a friend of the same gender. These things may be okay in some relationships and not others. I do have kind of a problem with like guys being like, oh, yeah, you know, my girlfriend like kissed another girl, but it's not cheating, because they kind of like undervalue especially if that woman's bisexual, because they undervalue the sexual urges, Like you know, I don't know. I think it's like a bit problematic to be like, oh, just because it's like between two women, I'm less offended, whereas if it was with a man, because I see women as less of a threat because I don't actually respect my girlfriend's sexuality anyhow, A bit of a segue, But I think that line of what you see is cheating or not is highly subjective, and it's based on what you decide as a couple. I don't think that it's something that you can determine by trial and error, like at all, set those boundaries and make them clear. But kind of that second part we're talking about, is cheating that bad and do our reactions to it only come about because of certain social norms? So it feels like we've spent the past century making a slew of progressive social changes that kind of undermine the sanctity of monogamy. I think it's more open and more common for couples to talk about the nature of their relationship than ever before, and I think we've reached a stage where relationships aren't as black and white as society has perhaps previously expected them to be. This is something really interesting that my friend Carolina, a friend of the show, told me. There's this idea in gender psychology and in gender studies that monogamy arose because of laws around property and the influence of religion. So men wanted to ensure that the offspric they were passing their inheritance onto were actually theirs, and so cheating became more taboo, especially for women, because it would undermine male sexual, emotional, economic, and physical authority. Also, as religious teachings made sex more conservative and wanted it to become more sacred. This restricted sex and intimacy into marriage, and people were shamed for breaking that sanctity of one man, one wife and their kind of marriage. Ben So, I think the cultural humiliation and pressure not to cheat throughout history because of the influence of these institutions and influences, has perhaps created the feelings we have now around cheating. Obviously it still naturally doesn't feel good, but emotions and reactions are, as we know, culturally conditioned in many ways from your parents, from your peers, from the media. And if history had promoted polyamory and multiple sexual partners or no marriage, maybe as a way to increase population and keep greater harmony, and that was our history, maybe these ideas around cheating, which by the way, it still see as pretty fucking apparent, but maybe those ideas around cheating would be less negative in the idea of sleeping with someone else or having emotional intimacy with someone else would be more accepted. I hope that we've enjoyed this kind of quick episode on the psychology of cheating. I think cheating, you know, as hard as it is, is kind of common in our twenties as we're testing out our boundaries and how we communicate with partners and kind of experiencing sex and intimacy and emotional disclosure for the first time. We hear a lot of stories about it. Perhaps you've experienced it, so I hope this kind of shed some light on why it happens, the reasons around why people cheat, but also kind of expresses that I don't think it's ever someone's like the person who's been cheated on's fault. There are so many theories that explain why people are driven to cheat, but so few theories that kind of put that blame on the partner. And I think especially interesting about this is this idea of like that culturally conditioned idea of monogamy, and whether we would see cheating as less bad if history had been different, if we didn't have the influence of property rights or religion. Obviously that's a bit of a fantasy, but just kind of something to think about anyhow. Another episode. I also just want to quickly say I got my Spotify wrapped for my podcast this year and there was just so much love you guys. You've all been listening so much and I really really appreciate it like a lot. I think at one point we were like twenty fourth in the charts in Australia, which is like insane considering I recall this on my phone in my Cambra bedroom. So thank you so much. And if you do like the podcasts and you feel called to support it more, please let write us a review on Apple Podcasts it really helps the community and the show kind of grow, brings more people into, bring new ideas, what they want to discuss, and hopefully they get something out of it like you have. So thanks again for listening. Next week we're talking about the psychology of loneliness another sad one, so I hope we're all ready for that. Zero