Dollars and Sex (32 page)

Sometimes it seems that every time I open my Web browser, there is news being reported that a high-ranking politician or high-paid corporate executive or athlete has been caught cheating on his wife. The media never reports on the affairs of married men in lower-paying jobs, of course, since there would then be no time to report other news.

The problem with the imbalance in visibility between the affairs of the wealthy and the poor is that it has left many with the impression that no matter how unfaithful those close to us are, no one is as unfaithful as a wealthy man.

If you think back to when we talked about the mystery of monogamy in
chapter 5
, this presumption that wealthy men cheat more makes economic sense. Just as it is wealthy men who can afford to have additional wives, it is also wealthy men who can afford to have sex partners on the side. Even if wealthy men do not explicitly pay their extramarital sex partners, or even give them gifts (such as cars, apartments, or clothing), they are bound to have an easier time attracting women who are willing to be the “bit on the side” in the hope that one day they will become the second (or third) wife of a wealthy man.

The thing is, while the observation that monogamy is the marriage institution preferred by wealthy men is a mystery, the fact the wealthy men are less monogamous (in term of fidelity to their one wife) is actually a myth.

There is no evidence that rich men cheat in their marriages any more than do poor men. In fact, after controlling for a variety of different effects, Donald Cox finds very little connection between a man's income and his willingness to cheat on his wife.

The real effect of income on cheating is with women; women in poorer households are significantly more likely to cheat than are women in wealthier households. That evidence is supplied in Cox's paper and also in Robin Baker's well-known book
Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex
. Baker says that while 10 percent of all men on average are raising children they mistakenly believe to be their own (the same figure as found by David Buss), when we look at men who are at the bottom of the income distribution, that share increases to 30 percent. The share of men in the top of the income distribution who are raising children who are not their own, however, is a mere 2 percent. If this is true, it is very compelling evidence that women are more likely to cheat on poor husbands than they are to cheat on wealthy husbands.

The cost-benefit analysis discussed above illustrates why this relationship between income and infidelity for women is what we would expect. Women who are living in poverty have less to lose financially if their husbands leave them as the result of infidelity than do women whose household income provides them with a comfortable life. It might also be the case that poorer women are hoping to use infidelity as a means of finding a mate who not only supplies good genes but also is a better provider.

While a higher income doesn't increase the likelihood of a man's infidelity, and actually decreases woman's likelihood of infidelity, the characteristic that really predicts infidelity isn't income but power. If that's not a completely new revelation, you might be surprised to learn that powerful women are just as likely to be unfaithful as are powerful men.

A study by a group of Dutch researchers (Joris Lammers, Janka Stoker, Jennifer Jordan, Monique Pollmann, and Diederik Stapel) uses data collected from managers, team leaders, and CEOs that report how often these managers had been unfaithful, measured their willingness to cheat again, and probed both the managers' opportunities for cheating and their confidence in their ability to seduce new lovers.

Among their respondents, 26 percent had cheated on their partner at least once. Those who wielded more power in their jobs were not only more likely to be among the cheaters, but the higher up the corporate
ladder they had climbed, the more extramarital encounters they reported, and the more likely they were to say that they expected to cheat again in the future.

What explains the link between workplace power and fidelity? Business travel and long hours at the office provide opportunities to cheat (and reduce the probability of being caught), but that is only part of the story. The most convincing statistical explanation has to do with confidence; more powerful business people reported much higher levels of assurance that they could find a sexual partner should they want one.

The women in this study behaved just like the men in indicating a history of cheating; more powerful women cheated more and felt more confident about their ability to seduce new sexual partners.

What I find interesting about these results is that they suggest that one of the reasons why we have observed lower levels of female infidelity in the past is not because women are more inclined to be faithful, but rather because they have traditionally occupied fewer positions of power. If this is true, then the next generation of women might be as promiscuous as men.

CHEATERS NEVER PROSPER

The one piece of evidence that appears repeatedly in the literature is that people who cheat in their marriages are less happy than those who are faithful.

The Elmslie and Tebaldi paper finds that married women who reported being “not too happy” were 10 percentage points more likely to report having cheated on their current husbands than were women who reported being “very happy.” Unhappy married men are even more likely to also be unfaithful; they were 12 percentage points more likely to report having cheated on their current wife than were men who reported being “very happy.”

That difference between male and female unhappiness when cheating could be related to prostitute use. A different study on happiness by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald finds that not only were those who reported having been unfaithful in the previous year less happy, but those who reported prostitute use were unhappier still.

The reason for the relationship between unhappiness and infidelity is unclear. Maybe infidelity itself is making people unhappy. Or maybe unhappy people are more likely to have an extramarital relationship, perhaps using it as a strategy to exit an unhappy relationship. Others may be unhappy for another reason unrelated to marriage and are using extramarital sex as a way to deal with that unhappiness.

Psychologists Denise Previti and Paul Amato used data collected over seventeen years to see if infidelity is a direct cause of divorce or a consequence of an unhappy marriage already on its way to divorce. They find that men and women in couples who are already likely to divorce are more likely to have sex outside of their marriage; infidelity is the consequence, not the direct cause, of an already unhappy marriage. They also find, not surprisingly, that following infidelity, the quality of the marriage deteriorates further, and it is that further deterioration in the quality of a marriage that increases the likelihood of divorce.

Infidelity, it appears, is both a consequence, and a cause, of unhappy marriages.

FINAL WORDS

You are probably wondering if Leonard's second wife ever found out about his attempts to find sexual relationships outside of their marriage. I honestly don't know, but I suspect she knew when she married him that he was likely to stray if he had the chance. Why would she agree to marry a man who would have a hard time being faithful? Probably because she correctly predicted that he was unlikely to ever get the opportunity. His new job promotion might have given her cause of concern, but she really needn't have worried—the small amount of power he held was not enough to persuade young fertile women that his genes were worth the trouble.

Infidelity is an economic story, but not for the reason you might have expected—that wealthy men are the most likely to be unfaithful to their wives—but because the decision to have, or not have, extramarital sex is the
solution to a cost-benefit problem. The costs in this story are a function of several economic factors, including lost income in the case of divorce, while the benefits are, for the most part, biological.

For example, legislation that allows divorce courts to financially penalize adulterers should increase the cost of cheating and decrease its prevalence. In the absence of that legislation, prenuptial agreements that stipulate financial penalties for violations of the contract should serve the same purpose. The movement of women into positions of authority in the workplace appears to be increasing female infidelity not just because powerful people are more likely to cheat, but also because it gives women greater opportunities to be unfaithful without being caught. Increased access to the Internet may not be increasing infidelity, on average (as we saw in
chapter 6
), but it does reduce the expected cost of cheating by making it easier for those whose impulse it is to cheat to fulfill that desire.

One interesting implication of this argument that the changing economic climate contributes to the propensity to cheat, or not to cheat, is that it suggests that individuals can structure their relationships in a way that decreases the probability of divorce.

For some, that might be writing binding contracts that explicitly forbid infidelity. In the past, that contract was essentially sworn at the marriage altar, but explicit contracts can impose financial penalties in a way that making an oath before family and friends cannot. Betraying marriage vows can be costly, in ways that I have already mentioned, but for some, additional financial penalties can increase the cost just enough to prevent infidelity.