Thread by @datepsych

Sex differences in reasons for infidelity 🧵:

Men are more likely to cheat when the opportunity is available.

Women are more likely to cheat when unhappy, not attracted to a current partner, and to switch relationships.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Consistent with the mate switching hypothesis in this study. An equal number of men and women reported infidelity, but:

Men who do cheat tend to cheat with more partners over time.

Women who cheat tend to do it less frequently.

Women are also more likely to tell their partners, consistent with cheating being concurrent with leaving a relationship (potentially for the new partner):

Women's relationships are more likely to end following infidelity and women are more likely to begin a new relationship with the affair partner:

Also in this paper: men were more likely to be suspicious and more likely to detect infidelity. Women may not be better at hiding it.

Potentially related to a higher sensitivity to extra-pair paternity from the evolutionary perspective.

Similar in another paper: "men were more likely than women to judge that their partners would commit sexual infidelity in the future."

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

What makes people less likely to cheat?

Sex differences again: men simply indicate a higher willingness.

But for women, it's especially low when current relationship satisfaction is high.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

"People's deployment of cheating strategy depended on the fitness benefits of their relationship and the potential costs of cheating. People would be more likely to hold back from cheating if they were in a fitness-beneficial relationship and if the costs of doing so were high."

Also an interesting paper:

When imagining committing infidelity, both men and women report higher negative emotions than when they recall having actually cheated.

And women report higher negative emotionality than men.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

General takeaway from this: we see qualitative and quantitative sex differences in infidelity.

There is some question about the "cheating gap" closing. This may be true if you look at "has ever cheated."

If you count the number of infidelities, rather than "had ever cheated," men still do seem to cheat "more."

Why? Higher sociosexuality in men (associated with infidelity), higher sexual pleasure from casual sexual encounters, higher libido, higher rates of antisocial behavior and risk behavior.

Additionally, a drive for novelty and evolved sexual strategies: men benefit more from infidelity from the perspective of reproductive fitness than women do.

True also for serial monogamy:

academic.oup.com/beheco/article…

Individuals can cheat for any reason or no reason at all, but we're speaking of trends between groups here.

For women, infidelity is more closely linked with the end of a relationship (and the beginning of a new relationship with the new partner).

This is why men are more likely to cheat in a happy relationship. They cite relationship dissatisfaction less. Infidelity for men is less likely to be relationship-seeking behavior. It's more likely to be sex-seeking behavior.

Important to understand this, because men often attribute what their own motives or behaviors might be to the motives of women.

For example:

You might imagine cheating because a woman was simply hot and available.

But she cheated because she was done with the relationship.