0.05 x 0.50 x $50,000 = $1,250
So the benefit of the extramarital sex is significantly lower for her than for the other woman. She would have to value it as more than $1,250 in monetary terms in order for her to cheat.
Anything that increases the chance a cheater will be caught (for example, if the likelihood of contracting an STD is high) or increases the chance that the partner will divorce him/her (for example, if he/she credibly commits to leaving) increases the expected cost of cheating.
Obviously, financial losses are only a convenient way to explain the costs in this analysis. Other considerations, those harder to measure, are also costs associated with being caught cheating. For example, cheating men and women risk the emotional cost of losing their children and, even if they don’t lose their children, imposing hardship on those children in the case of divorce. Many cheaters, both men and women, risk retaliation for their infidelity in the form of physical violence from their partners. They risk losing their spouse’s love for them, which is something most married people value. They risk being expelled from their faith communities or being socially isolated by family and friends. Others risk damaging their careers, particularly if the affair is with a colleague or client. Even the risk of living alone for an undetermined period imposes an expected cost on someone contemplating infidelity.
All of these factors, and probably many others, enter into the cost side of this infidelity cost-benefit analysis.
In the years that follow an extramarital relationship, a cheater may not feel that the decision to cheat was as rational as I have portrayed it to be here, especially if the expected costs have become real costs (for example, if the spouse both discovered their infidelity and asked for a divorce), but even decisions we later regret, in fact even the worst decisions you have made in your life, can be a rational decision at the time that they were made.
WOULD YOU CONFESS TO VISITING A SEX WORKER?
Many of the men who have had extramarital sex have done so with a sex worker. I have already said that 25 percent of men say they have had sex with another person while married, but if we consider only the subsample of men who have not purchased sex on the market, that number drops to 19 percent. Given that less than 20 percent of men will use a prostitute in their lifetime, this evidence suggests that men who are willing to buy sex are also much more willing to cheat on their wives.
A study conducted by Canadian sociologist Chris Atchison called “A John’s Voice” (www.johnsvoice.ca) surveyed a large number of purchasers of sex workers and asked specifically whether or not they had discussed this behavior with their partners. Most of them had spent over a decade of buying sex on the market and had purchased sex on and off the street. Just under half of the men in the sample (371 out of 781) were married or in a common-law relationship at the time of the survey, and 25 percent of those who were not married reported they were in a relationship.
Fewer than 50 percent of these men had ever discussed their prostitute use with anyone. Of those men who had, 23 percent told male friends, 17 percent told other sex sellers, 10 percent told other sex buyers, and 9 percent told female friends.
Roughly 6 percent of the men in the sample had revealed to a spouse or other sex partner that they had used the services of sex workers. Of the men who were in a relationship at the time of the survey, 79 percent reported that they actively hid their sex-buying from their partners, which seems to suggest that 21 percent did not (presumably either because they don’t care or they believed there was little chance they would be caught) and 63 percent worried their partner would find out. When asked what they thought would be the repercussions of their partner’s discovery that they frequented sex workers, 61 percent thought they would divorce, 11 percent thought it would cause arguments, 10.5 percent thought their partner would be upset, 5 percent thought it would result in “general disaster,” and just over 1 percent thought it would result in violence.
The survey also asked about the possible reactions of family members and coworkers. In response to that question, 41 percent thought that if they were outed as johns that they would face “shame, embarrassment, stigma or ridicule,” 17 percent thought they would lose friends or family, 13 percent thought there would be more than one form of repercussion, and 13 percent didn’t care or felt there would be no repercussions.
This is because decisions are made based on the likelihood of a bad outcome, not based on the certainty of a bad outcome. If everyone who cheated knew with certainty that they would be caught, knew with certainty that their spouse and community would respond negatively, and knew with certainty the costs they would incur as a result, I think you would agree with me that there would be significantly less marital infidelity than there currently is.
THE MYTH OF MONOGAMY
Humans, like other mammals, are not naturally monogamous; even the overly romanticized female sloth, rumored to be the most monogamous of all the primates, will sneak out for a night of coitus with a nearby sloth if she gets the chance. Understanding the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis that determines whether or not a man or woman cheats requires an understanding of the biological payoff to giving into the desire to have a sexual relationship outside of marriage.
As we discussed in chapter 2, the males of our species demonstrate a biological desire for multiple sex partners. The best descriptor of this male trait, in my mind, is called the Coolidge Effect. The Coolidge Effect describes how males of any mammalian species, including humans, who are sexually receptive to a sexual partner, will, eventually, lose interest in copulation completely unless a new partner is introduced; males are hardwired not to invest in repeatedly inseminating a female that they have already inseminated.
Psychologists Frank Beach and Lisbeth Jordan tested this effect in laboratories in the 1950s by placing male and female rats in a container and allowing them to copulate until the male was exhausted. At the point of exhaustion, the male lost all interest in copulation, despite persistent attempts by the female rats to encourage him to continue (this scenario may sound familiar to some of you). When the researchers introduced a new female rat into the container, however, the male rat regained his interest in copulation and proceeded to inseminate the new female rat.
Just in case you are either a sexually frustrated women who is tempted to think that introducing another woman to your bed will stimulate your male partner’s sexual interest, or a sexually bored man who thinks this is convincing argument to share with your partner, you should know that the introduction of the new female did not renew the male’s sexual interest in the original female rat—just the new one that was introduced.
The popular theory for why males behave this way is that, throughout evolutionary history, the men who have had the most sexual partners (we can call him Australo-promiscuous, if you like) were the same men who had the most children. We are descendants of the most promiscuous males, meaning that modern-day men are hardwired to desire multiple sexual partners.
Females are more restricted in the number of children they can produce and having multiple sexual partners does not increase the quantity of children they will bear over their lifetime. It can, however, improve the quality of their children. Children who are taller and healthier are more likely to survive to adulthood and have children of their own. As a result, we are descendants of the women who sought out the tallest and healthiest sexual partners to be the fathers of their children.
Some evidence that women are hardwired to seek high-quality sexual partners for the purpose of fertility can be found in studies that show that women change their preference for sexual partners depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle. For example, evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and Geoffrey Miller found that when the participants in their study were ovulating, 93 percent stated that they would prefer a poor yet creative man for a short-term sexual relationship to a financially successful but uncreative man. When this exercise was repeated with participants who were not ovulating, only 58
percent of women preferred the poor yet creative man as a short-term sexual partner.
These effects of ovulation on mate choice were not found when women were asked about long-term relationships. You might be tempted to predict that wealth matters more for long-term relationships than it does for short-term relationships where women are looking for good providers instead of good genes. However, in this particular study when the choice of long-term partner was a poor yet creative artist or a wealthy yet uncreative artist, approximately 84 percent of both ovulating and non-ovulating women expressed a preference for the poor artist.
Another study, by evolutionary psychologists Elizabeth Pillsworth and Martie Haselton, is even more to our point. It finds that women who are married to less-attractive men were more likely to seek extramarital relationships when they are ovulating than are women who are married to more-attractive men. Those same women, who were more inclined to seek an extramarital sexual partner, also reported that their husbands were more attentive and affectionate when they were most fertile; less attractive men seem to realize on some level that they must protect their wives from extramarital relationships by rewarding them for their fidelity through affection.
BIRTH CONTROL CHANGES WOMEN’S PREFERENCE FOR MEN
If ovulation gives women a biological impetus to seek more attractive sexual partners, then a man who wishes to curb his wife’s desire to stray might want to encourage her to take an oral contraceptive that eliminates ovulation all together. The question is: what happens to their relationship when they decide to have children?
According to a paper by scientists Alexandra Alvergne and Virpi Lummaa, women who take oral contraceptives lose the stronger preference for a man who is masculine in appearance that occurs in ovulating women when they are most fertile.
This research implies that in societies where large numbers of women are taking oral contraceptives, the ideal of an “attractive” mate is moving away from one who looks like he will provide good genes (that is, more masculine-looking men) toward one who looks like he might be a caretaker (that is, more feminine-looking men). A technological advance, the invention of oral contraceptives, has led to a change in mate preference for women.
I call this the Justin Bieber Effect.
What happens, though, when a woman who has been taking the birth control pill during courtship and early marriage stops taking it because she wishes to become pregnant? I have already said that it is when a woman is young that she is most likely to cheat on her husband. The timing of female cheating is then consistent with the view that women cheat in order to seek better genes for their children. The Bieber Effect might explain why these women didn’t seek mates who were more attractive in the first place; oral contraceptives suppressed their biological imperative to finding a more masculine mate.
In reality, good genes are a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, their market price is inflated. The high price of good genes prevents many women from finding a long-term mate with all the qualities she would ideally pass on to her children. It doesn’t prevent her, however, from using a different strategy—that of marrying a man with other good qualities, like being a good father to her children, and then finding an extramarital sex partner to be those children’s biological father.
Of course, the strategy fails if a woman is caught cheating by her husband and, as a result, he divorces her. This implies that the benefit in terms of increased gene quality must be great in order for women to take that chance.
The point of this evidence on human biology is that it tells us that the benefits of being unfaithful to one’s partner are different for women than they are for men.
For example, it implies that when a man cheats, it is because he is desirable enough to persuade a woman, other than his wife, to have extramarital sex with him. He can do this because the benefits to a short-term relationship with a man who has good genes, measured in the quality of her children, is high for the woman he attracts.
It also implies that when a woman cheats, it is not because she is highly desirable but because her husband is less desirable than the men who are willing to have extramarital sex with her. She will do this because there is a benefit, measured in the quality of her children, to having a short-term relationship with a man who has good genes.
IT’S NOT YOU; IT’S ME
This idea that a man’s willingness to cheat is a function of his own quality and a woman’s willingness to cheat is a function of her husband’s quality is a testable hypothesis that was taken on by Bruce Elmslie and Edinaldo Tebaldi, whose research we discussed earlier in this chapter.
The idea that infidelity is related to fertility is supported by their research. Men are fertile for a longer period of their lives; men are more likely to be unfaithful to their wives as they themselves age, but only up to the age of age of 55, after which point the likelihood that they will cheat drops off. The relationship between women’s infidelity and age has a similar pattern (increasing and then decreasing), but with a peak in the likelihood of infidelity occurring much earlier—around the age of 45—when a woman’s ability to reproduce is in decline. It is at this point that the reproductive benefits to a woman of having extramarital sex end since she is unlikely to have any other children.
Using educational achievement as an indicator of gene quality, they find no evidence that educated men are more likely to have extramarital sex than are less-educated men—in fact they find that men who have only a high school diploma or less are about 3 percent more likely to cheat than are men with a college or graduate degree. This evidence seems to refute the hypothesis that high-quality men are more able to cheat than are low-quality men. The authors attribute this result to the fact that some men are having sex with prostitutes and that gene quality does not determine a sex worker’s willingness to have sex with a married man.
If women are seeking short-term sexual partners based on gene quality, however, because they have been hardwired by years of evolutionary forces to select fathers who will give their children the greatest chance of survival, then is a university degree what they are really looking for?
As a woman myself, I have to say that to me the ideal short-term sex partner looks more like someone who would scale a cliff to tackle a tiger on my behalf, rather than a man who can solve systems of equations. I suspect it is their measurement of attractiveness (i.e., education) that has made it difficult to prove their hypothesis that men with high gene quality are more likely to cheat.
Having said that, women whose husbands have a college or graduate degree are 3 percent less likely to cheat than are women whose husbands have only a high school diploma or less. Men don’t seem to be more or less likely to cheat dependent on their wives’ education. This does lend some evidence to support the hypothesis that for women it is their husband’s characteristics that determine whether or not they cheat, but men’s decisions are independent of that consideration.
That conclusion leaves something out, however: it assumes that a husband’s low educational achievement increases a woman’s likelihood of cheating because it increases the benefit of having sex with a superior man through the good-genes effect. This argument ignores the fact that a woman’s decision to cheat is determined by the expected cost of cheating as well as the benefit, and we already know that the cost of cheating is partially measured in the income she will forgo if he divorces her.
IF I HAD A RICH MAN
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 thin
k 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.
CAN FINANCIAL INCENTIVES REDUCE FEMALE INFIDELITY?
Evidence from an unlikely source suggests that marriage contracts can reduce female infidelity but may actually increase male infidelity.
In Uganda, men’s families pay a price to the families of their sons’ brides that acts as a security deposit against future bad behavior. Despite laws to prevent the demanding of refunds, a man who suspects that his wife is having sexual relations with another man will return her to her family and ask for his bride price back.
A recent study by David Bishai and Shoshana Gross-bard uses a nationally representative Ugandan data set collected in confidential face-to-face interviews with both husbands and wives to determine if these contracts influence sexual behavior. In the whole sample, 5 percent of wives and 19 percent of husbands reported having been unfaithful in the previous twelve months. In the sample that included only couples in which the husband paid a bride price, 2 percent of wives and 21 percent of husbands had been unfaithful. In the sample that includes only couples in which the husband had not paid a bride price, 10 percent of wives and 16 percent of men had been unfaithful.
Dollars and Sex Page 21
