Who Will Cheat?

What Personality Traits May Influence Fidelity?

By: THEODORE MILLON and

      Seth Grossman

      Carrie Millon

      Sarah Meagher

      Rowena Ramnath

Does personality influence who is likely to be unfaithful and who is not? Apparently so.

D. M. Buss and Shackelford (1997) studied the relationship between a variety of personality traits and infidelity in recently married couples. After completing self-report personality inventories at home, subjects were asked to come into the lab and rate the probability that both they and their partners would engage in each of;

Six levels of extramarital interest:

Flirting, passionate kissing, a romantic date, a one-night stand, a brief affair, or a serious affair.

As part of the assessment, they also reported on their own narcissism, as well as that of their mates.

Not surprisingly, a strong correlation was found between conscientiousness and extramarital interest. This finding is perhaps expectable, as conscientiousness can be considered a tendency to do the right thing, to inhibit impulses, and to have social standards foremost in mind.

Subjects low in conscientiousness rated themselves as more likely to engage in extramarital behaviors. Moreover, the partners of those low in conscientiousness also rated them as being more likely to engage in extramarital behaviors.

Also associated with extramarital interest was narcissism for both men and women. Because narcissism can be viewed as a focus on the interests of self, this result was not unexpected.

The surprising finding, however, was that narcissism in women was more strongly correlated to extramarital interest than was narcissism in men across all of the six levels of behavior, with an emphasis on flirting, dating, and a brief affair.

Perhaps even more interesting, husbands’ ratings of their wives confirm their wives’ opinion. Husbands were able to predict, to some extent, that their wives might cheat based on the wife’s personality.

For anyone seeking to sort out the cheaters from the non-cheaters in advance on the basis of personality characteristics, a combination of low conscientiousness and high narcissism is especially predictive of extramarital interest. Such individuals are more likely to focus on their own desires to the exclusion of social standards and then to act on their impulses.

References

Personality Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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