OKCupid Study: Cheaters Hot, If They’re Chicks
A new OKCupid study on cheaters found that infidelity is kind of a turn-on… for heterosexual males.
The OKCupid study on cheaters is one of several based on the dating site — which itself has done on the extensive metrics on dating, mating, and courtship behaviors.
The OKCupid cheaters study wasn’t done by the site itself, however, but the site Recovery.org — and it wasn’t a study in the sense that data was extensively collected across a large sample size and peer reviewed.
Instead, Recovery.org did a small bit of intel with 40 fake profiles. Hardly a definitive result, but compelling nonetheless.
In the site’s To Catch A Cheater sting, all the data was culled into an infographic, but the precipitate was explained first:
“So, to very quickly reiterate: I’d set up 40 accounts on the dating site OKCupid, half male and half female. The men and women were split into four different categories: blatant cheaters, ambiguously married folk, recently off-the-market people, and a control group of totally single non-cheaters. They were spread between America’s five most unfaithful cities.”
It’s worth noting that the OKCupid study of cheaters is specifically both monogamy-centric and heteronormative — that is to say that the “research” is predicated on the assumption that all involved approach relationships in a standard, monogamous, “vanilla” way. (Some mention of subterfuge or hiding was made for the “Brazen Cheats” category.)
Another consideration is the site’s focus on addiction recovery, and the mention of “sex addicted cheaters.” While the view is a common one, psychology professionals have been in part moving away from such diagnoses — increasingly preferring the idea that such notions make a high sex drive a sickness. (That does not excuse infidelity, but neither does it account for those who are in a non-standard or not monogamous relationship.)
Ultimately, it seemed overall that the OKCupid study of cheaters reveals that the best way to spark conversation on the site is to appear semi or somewhat taken. However, while the messages received were higher in volume, they weren’t always positive. Peep the interesting results below.
