Beliefs about the outcomes of extramarital sexual relationships as a function of the gender of the "cheating spouse." Sex Roles: A Journal of Research v38, n3-4 (Feb, 1998):301
Sprecher, Susan; Regan, Pamela C.; McKinney,
Kathleen Beliefs about the outcomes of
extramarital sexual relationships as a function of the gender of the
"cheating spouse." Sex Roles: A Journal of Research v38,
n3-4 (Feb, 1998):301 (11 pages). [Long
Display]
COPYRIGHT 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation
Marital infidelity has a long history in human existence (Harvey,
1995). In U.S. samples alone, the percentage of married men and
women reporting at least one incidence of extramarital sex (ES)
ranges from 13% to 50% or higher (e.g., Blumstein & Schwartz,
1983; Greeley, Michael, & Smith, 1990; Hunt, 1974; Kinsey,
Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard,
1953; Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). For example,
a recent NORC study based on a representative sample of the U.S.
population indicates that approximately 25% of married men and 15%
of married women reported having engaged in ES at least once
(Laumann et al., 1994). Although marital infidelity is not uncommon,
attitude surveys reveal that there is widespread disapproval of
extramarital sexual relationships in the U.S. (e.g., Davis &
Smith, 1991; Glenn & Weaver, 1979; Laumann et al., 1994;
Thompson, 1984; Weis & Slosnerick, 1981).
Much of the earlier, descriptive research on normative attitudes
toward ES relied upon global questions (e.g., "What is your opinion
about a married person having sexual relations with someone other
than the marriage partner?"; Sponaugle, 1989); such items measure
general approval or disapproval, but cannot assess other, more
specific beliefs and attitudes people may have about ES (e.g.,
possible outcomes of the ES relationship, evaluations of the
individuals involved therein). For the current investigation, we
conducted a person perception experiment to examine a variety of
specific responses people may have to an ES relationship. The person
perception paradigm has been used in past sexuality research to
study reactions to premarital sexuality (e.g., O'Sullivan, 1995;
Sprecher, McKinney, & Orbuch, 1987), and is particularly useful
for examining beliefs about male vs. female ES behavior because
participants are not aware that the focus is on differences in
attitudes about men vs. women and therefore are less likely to
provide socially desirable responses. Specifically, we examine men's
and women's beliefs about the individual and interpersonal outcomes
of a common type of sexual relationship, one that involves a married
person and a single person. This type of "forbidden sexual
relationship" (Richardson, 1988), particularly when it involves a
married man and a single woman, may be quite common. Richardson
(1988) estimated that between 18% and 32% of single women become
involved with a married man. However, we have very little
information about how people might react to and perceive such a
relationship if it occurs to someone in their social network. Our
research explores the role of gender in people's beliefs about the
outcome of the "forbidden sexual relationship" between the married
person and the single person.
Gender is an important variable to consider in any investigation
of extramarital sexuality. Previous research has found that gender
is related to ES in a number of ways. Compared to women, men hold
more permissive attitudes about ES (e.g., Thompson, 1984), are more
likely to express an interest in having an extramarital relationship
(e.g., Buunk & Bakker, 1995; Seal, Agostinelli, & Hannett,
1994; Thompson, 1984), are more likely to engage in one (e.g.,
Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Laumann et al., 1994; Thompson,
1984), and report that they are less emotionally committed to their
ES partner(s) (e.g., Thompson, 1984). Research also indicates that a
double standard exists in regard to censure for extramarital sexual
relationships. While ES behavior is not considered acceptable for
either gender, it seems to be more tolerated or expected in men (for
discussion, see Collins & Coltrane, 1995; Reiss, 1973; Reiss
& Lee, 1988; although for an exception, see Margolin, 1989).
Two major theoretical perspectives have been used to explain the
association between gender and ES behaviors and attitudes.
Evolutionary theorists suggest that gender differences in sexual
behaviors and attitudes are a result of different obstacles to
reproductive success that men and women faced in their ancestral
past. Male reproductive success requires maximizing the number of
genes passed to the next generation; hence, men should seek to
engage in sexual activity with as many fertile: partners as possible
and should hold permissive sexual attitudes. Female reproductive
success requires maximizing an offspring's chances of survival;
women, then, should demonstrate less permissive sexual attitudes and
should confine their sexual activity to long-term relationships with
committed partners who control many resources (e.g., Buss &
Schmitt, 1993; Kenrick, Sadalia, Groth, & Trost, 1990; Symons,
1979). According to the social context perspective (e.g., Oliver
& Hyde, 1993), gender differences in sexuality are shaped by the
patterns of reinforcement and punishment that men and women receive
for their sexual behavior; men generally receive more positive
reinforcement for seeking out and engaging in sexual activity with
multiple partners, whereas women generally receive more
reinforcement for confining their sexual activity to committed,
love-based relationships involving a single long-term partner (e.g.,
marriage).
These theories may be more relevant for explaining gender
differences in actual ES behavior than for making predictions
concerning how male vs. female ES behavior will be viewed or
evaluated. Nonetheless, both evolutionary and social cultural
factors may interact to influence the development of societal sexual
norms and scripts that dictate who is appropriate as a sexual
partner and the appropriate reasons or motives for having sex or for
entering a sexual relationship (see, for example, Gagnon &
Simon, 1973; Reiss, 1981). For example, research across several
sexual domains (including both premarital and extramarital contexts)
indicates that the love-sex association is stronger for females than
for males, whereas the pleasure-sex association is stronger for
males than for females. That is, while both genders may be motivated
to have sex as an expression of affection and love, love/affection
is more important to women than to men and pleasure is more
important to men than to women. This has been found not only in men
and women's actual sexual behaviors (e.g., Carroll, Volk, &
Hyde, 1985; Glass & Wright, 1985), but also in people's beliefs
about male and female sexuality (e.g., Regan & Berscheid, 1995).
These findings suggest that an alternative form of a double standard
(one more favorable toward women) might exist when considering
impressions about the outcomes of an extramarital relationship. We
hypothesize that a married woman who engages in an extramarital
relationship may be viewed as motivated primarily by feelings of
love and commitment for the new partner, and therefore the perceived
prognosis for the new relationship may be positive. Conversely, a
married man who has an extramarital relationship may be viewed as
having nonrelational motives (pleasure, etc.) and thus the new
relationship may be viewed as temporary. Indeed, in Richardson's
(1988) interviews with single women involved with married men, most
of the women said they entered the relationship assuming it would be
short-lived.
How the "forbidden sexual relationship" between a single woman
(man) and a married man (woman) is viewed may also depend on the
degree to which the married man (woman) is perceived to be invested
in his/her marriage. Investment theory, a theory about the stability
of relationships (Rusbult, 1983), states that the greater the number
of investments in the relationship (e.g., children, shared
possessions, years together), the greater its stability. Indeed,
prior research indicates that people who are invested in a
relationship are less likely to leave it (Rusbult, 1983) and are
viewed as less likely to leave it (Rusbult, 1980). We hypothesize
that a person who is presented as highly invested in a marriage (has
children and has been married for many years) will be viewed as less
likely to leave a spouse for an extramarital sexual partner than
someone less invested in the marriage. We are also interested in
exploring whether a person's marital investments interact with
gender to affect the perceived outcome of the extramarital sexual
relationship. For example, marital investments may decrease the
perceived likelihood that a married woman will leave her husband for
an extramarital partner, but have no effect or increase the
perceived likelihood that a married man will exit the marriage. In
order to be able to make comparisons with previous research on
beliefs about male vs. female sexuality (e.g., Regan &
Berscheid, 1985), we conduct our study also with young adults.
METHOD
Participants and Procedure
The participants were 209 undergraduate students (80 men and 129
women) from a Midwest, public university. The mean age of the sample
was 20.6. Although information on racial/ethnic background of the
sample was not obtained, the undergraduate population of the larger
university was approximately 86% white, 8% black, and 6% various
other racial/ethnic backgrounds.
The students participated on a volunteer basis during class time.
Each student received a 2-page experimental booklet that contained
directions, a vignette about a sexual/emotional relationship between
a single friend and a married opposite-sex person in the workplace,
and a brief section of dependent measures. The directions indicated
that the students' participation was anonymous and voluntary.
The Materials
Eight versions of the vignette were created to correspond to a 2
(Gender of Married Person [Gender of Single Person]) x 2 (Marriage
Length: 5 vs. 15 years) x 2 (Number of Children in Marriage: 0 vs.
2) factorial design. Each participant was randomly assigned to one
of the eight vignettes. The vignette was introduced as a "situation
you could possibly encounter." Following is the general vignette
used with the manipulations:
Imagine you have a close friend named Ann (Bob). She (He) is a
single woman (man) in her (his) thirties and is currently employed
as a CPA at a local accounting firm. She (He) has enjoyed this
position for a number of years with no complaints. She (He) has
confided in you about a situation that has developed. She (He) has
been involved emotionally and sexually with one of the other
accountants in the firm for the past year. The man (woman) she (he)
is having the affair with has been married for five (15) years and
has no (two) children. He (she) says that he (she) loves Ann (Bob)
and vows to leave his wife (her husband) to be with her (him). Ann
(Bob) wonders where the relationship will go.
Dependent Measures
Participants were asked seven questions that assessed their views
of the relationship and possible relationship outcomes. There were
two versions of the dependent measures corresponding to the gender
of the friend (and the gender of the married "other"). Below are the
seven questions presented for the "married man vignette." Each
question was followed by a 1 (not at all) to 5 (a great deal)
response scale. The questions were:
1. How much do you think the man is attracted to Ann?
2. How committed do you think the man is to building a life with
Ann?
3. How much do you think the man loves Ann?
4. If the man were to leave his wife, how likely is it that the
man and Ann would ever marry?
5. How much of a trustworthy person do you think the man is?
6. How likely do you think it is that the man will become
emotionally and/or sexually involved with someone else?
7. How likely is it that the man will leave his wife?
RESULTS
The first column of Table I presents the mean responses to the
seven questions for all participants (across all versions of the
vignette). Overall, the participants believed that the married
person presented in the vignette experienced considerable
attraction, some love, but a low level of commitment for his or her
extramarital partner (i.e., the participant's hypothetical single
friend). Furthermore, the participants believed that there was a low
likelihood that the married person would leave his or her spouse,
but that if he or she did leave, that there was a moderate chance he
or she would marry the current extramarital partner. The
participants did not view the married person as very trustworthy and
believed that there was a high chance that he or she would have
another extramarital relationship. Thus, overall, a "cheating
spouse" is viewed somewhat negatively.
To examine whether the participants' perceptions of the
extramarital relationship varied as a function of the version of the
vignette, a 2 [Gender of Married Person (also Gender of Single
Person)] x 2 (Number of Children) x 2 (Length of Marriage) x 2
(Participant Gender) multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was
conducted on responses to the dependent measures.
As hypothesized, participants' perceptions of the extramarital
relationship were strongly influenced by the gender of the married
individual (i.e., a married man with a single woman vs. a married
woman with a single man). The MANOVA revealed a significant
multivariate Gender main effect [Pillai's V = .131, F(1,193) = 4.04,
p [less than] .001]. Follow-up univariate analyses of variance
(ANOVAs) were then conducted on each of the seven items, utilizing
the Bonferroni procedure to guard against inflating the Type I error
rate and employing a familywise alpha of .05 (resulting in a
significance level of p [less than] .007). These analyses revealed a
significant univariate main effect of gender for four items.
Specifically, a married man (having an affair with a single woman)
was perceived as experiencing less love and less commitment in the
extramarital relationship than a married woman (having an affair
with a single man). In addition, a married man was perceived as less
likely to marry the extramarital partner and was perceived as more
likely to have another extramarital relationship than a married
woman. A married man having an affair was also perceived as less
trustworthy and as less likely to leave the current spouse than a
married woman having an affair, although these results failed to
reach significance when Bonferroni protection was applied (both at p
[less than] .05).
[TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE I OMITTED]
There were no significant multivariate or univariate main effects
for our two investment manipulations (years married, children),
which also failed to significantly interact with gender at the
multivariate or univariate level. However, our analyses did reveal a
significant multivariate Participant Gender main effect [Pillai's V
= .078, F(1,193) = 2.25, p [less than] .05], as well as one
significant univariate main effect for the item "likelihood that
married person will become involved with another partner" [F(1,193)
= 9.40, p = .002]. Female participants were more likely to endorse
this belief than male participants. Finally, the MANOVA revealed a
significant interaction effect between Participant Gender and Length
of the Marriage [Pillai's V = .077, F(1,193) = 2.24, p [less than]
.05]; however, protected follow-up univariates failed to reach
significance.
DISCUSSION
This person perception experiment was designed to examine the
beliefs that people form about an emotional/sexual relationship
between a married person and a single person, a common type of
extramarital relationship (e.g., Richardson, 1988). Our primary
interest was in the degree to which people's beliefs about the
outcome of such a relationship depend on the gender of the "cheating
spouse" and the extent to which that individual was invested in his
or her marriage.
Overall, participants recognized that love and attraction can
exist in the extramarital relationship. Participants were less
optimistic, however, about the future outcome of the extramarital
relationship (e.g., whether the married partner would leave his or
her spouse; how committed the married person was to their
extramarital partner). These two somewhat divergent sets of results
seem to indicate that people have mixed perceptions about
extramarital relationships. They recognize that a single person can
derive love and intimacy from a relationship with a married person,
but they do not expect it to be a permanent, exclusive relationship.
The results of this study also indicate that views about an
extramarital relationship involving a single person and a married
person differed as function of whether the married person (the
"cheating spouse") was a male or a female. A woman's extramarital
involvement, relative to a man's, was more likely to be viewed as
leading to the formation of a new committed relationship. That is, a
"cheating female" was more likely than a "cheating male" to be
viewed as on the verge of terminating the old relationship and
becoming committed to the new relationship. Prior research suggests
that a double standard exists in attitudes about extramarital
sexuality insofar as women are judged differently (usually more
harshly) than men for engaging in extramarital relationships (e.g.,
Reiss & Lee, 1988). The present research, however, suggests that
if a woman does engage in an extramarital relationship, her behavior
- unlike that of a extramaritally-involved man is assumed to arise
from feelings of love and commitment and is viewed as likely to
result in a new, permanent union. These results are consistent with
other research indicating that people believe that the love-sex
association is stronger for women than for men (e.g., Regan &
Berscheid, 1995), and are also consistent with the type of sexual
norms and scripts that are likely to have developed due to the
interaction of evolutionary and social cultural factors.
Surprisingly, the investment variables had no effect on
participants' perception of the ES relationship, for either gender.
A person presented as married for a long period of time and/or as
having children was not viewed any differently than a person
presented as married a shorter period of time and/or as not having
children. These results may suggest that college students do not
perceive duration of marriage and the presence of children to be
barriers to leaving a marriage for a new partner. Other research has
also indicated that these factors are no longer important deterrents
to marriage termination (Attridge & Berscheid, 1994; Berscheid
& Campbell, 1981), although another possibility is that these
investment variables would have been perceived as more important to
an older sample that had more experience with marriage and children.
The results of this study have implications for our understanding
of how the outcome of an extramarital relationship might depend upon
others' reactions to it. Although a sexual relationship between a
married person and a single person may be forbidden and secret
(Richardson, 1988), others undoubtedly find out about it and develop
beliefs about its outcome and those involved. These beliefs may, in
turn, have a self-fulfilling impact. Research on peer reactions to
romantic relationships indicates that the more friends (and family)
support a relationship--by asking about the other person, by
referring to the two as a couple, by extending invitations to both
of them - the more likely it is that the relationship will develop
and continue (e.g., Lewis, 1973; Parks & Adelman, 1983; Sprecher
& Felmlee, 1992). People who disapprove of a particular
(extramarital) relationship or who do not believe it will last are
unlikely to engage in these relationship-confirming behaviors (for
discussion, see Sprecher 8,: Felmlee, 1992).
We encourage other researchers to examine people's perceptions of
and reactions to these and other "forbidden sexual relations." For
example, future research might examine how people beyond college age
(e.g., those in their 30s and 40s) respond to such relationships. In
addition, it is important to supplement our experimental results
with descriptive research exploring the actual attitudes and
responses expressed by the people who serve as confidants to men and
women involved in ES relationships. And, finally, more research is
needed on these actual forbidden relationships. Who engages in these
relationships and to what consequences? Are societal conditions
changing so that it is becoming more acceptable for both genders to
have access to extramarital sex? We encourage more research that
uses a social exchange framework (e.g., Sprecher, in press) to
understand, in particular, the sexual relationship between a married
person (often a man) and a single person (often a woman). What is
being traded in such a relationship and what exchange conditions
will result in the married person leaving his or her spouse for the
extramarital partner?
The authors would like to thank four undergraduate students from
Illinois State University who helped on this project for a classroom
assignment.
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