Men Don’t Get Cheating Statistics

Even men with math major’s fail to grasp basic statistics when it makes men look bad

I have debated many highly educated and intelligent men who, as far as I can judge, are fairly balanced, kind, nuanced and reflective. In other words, they are not poorly educated aggressive type of MAGA rednecks. They have professions I can relate to.

One of these men, Richard, got into a debate with me about an article written by Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten going by the name Dr. Psych Mom. She wrote an article called Women Don’t Usually Cheat. The responses to this article exposed some common biases among men against women.

The article start with the following premise:

Whenever I post about different rates of cheating, some men insist that women cheat just as frequently as men, despite what statistics say. This is inaccurate and speaks to a profound lack of understanding about what motivates women, as well as to the common human bias of taking our own anecdotal experience as representative of the larger world. I’ll discuss both in this post.

Then she goes on to discuss the psychology of what drives men and women to cheat and how that produces differences in frequency for men and women cheating.

Ironically, whole scores of men proved her point by leaving lots of negative comments trying every possible way to invalidate her claims. What I want to focus on here, however, is how often men totally misunderstand the statistics, even when there is no good reason to do so.

Richard, is a math major by his own admission. Something I have no reason to dispute. Yet, repeatedly through our debate he showed clear misunderstanding of the statistics around cheating. This story is not about Richard as a person. We had a respectful exchange. Richard isn’t unique. Rather, he is a representative of so many intelligent well read men I debate who somehow cannot see straight when the topic becomes men and women.

Our exchange starts with Richard making the following claim to dispute the article written by Dr. Psych Mom:

Richard: A basic understanding of math would suggest that women cheat at the exact same rate as men. The are just statistically less honest when taking a survey

There are several problems with this claim:

1. No, this does. Not follow from basic understanding of math.
2. He accuses women of lying.

I would opinion that claiming women are “statistically less honest when taking a survey” is the same as accusing women of being liars. It is not the first time I have seen surveys making men look worse, leading to accusations of women lying.

Through our long exchange Richard never accepts that he has given negative characteristics of women. When I accuse him of calling women liars he responds with:

Richard: First, I am not characterizing women as liars in general — at all. That is an assumption you are projecting onto me, based on your own framing, not on anything I have said. I am arguing that the author of this article is mistaken.

See how he tries to reframe what he said? First it was “They (woman) are just statistically less honest when taking a survey” suddenly becomes “I am arguing that the author of this article is mistaken.”

But the graph used in Dr. Psych Mom’s article is not made by her but by The Institute for Family Studies (IFS). Which ironically is a right-wing think tank. Hence, there is no reason to believe they are biased against men. And the graph presented clearly states that “cheating” is defined as sex outside of marriage.

But given that so many men have the same misconceptions as Richard and so eagerly claim the statistics and the definitions are wrong, let me give a solid coverage to the actual data and studies.

Research on Dating and Gender Equality

Research on Cheating

Let me begin with definitions because many men try to twist the stats by tweaking definitions to their liking.

New Oxford American Dictionary Infidelity:

the action or state of being unfaithful to a spouse or other sexual partner: her infidelity continued after her marriage | I ought not to have tolerated his infidelities.

From Thesaurus we can find synonyms for Infidelity:

adultery, unchastity, cuckoldry, extramarital relations, extramarital sex, cheating

I point this out because cheating can refer to cheating in sports, games or all sorts of other things. It is important to get across that we are using the word cheating in context of male and female relationships.

Merriam Webster on Cheating

the act or fact of having a romantic or sexual relationship with someone other than one’s spouse or partner

It is important to understand the difference between cheating and having an affair. I asked ChatGPT to clarify since many seems to misunderstand the difference:

Cheating is not defined by participating in sex; it is defined by violating a trust. A married man who has an affair cheats because he breaks an exclusive commitment to his spouse. A single woman who has an affair with him may be acting immorally, but she is not cheating, because she is not violating any promise or bond of her own.”

The definition is important to get when looking at statistics over cheating (I will focus on US statistics). Again, let us look at the Institute for Family Studies given that they produced the graph used in the original article.

Pay attention to what the graph says it measures. It is just asking people at different ages if they have had sex with someone other than their spouse when married. They did not ask when. In other words if a 80 year old says he has had extramarital sex, that doesn’t mean he had it this year. That could have happened in his youth.

It is worth illuminating this fact further by lookin at another study from the Institute of Family Studies covered in America’s Generation Gap In Extramarital Sex article. It shows prevalence of extramarital sex by cohort.

The Manosphere and Redpiller like to present it as if we live in an age where women are all sluts, and cheating on their loyal and hard working husbands. That is of course rubbish. Not only are men the ones cheating more, but it is also the older generation that cheated more. And the reason is simple:

People born between 1940 and 1959 report the highest rates of extramarital sex. These are the first generations to come of age during the sexual revolution, so it’s understandable they are more likely to have sex with someone without their spouses

Evolutionary Theory on Cheating

To judge whether men and women are telling the truth in surveys on sexual behaviors we can look at what evolutionary theory predicts. After all scientists have studied in detail sexual behavior among humans and other animals extensively ever since Charles Darwin.

The Parental Invest theory is relevant to understanding why the sexual mating behavior of men and women is different. Wikipedia summary of theory:

Parental investment theory, a term coined by Robert Trivers in 1972, predicts that the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate, and the less-invested sex will have intra-sexual competition for access to mates. This theory has been influential in explaining sex differences in sexual selection and mate preferences throughout the animal kingdom and in humans.

From wikipedia on parental investment and outcomes for sexual behaviors:

Parental investment theory, as proposed by Trivers, argues that the sex with higher obligatory investment will be more selective in choosing sex partners, and the sex with lower obligatory investment will be less selective and more interested in “casual” mating opportunities. The more investing sex cannot reproduce as frequently, causing the less investing sex to compete for mating opportunities. In humans, women have higher obligatory investment (pregnancy and childbirth), than men (sperm production). Women are more likely to have higher long-term mating orientations, and men are more likely to have higher short-term mating orientations

Translated this quote says we can expect men to attempt cheating more than women because there is an evolutionary advantage for men to do so. Much less so for women. I am talking about cheating in the sense of having sex with someone you have not pair bonded with. Keep in mind though that attempts may not be successful as we get into.

Extra-Pair Copulation AKA “Cheating” Among Animals

A way to verify this theory is to verify check other animals. What we look for then is what is called formally Extra-pair copulation.

Extra-pair copulation (EPC) is a mating behaviour in monogamous species. Monogamy is the practice of having only one sexual partner at any one time, forming a long-term bond and combining efforts to raise offspring together; mating outside this pairing is extra-pair copulation. Across the animal kingdom, extra-pair copulation is common in monogamous species, and only a very few pair-bonded species are thought to be exclusively sexually monogamous. EPC in the animal kingdom has mostly been studied in birds and mammals.

The dominant theory is that indeed male are more likely to cheat than females, for the following reasons:

For males, a number of theories are proposed to explain extra-pair copulations. One such hypothesis is that males maximise their reproductive success by copulating with as many females as possible outside of a pair bond relationship because their parental investment is lower, meaning they can copulate and leave the female with minimum risk to themselves. Females, on the other hand, have to invest a lot more in their offspring; extra-pair copulations produce a greater cost because they put the resources that their mate can offer at risk by copulating outside the relationship

With animals we do not have the concept of singles and being married. Hence for animals that form bonds we measure as if all animals are in a relationship.

This has the consequence that statistics of animals looks reverse of that of humans. While makes want to cheat more than females, they cannot do it more than females allow. The consequence of that dynamic is that most males do not succeed cheating, but a few cheat a lot. Statistically speaking then a few males perform a lot of Extra-Pair Copulation, while many females perform a few Extra-Pair Copulations.

To understand this statistics we have to understand how it is measured. One looks at offspring DNA, and compare it with the pairs that are together. This allows one to discover how many children derive from animal equivalent “out of marriage sex.” Studying the DNA we can find that it stems from a minority of male animals.

If we analyzed humans the same way, then we would find similar results. Some men through history has had a lot more offspring while a lot of men had few or none. Consequently women have had to have offspring from several men. These historic patterns also arise from the fact that conquering armies would often rape. Powerful men had harems or mistresses.

Ironically this counters the claim by Richard I presented earlier:

Richard: A basic understanding of math would suggest that women cheat at the exact same rate as men. The are just statistically less honest when taking a survey

In the animal kingdom, more female than males “cheat”, by the Extra-Pair Copulation measurement we use there. Richard has not understood this is possible because the distribution of Extra-Pair Copulation is different between male and females.

Somehow, I am pretty sure he would not have objected to a study suggesting women cheat more than men, alas I digress.

If we were to try to steelman Richard’s argument we could suggest he is thinking of total number of cheating encounters between men and women as opposed to percentage of men and women who cheated.

But the graph is clear about what it is showing. This is the explanation text you can review yourself:

% who reported having sex with someone other than spouse while married

In other words it is not about how many times you cheated with someone but about whether you did it at all.

This text also helps explain why we see the reverse among humans compared to the animal kingdom. Humans have the social structure of marriage. In this measurement only those married can technically cheat.

Translating Observations of Animal Behavior to Humans

One problem with translating Extra-Pair Copulation (EPC) to human society and talk about cheating in a human context is that EPC doesn’t measure sex outside of your relationship. Rather it measures only sex outside a stable relationship that translated into an offspring.

I know Redpillers might argue that there are just a few Chads among males that cheat and most of the male are honest and decent fellows. But that isn’t what biologists observe.

Across species (including birds and mammals), researchers do observe male behavior directly — and what they see is:

• Most males court
• Most males attempt extra-pair access
• Most males are rejected
• A minority succeed repeatedly

This shows up in:

• courtship displays
• mate guarding
• sneaking behavior
• roaming / prospecting males
• frequency of solicitation vs acceptance

In other words: Male sexual motivation is widespread; male sexual success is skewed.

In many species 70–90% of males get zero extra-pair offspring, yet most males still attempt.

Humans differ from animals in one crucial way:

• Humans can have lots of sex without producing offspring
• Humans can report attempts, not just outcomes

So if EPC logic were applied to humans via offspring:

• a few men with many children would dominate
• many men’s extra-pair sex would be invisible

But when we use self-reports instead of offspring:

• men report more extra-pair sex than women
• not “a tiny elite minority”
• but a broad male distribution

That tells you the animal EPC skew is about success, not about disposition. That males should seek to cheat follows from what is called the Bateman gradient.

The Bateman gradient measures how much reproductive success increases with each additional mate. In most species it is steep for males and flat for females, which means selection favors widespread male mating effort even though only a few males actually succeed.

The Bateman gradient means there is an evolutionary selection pressure towards males seeking Extra-Pair Copulation. In other words it is a broad trait for males, not an anomaly among a tiny male elite.

We can summarize this to:

Behavioral observation, experimental manipulation, and sexual dimorphism all show that male courtship effort is widespread across species. Extra-pair paternity data capture only the small fraction of males who succeed, not the much larger number who attempt.

Back to the Debate

Now that you got the statistics, evolutionary theory background to understand why it makes no sense to claim that cheating (defined as extra marital sex in the article) needs to pair up 50/50. That isn’t how either the science or statistics work. If we looked at EPC for instance the percentage would be much higher for females as it only measures successfully producing offspring. While if we look at surveys of having sex among humans it is skewed the other way.

I want to use this as a backdrop to analyze and contextualize the further debate I had with Richard to expose the kind of biased thinking the plagues many fellow men when it comes to women.

Moving the Goalpost

When the results don’t agree with what you want, it is common to attempt to move the goalpost.

Richard: You are saying that more married men are having affairs than married women. So either those men are hiring prostitutes (very possible) or they are seeing single women. Since I don’t really place prostitutes in the same category as affairs, it follows that more single women than single men are having affairs with married folks. It’s just mathematical as General Longstreet would say.

Here Richard tries to suggest that for a married man to see a prostitute doesn’t count as cheating. It seems like grasping at straws for anything to change the statistical outcome. Also I find this claim rather dubious. Seeing a prostitute is cheating on your wife. It is absurd to claim otherwise.

Then he suggests more single women than single men are having affairs with married men. Then follows a classic attempt to present the male view as cold, scientific and objective as opposed to what women argue as emotional and illogical.

But reality is that Richard is the emotional and biased one here. He entirely ignores distribution. As we saw with EPC, a few males copulate with many females. While many females have few Extra-Pair copulations.

Hence it is perfectly possible for many men to cheat a little and a few women to cheat a lot. Richard seems to insist that there must be strong symmetry between behaviors or men and women, but nature does not show that at all. It is very asymmetrical. A tiny minority of males have most of the EPC.

Either way it doesn’t matter. Richard only argues this way because he is looking for a gotcha. He is in a battle where he believes what is at stake is the dignity of men.

For me this is perplexing and strange. I look at this as a biologist. This is just evolution. Men and women were not made the same. We are optimized differently. Men benefit from cheating far more than women. That is what the Bateman gradient tells us.

Feelings vs Science

As the debate progresses I do get confirmed that for Richard this debate is not about science, statistics and evolutionary facts. And ironically men like to try to present themselves as just talking about hard cold facts. But in reality Richard is driven significantly by emotions:

Richard: The relevance of this topic is to challenge the kind of reflexive, prejudicial thinking that you — and many others — fall into. There is a persistent assumption that when it comes to sex, men are inherently predatory while women are inherently pure. This mindset is not fundamentally different from other forms of bias that have caused real harm for generations.

It is a clear rhetorical ploy to invalidate my arguments for the scientific validity of the statistics presented. Richard failed to grasp the basics such as why extra-marital sex doesn’t have to be 50/50. When I try to give the logical reasons for why I am dismissed as being biased against men. Instead of admitting his own bias he create a fairy tale about how me and other deem women as “inherently pure.”

Richard however is convinced he is the logical cold hard thinker while the rest of us are emotional and unreliable. To show how absurd this gets consider this claim he makes for why the graph cannot be true:

Richard: The graph becomes even less believable at the extremes. It implies that 80-year-old men cheat at twice the rate of 30-year-old men, and nearly four times the rate of 80-year-old women. This defies basic biological reality. At 80, sexual activity is sharply constrained by unavoidable physiological limitations — there are plumbing and hydraulic issues that are not optional.

But as I covered earlier, the graph only asks if you ever cheated. The 80-year old saying “yes”, could have cheated when he was in his twenties.

Now anyone of us can make mistakes when reading statistics, but Richard keeps getting it wrong repeatedly and despite me pointing out how he gets it wrong he never develops any humility. He still throw out every new claim with bombastic certainty and arrogance. Consider this other claim from our debate.

My point is simply this: because most affairs involve one man and one woman, it follows that men and women must be participating in them in roughly equal numbers. If surveys suggest otherwise, then the discrepancy likely reflects reporting bias rather than reality — whether that means some women underreporting affairs, some men overstating them, or men claiming experiences that were imagined rather than lived.

I’m sorry — I was a math major, not a diversity, equity, and inclusion major.

Look at the whole wording. He is trying to dismiss critics by implying he is a man of science and cold hard facts, while the rest of us are soft science majors relying on our emotions. I should add that my fields of studies was not gender studies but rather AI, Robotics, Compiler Design and Computational Geometry. Fairly math heavy subjects, not very big on emotions and gender.

Again he gets the core facts totally wrong. The graph text makes it clear that it measures percentage of men and women who have had extra-marital sex. It isn’t a tally of how many extra-marital sexual encounter men and women have had. If it had been then Richard would have had a point.

But let us consider for a moment how utterly absurd this assumption is by Richard.

1. It would be very hard to measure how many times someone had sexual encounters outside their marriage. Much easier to ask “Have you ever had one.”
2. If we measured total number of encounters for men and women, then that would not have produced percentages. It would have given a number of occurrences.

In short Richard’s understanding of the statistics and math here is so terrible that I would have been really embarrassed to parade around that I was a math major.

The question is why someone with a math major, who seems fairly intelligent, can get these facts so profoundly wrong.

I believe the book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow gives us some clues.

Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman famously described human reasoning as operating through two systems. One is fast, intuitive, and emotional. It produces immediate judgments — what feels fair, plausible, or morally acceptable. Kahneman called this System 1. The other is slower, more deliberate, and analytical. It checks definitions, reads graphs carefully, and asks what is actually being measured. This is System 2.

A common misunderstanding is to think that educated or mathematically trained people rely more on System 2. Kahneman’s work suggests almost the opposite. Intelligent people are often better at using System 2 to defend conclusions that System 1 has already reached. In other words, slow thinking frequently acts as a lawyer, not a judge.

This distinction helps explain why debates that appear to be about statistics often feel strangely emotional. When a claim threatens a person’s sense of fairness or identity, System 1 reacts instantly. If that reaction is strong enough, System 2 does not reevaluate the claim. Instead, it searches for ways to discredit the data, reinterpret the definitions, or reframe the question so the original intuition can be preserved.

What looks like careful skepticism on the surface can therefore be something else entirely: analytical skill being deployed in the service of a prior emotional conclusion. Once that dynamic is in play, corrections don’t accumulate. They are deflected. Mistakes are not admitted; they are rerouted around. The discussion keeps moving, but never converges.

Seen through this lens, the debate over cheating statistics is less about math than about which mental system is in charge — and whether slow, analytical thinking is being used to discover the truth or merely to protect an intuition that already feels too important to give up.

Mental Gymnastics

This attempt at using System 2 thinking to confirm what Richard “feels” is right, is pervasive. Here is another unreasonable accusation he would make in the debate:

Richard: Yes, the author refers to “cheating,” but she never clearly defines the term; instead, she leaves it deliberately vague. That vagueness is precisely the problem. Not all forms of cheating are equivalent, especially within marriage.

But it isn’t vague at all. It says right on the graph itself:

% who reported having sex with someone other than spouse while married

And as I elaborated on before cheating has a fairly well defined definition you can find in the dictionary, that a reasonable person should assume that you know. And if you are uncertain, it is reasonable to assume you look it up.

Also from the writing in the article it should be clear that it refers to sex outside the marriage and not some vague sense of emotional attachments to others that Richard tries to frame it as. Here is a quote from the original article.

Dr. Psych Mom: The reality is that women’s sex drive just drops in monogamy, and they are not interested in sex WITH ANYONE at anything near the intensity they felt desire or drive when younger/not a mother.

In other words she is talking specifically about desire for sex. There are others who have studied cheating, where they define it more broadly as things not necessarily implying sex. But clearly that isn’t what Dr. Psych Mom is talking about. Nor is it what generally speaking most studies of cheating would do. The ones that look at broader definitions as not the norm to my knowledge.

Conclusions

I don’t think Richard is overtly misrepresenting reality or that he hates women. I think Richard is just a representative of a very common problem among many men, which is a negative bias against women which they are not aware of.

And I freely admit I had similar biases in the past. I have had biases against gay people, minorities and women. And like Richard I used my skills to perform more complex analytics to rationalize my own bias rather than to uncover it.

I am pointing this out, because there are so many who believe when people express some biased opinion that they actually know the truth but are just grifting or dishonest. But we all have biases. Everything isn’t a grift.

And this goes both ways. I was just pointing out how 20–25 percent of women in most Western countries have experienced rape once in life. To me that is shockingly high, but there was still women who were convinced that was a far too low number. Likewise about 45 percent of women in the US according to the CDC have experienced sexual assault of some form.

Again many women will insist every single woman has experience that. And that is just not true. I certainly know women who haven’t. So biases exist in all directions.

It is not like it is only men who have biases against women. It is also women who have biases against men.

But there is a qualitative difference. The bias women have against men tends to be exaggerating negative traits in men. But these are actual problems with men such as the fact that we are more violent and prone to rape.

The problem with male biases against women is that they are not really exaggerations of female behavior but all too often complete fiction. For instance Richard assumed that women were lying in the survey about their cheating, while assuming men were truthful.

But studies shows that men are slightly more likely to lie than women. And men have more Machiavellian traits: which means deliberate and planned lying and deceit over some time to reach a goal.

In other words lying isn’t some special female trait. But ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, men have tried to project the idea that women are somehow inherently lying and manipulative. Reality is men are more prone to this.

Likewise men will present women as loose and sluts, but they are less not more promiscuous than men. In other words the bias isn’t amplifying an actual female trait but complete fabrication.

In contrast areas where women have biases against men are areas where men are genuinely worse than women. The bias is in amplifying the degree to how much worse we are.

And if there is anything that personally irks me about women’s characterization of men is that men are treated as one big homogenous groups, without recognizing that there are huge differences between different subgroups of men.

For instance one can read feminist articles about how horrible men are by using examples from an experiment that was done in Cairo. If you are a Western man, it feels rather unfair when women make conclusions about how men are in the West based on male behavior in a region of the world very well known for misogyny.

Downsides of being a white male

If we cannot talk about male behavior depends on culture, without getting the racism accusation then we have also unintentionally killed all hope for improvement. If the argument is that men are just universally bad and that is unchangeable then what is even the point in discussing negative male traits? Indirectly those feminists have “acknowledged” those traits are unchangeable, so why even bother talking about it?

As a Norwegian who has lived around the world, I have seen how female and male relationships and interactions different vastly. And that has led me to believe we absolutely can improve. Many of the things women complain about men, can be reduced by talking about this and deliberate efforts. These are cultural traits. Cultures can change.

But if we are so politically correct that we cannot acknowledge that misogyny differs between cultures then we cannot change it.

I notice I am allowed to point out that the US is far more sexist than my native Norway. But suggest that Egypt or Pakistan is more sexist and it all too quickly turns into a racism debate.

And look, I get that. There are plenty of people who want to present Muslims as all inherent rapists or something. But we must be able to have two thoughts in the head at the same time. There is a great difference between saying a culture as it exists today has more prevalence or rape, than to imply the people in that culture has some kind of DNA or genes disposing them for that. Cultures can change. Attitudes can change. DNA much less so.

My argument is that sexism, misogyny are cultural and can thus be changed.

Making that change happen will be harder with men like Richard and many feminists. The Richard’s of the world hinder change because they reject the problem exists. Man feminists hinder change because they indirectly say that men cannot change. That culture doesn’t matter.

That is why the whole “all men are like this” rhetoric is harmful. It tells people that men cannot change. That men never differ. That we can never be better.

Feminism Benefits Men Too

I do consider myself a feminist, but I am one that believes in change, and I believe great progress has been made for men in many cultures. And I believe gender equality benefits men just as much as women. I don’t think it is a zero-sum game. Improve the lives of women and we improve the lives of men.