Why Do People Cheat on Someone They Love? - Prof. Dylan Selterman - #64

Yeah.

And I want to talk about how we view people who cheat, right? Because, of course, we, at least in the Western world, we think of cheaters as bad people, someone who is known to be a notorious cheater.

We generally don't really consider them to be good people.

It isn't a trait that we aspire to see in a lot of people.

Part of it might also be when we say something about another person, there is the identification of it, but also the implicit feeling What you're implicitly also doing is, hey, I don't agree with this, meaning I would never engage in such behavior.

So there's definitely something to be said there as well.

But I'm just curious to understand why we get angry at cheaters, even though we are not involved in that particular relationship.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's a great point.

I wrote about this in a chapter and an entry for a psychology encyclopedia.

Like, why is it that people are angry and upset, not just when their partners cheat, but when other people in society cheat? Like there's this kind of third party judgment and condemnation.

So as for the the kind of specific reason why people might be upset or angry at other people when they commit infidelity.

Some might think that it's a threat to their own relationship, even if their partner's not involved.

They might think, well, if there's a society that we live in that condones this kind of behavior, maybe that makes it more likely that my partner will at one point cheat on me.

So there could be a kind of selfish reason for that, a self-oriented reason.

I haven't found evidence for that specifically in my research, But it's certainly a possibility.

Another possibility is that people are upset because they perceive there to be some kind of contamination from that behavior that is relevant to moral foundations of loyalty and purity.

And people see those as important kind of variables for the ethical foundations of society.

So we're getting into some new territory here and theories of moral psychology and the psychology of ethics.

And there's a lot of debate between different scholars who have views on what really drives people to have moral judgments and condemnation of others' behavior.

Certainly, it is the case that, you know, we judge other people's behavior to be wrong when someone is harmed.

So if somebody assaults or kills someone, we condemn that because the victim has been harmed.

And this is part of one of the biggest theories in moral psychology, the idea of dyadic morality.

This is championed by Kurt Gray and his colleagues.

And then there's other theories that suggest it's not all about harm.