Format

Send to

Choose Destination
Arch Sex Behav. 2018 Jul 12. doi: 10.1007/s10508-018-1244-1. [Epub ahead of print]

American Political-Party Affiliation as a Predictor of Usage of an Adultery Website.

Author information

1
Global Center for Children and Families, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, USA. research@arfer.net.
2
Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA.

Abstract

The more politically conservative Americans are, the more restrictive their sexual attitudes are. A natural follow-up question is how this difference in attitudes relates to actual behavior. But self-reports of sexual behavior may be compromised by a social desirability bias that is influenced by the very sexual attitudes at issue. We employed a non-self-reported measure of sexual behavior: usage of the adultery-focused dating website Ashley Madison. Linking an August 2015 leak of user data from Ashley Madison to 2012 voter registration rolls from five U.S. states, we found 80,000 matches between 200,000 Ashley Madison user accounts and 50 million voters. According to simple rates in the sample, and also to predictively validated regression models controlling for state, gender, and age, we found that Democrats were least likely to use Ashley Madison, Libertarians were most likely, and Republicans, Greens, and unaffiliated voters were in between. Our results provide support for theories arguing that people with stricter sexual attitudes are paradoxically more likely to engage in deviant sexual behavior.

KEYWORDS:

Adultery; Democratic Party; Online dating; Political-party affiliation; Republican Party

PMID:
30003437
PMCID:
PMC6330161
[Available on 2020-01-12]
DOI:
10.1007/s10508-018-1244-1

Supplemental Content

Full text links

Icon for Springer
Loading ...
Support Center