An amazing study from the University of Texas establishes a link between infidelity and professional misconduct. According to its authors, men registered on extramarital dating sites are more likely to engage in objectionable behavior in the workplace.
Are fickle men potential sexual harassers at work?
This is the hypothesis put forward by researchers at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), they argue that people who cheat on their spouse are much more likely to engage in professional misconduct.
The first study of its kind
How did the researchers manage to establish such a link? They began by analyzing the profiles of men registered on the extramarital dating site Ashley Madison, very well known in the United States and whose data from 36 million user accounts, including 1 million paying users on American soil, were hacked in 2015. This site advertises itself as an online dating site for married people looking for “discreet encounters”. The profiles that have most interested researchers are those of police officers, financial advisers, senior executives and “white collar criminals”.
“This is the first study to determine if there is a correlation between personal infidelity and professional conduct,” Kruger said. “We find a strong correlation, which tells us that infidelity is indicative of expected professional conduct.”
Indeed, the researchers then cross-referenced this data with that of 4 files: data on police officers from the Citizens Police Data Project, data on financial advisers from the BrokerCheck database of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, data on defendants in SEC cases from the records of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and data on CEOs and CFOs from Execucomp. A total of 11,235 profiles were reviewed.
A correlation between personal and professional behavior
They found that people with a history of professional misconduct were significantly more likely to use the Ashley Madison dating site.
Their findings therefore suggest that there is a strong link between people’s actions in their personal and professional lives and support the idea that eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace can also reduce fraudulent activity. “Our results show that there is a correlation between personal sexual behavior and behavior in the workplace,” says Samuel Kruger, co-author of the study. work could therefore have the added benefit of contributing to a more ethical company culture in general.”
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