People who cheat on their partners more than twice as likely to engage in workplace misconduct, study claims

Researchers use data from Ashley Madison user exposure

Reasons for people's infidelities are numerous but those who are unfaithful to their monogamous partners may have one thing in common as a new study suggests that marital infidelity and professional misconduct are linked.

To find out whether personal infidelity is informative of professional conduct, researchers from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin looked at the records of police officers, financial advisers, white-collar criminals and senior executives who used the Ashley Madison marital infidelity website.

In August 2015, the website – which pairs people looking to initiate extramarital affairs – was hacked and exposed the names of approximately 39 million customers.

The study, titled "Personal Infidelity and Professional Conduct in 4 Settings" and published on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the website’s users in the professional settings they studied were more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct.

The researchers investigated four study groups totalling 11,235 participants whose misconduct ranged from disciplinary issues to criminal activity.

The data was sourced from the Police Data Project, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority BrokerCheck database, the Securities and Exchange Commission's litigation release archives, and data on CEOs and CFOs from Execucomp.

In a video explaining the study posted by the university on YouTube, Samuel Kruger, one of the study’s authors and assistant professor of finance at McCombs, said that after information relating to users of the “dating” website entered the public domain, his team saw it as “an opportunity to get this lens into the personal behaviour of a wide array of individuals”.

Using the data, the team investigated whether certain individuals had previously engaged in a transaction with Ashley Madison and whether they were a page user of the website.

After matching professionals who had engaged in misconduct to misconduct-free individuals with similar ages, genders and experiences and controlling for a wide range of executive and cultural variables, the researchers found that people with histories of misconduct were significantly more likely to use the Ashley Madison website.

"This is the first study that's been able to look at whether there is a correlation between personal infidelity and professional conduct," stated Kruger.

"We find a strong correlation, which tells us that infidelity is informative about expected professional conduct.”

The study's researchers said their investigation suggests a strong connection between people's actions in their personal and professional lives and help support the idea that eliminating workplace sexual misconduct may also reduce fraudulent activity.

"Our results show that personal sexual conduct is correlated with professional conduct," Kruger added.

"Eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace could have the extra benefit of contributing to more ethical corporate cultures in general."

In the study, the authors also refer to the #MeToo movement, writing: "By ensnaring leaders in entertainment, politics, business, media, education, and the law, and highlighting the magnitude of workplace sexual misconduct, the #MeToo movement has generated renewed interest in personal conduct."

Opening up about what the study will mean to the movement – launched in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke to campaign against sexual assault and harassment – Kruger said in the video: “One thing we can take away from this paper is showing that sexual conduct – the kind we’ve looked at is kind of different to the sexual harassment or sexual assault that the #MeToo movement is focused on – but this sphere of personal conduct is pretty correlated with other professional outcomes."