Why (Some) Women Love Adulterers

Bryan Caplan tries to fathom why so many women who get involved with married men expect the cheating husbands they're involved with to treat them any better than the wives they're currently betraying, and the answer he comes up with is pretty much the same as my own:

I think that most of the puzzle has to be resolved with psychology rather than economics. The average mistress is probably overconfident; she imagines that she is a lot more desirable than the average mistress. So if a mistress convinces a man to leave his wife, she tends to think that he left because she is so great, not because he can't be trusted.

It isn't as if these women are entirely wrong, either: they have to have an edge in some department on the wives of the men they're sleeping with, otherwise there'd be no point to the relationship whatsoever; where they go wrong is in imagining that no one else is likely to come along with an even better package to offer than they do.

Slipping into armchair evolutionary psychologist mode, though, it is easy to imagine scenarios in which females of any species will preferentially seek out cheats to have children with: if the propensity to cheat on one's spouse is a genetically hardwired trait (a big "if"), it would make sense for females to prefer to bear the children of such males, ideally while attached to exactly the sorts of males who make for loyal, caring mates. Of course, this is all rank speculation on my part, with not a stitch of science to support any of it, but it makes for an excellent "just so story" explaining why "Nice Guys&trade" finish last, don't you think?

Comments

[dsquared]

[Of course, this is all rank speculation on my part, with not a stitch of science to support any of it]

one would have hoped this, but of course there really is no such just-so speculation so half-assed it hasn't been published in the EP literature along with an "empirical" validation based on someone's graduate students; the google term is, god help us all, "sexy sons hypothesis".

[dsquared]

(by the way, the actual answer to this question is simpler than either economics or psychology; the women in question believe this because they are systematically lied to).