How Cheaters Manage to Cheat Without Feeling Bad

If you’ve ever been on the losing side of a cheater’s behavior, you know how painful and unsettling this can be. When the cheater is, or was, your romantic partner, it’s particularly disheartening. Not only did you trust this person to be honest with you, but you have also done everything you could to be on the up-and-up yourself. How did this happen?

There are many forms of cheating, but the kind involving a close romantic relationship seems particularly pernicious. When partners are close and committed to each other, it would seem obvious that they would put themselves on the highest moral ground possible. Yet, cheaters don’t seem to play by those rules.

A New Way to Look at Relationship Cheating

You might think of cheating as a function of a bad relationship, one in which cheaters feel they deserve to seek comfort from someone other than their partners. However, according to University of Innsbruck’s Verena Aignesberger and Tobias Greitemeyer (2024), infidelity is remarkably widespread in close relationships. Of all the possible reasons, including unhappiness with the partner, one unexamined factor is “moral disengagement (MD).” In MD, people “decouple their actions from internalized standards of right and wrong, allowing them to act against their moral compass without a bad conscience.” You walk through a grocery store, decide that a particular red grape sitting in a plastic bag looks good, so you surreptitiously put it in your mouth without thinking of yourself as a “shoplifter.” In that moment, although you may be a generally law-abiding citizen, you’ve just shown MD.

MD is based on the assumption that there can be a discrepancy between what you know and what you do, hardly a new idea in social psychology. The difference with MD is that you go through a series of mental machinations to resolve that discrepancy. When it comes to infidelity, you might reinterpret a one-night stand as not as bad as someone else’s months-long affair. Or you might take a “no harm no foul” approach, figuring that if your partner didn’t know about this, then there was nothing really wrong with it.

However, what if you just don’t think that something wrong was wrong at all? And, as the authors suggest, what if your partner has a similar view on morality? The purpose of their couples-based study was to find out whether infidelity can be better understood when two partners, rather than one, rate their beliefs in morality and their tendencies to disengage.

Putting Cheating Couples Under a Moral Microscope

Using data from an online sample of 236 dating couples (average age 29 years), Aignesberger and Greitemeyer used what’s called an “Actor-Partner Interdependence Model” (APIM) to predict infidelity from the joint combination of individual MD scores obtained from both members of each couple. Next, the authors used the similarity between partners in MD to predict relationship satisfaction.

The MD questionnaire contained items such as “It is okay to spread rumors to defend those you care about,” and “People who get mistreated have usually done something to bring it on themselves” (with scales from 1 to 7).

The authors assessed infidelity with a 33-item list of behaviors used in previous studies, in which partners indicated (1) whether the behavior constituted cheating, (2) whether they committed the behavior, and (3) whether their partner committed the same behavior. Examples of cheating behavior included secretly meeting an ex, masturbating, and exchanging phone numbers with an attractive person. The key factor in the cheating measures was not how many times cheating occurred but how many different types of cheating behaviors were considered cheating, and that a person or a partner had committed. Across the sample, 39 percent of women and 35 percent of men reported that they committed at least one act of infidelity.

The first analysis testing MD’s relationship to relationship outcomes showed that, as the authors predicted, partners were similar in their MD scores. Second, partners sharing high levels of MD were actually less (not more, as the authors predicted) dissatisfied with their relationship. When it came to cheating, both people and their partners high in MD were more likely to engage in infidelity, and they also were more suspicious of their partner’s infidelity.

None of this sounds like a great recipe for relationship satisfaction. People high in MD seem to feel that it’s OK to do things that they know, logically and morally, are bad. Once these people end up in a relationship together, they aren’t particularly happy. When it comes to infidelity, they are more likely to cheat, and also to feel that their partners do as well.

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Although the research team didn’t measure Dark Triad traits, which would seem related to MD, they note that their findings support studies on these unsavory qualities as spelling trouble for good relationships.

The findings also suggested, as the authors point out, that people who commit infidelity don’t operate according to a set of moral standards that considers cheating acceptable. They know about these standards, apply them to cheating, and then do it anyway. The partners in this study, in the words of the authors, “openly admit a behavior’s wrongness and commit it nevertheless.”

Is There a Positive Message Here?

Once you’ve swallowed those statistics about the frequency of self-confessed cheating, you might wonder whether something’s happened in your relationship that you don’t know about. The good news, though, is that unless you’re a morally disengaged person, you’re probably on safe ground. As long as you and your partner share not only a moral compass but also a decision to live by it, then the odds are that neither of you would either engage in cheating or have reason to suspect the other.

There is value, nonetheless, in learning about the concept of moral disengagement. Outside of a committed romantic relationship, you may encounter people whose attitude toward morality is blasé at best and corrupt at worst. It might be good to listen hard to the kinds of rationales they use for behaviors that cross the line. A grape from the grocery store every now and then doesn’t necessarily indicate a morally disengaged person, but a constant stream of cutting corners in the way they treat others could serve as a warning to keep your distance.

To sum up, a moral compass is fine as long as people follow it, even if someone else’s morality isn’t the same as yours. Looking for the morally disengaged will protect you from those who don’t value your best interests.