Love thy neighbour: Personality traits, relationship quality, and attraction to others as predictors of infidelity among young adults

Abstract

Infidelity is defined as the violation of a couple's assumed or stated agreement concerning emotional and/or sexual exclusivity. The current study examined the utility of personality traits (i.e., the Big Five and SIS/SES - an individual's sexual response to sexual desires, arousal, and behaviours are based on the balance between sexual excitation and sexual inhibition; Bancroft & Janssen, 2000) relative to relationship quality and attraction to others in predicting reports of infidelity among a sample of young adults (ages 18–26 years). A total of 131 men and 164 women from the US who reported being in a romantic relationship were recruited using MTurk®, an online crowdsourcing survey tool. Participants completed a series of measures assessing demographics, relationship quality and investment, sexual experience, sexual attitudes, attraction to others, and personality traits, including the Big Five and SIS/SES. A notable minority (16.6%) of participants reported at least one occasion of past infidelity during their current romantic relationship (yes/no reports); however, reports of infidelity increased significantly when individuals reported actual sexual, romantic, and online infidelity activities (78.6%). Personality traits within the Big Five and SIS/SES models were not significant predictors of infidelity. With each occurrence of emotional attraction to a person other than their current partner, the odds of reporting infidelity increased by 51.6%. The findings are discussed in terms of implications for counselling and education regarding infidelity, as well as continued research on risk factors for infidelity among young adults.