This study says that married flirts are more inclined to lie and cheat

Flirtatious individuals are far more likely to lie about money to their spouses and cheat on them according to a new study published in Frontiers of Psychology. 

Researchers studied a dataset of roughly 2000 nationally married individuals in an attempt to establish a relationship between marital financial deception, infidelity, and flirtatious behavior. 

Participants were divided into four groups with the first two groups being made up of those who deceived their partners about money but did not cheat on them, and those who cheated on their partners but did not deceive them about money.

The third group studied was made up of individuals who both cheated on their partners and deceived them about money while the fourth group was composed of married people who engaged in neither activity. 

The study was able to make a number of shocking conclusions and found that flirtatious behavior by married individuals was a strong predictor of potential marital problems in regard to money and infidelity. 

People who flirted with someone other than their spouse were 49% more likely to have engaged in marital financial deception without having an extramarital affair. 

Flirtatious people had a 291% higher likelihood of having had an extramarital affair without deceiving their spouse about their finances.

Most concerning of all, however, was the finding that married individuals who flirted with others were far more likely to engage in both marital financial deception as well as infidelity. 

“We were somewhat surprised that religiosity was not related to any type of marital deception once other variables were in the model,” said Jeffery Dew, a Professor at Brigham Young University and one of the co-authors of the study. 

“Historically religiosity has been a strong (negative) predictor of extramarital infidelity,” Dew added in a conversation he had with PsyPost. 

Dew and his co-authors had set out to better understand financial deception and infidelity in order to assist therapeutic practitioners in helping married couples facing the complicated issues of financial deception and infidelity in their counseling sessions. 

The researchers also revealed that those who reported high levels of satisfaction with their marriage were far less likely to engage in financial deception according to PsyPost's Laura Staloch.

Staloch also noted that “relationship satisfaction was unrelated to extramarital infidelity,” meaning even happily married people cheated on their spouses.

“Heightened moral commitment predicted lower odds of financial deception,” according to Staloch, “while greater personal dedication commitment was associated with lower odds of extramarital infidelity.”

Examples used by the study to define marital financial deception included things like “hiding a bank account/credit card/loan” or “lying to one’s spouse about the cost of a purchase.”

Infidelity was defined by the study as having any kind of intimate physical contact “with someone other than their spouse and without their spouse’s knowledge and approval.”

Dew and his coauthors also pointed out that their study had some limitations and wrote that their analysis could not “assess the direction of the associations we examined,” though they added that their findings were still an important contribution to the study of the subject.