A Culture of Infidelity?

Part 1: The Question

Do some settings tolerate, if not outright encourage, infidelity?

This idea knocked on our door last year. We had a couple of infidelity cases in an affluent suburb. On more than one occasion, independent cases from different clients, the team wound up sitting in the parking lot of the same fitness center. The cases involved trainers at the gym. There was no overlap in the cases: different clients, different trainers…all unrelated, save the common denominator: the gym.

The question came to us: Are some institutions veritable Petri dishes for a culture of infidelity?

Maybe it’s a gym. It could be an office. It might even be a church. Any place people gather and share time, there’s a chance that certain behaviors may spread like contagious illnesses. Groups influence behavior. Commonly, we call it peer pressure, which doesn’t always manifest in the form of, “come on…everybody’s doing it. Don’t you want to be cool?” More often than not, it is a simple sense of acceptance, not an overt push: if the kids you’re hanging out with think nothing of passing around a bong in the afternoon, even though you don’t approve, pretty soon you’re likely to soften your attitude towards the practice. Maybe you’ll even indulge.

Six Bars

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “The Tipping Point,” examines several social epidemic studies that, he would contend, bear out the notion of social networks influencing behavior. One study by an epidemiologist named John Potterat looked into a gonorrhea outbreak in Colorado Springs in the 1990s. He traced the epidemic to a relatively small number of people, a tiny percentage of the infected population who did the bulk of the work of seeding the epidemic. Each of them infected multiple people; and the majority of them hung out at the same places.

In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs — a town of well in excess of 100,000 people — the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

-Malcolm Gladwell, “The Tipping Point”

The gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs doesn’t seem to have anything to do with infidelity in a fitness center in Tennessee. But maybe there’s a common denominator: are those six infamous bars in Colorado Springs somehow incubators of promiscuity? Similarly, could that suburban gym we staked out be an incubator of infidelity?

There’s no question that some environments foster their own unique culture, in which certain behaviors proliferate and even thrive: the party school, the glacial bureaucracy, etc. But what about causality? Are these settings drawing like-minded people who already love to party or who tend to shy away from initiative? Or are the institutions themselves turning regular people into wild partiers and slothful bureaucrats?

Culture of Infidelity – Part 2: The Studies.

More likely, it’s a combination of the two: one part “causality” and one part “clustering.” Case in point: the famous Framingham Heart Study.

Family and Friends

Researchers James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard wanted to know whether social networks can influence health behaviors like smoking, exercise, and diet. So they reconstructed data collected from around 12,000 people in the Framingham study for more than three decades. Their findings reflected a combination of clustering and causality: smokers did seek each other out in social networks (as did non-smokers). But Fowler and Christakis also determined that networks of friends or family members sometimes quit smoking in groups, a sort of cascade effect.

“There's no doubt that people are influenced by the behaviors of individuals that are not just one degree of separation from them, but two and three degrees of separation. There's a kind of cascading influence." -Nicholas Christakis for a 2008 NPR story for NPR about the dynamics of smoking in social networks.

If a few bars in Colorado Springs can become incubators for promiscuous sexual behavior, and if friends and families can affect the choices we make about eating and smoking, can we then postulate that some places might give rise to an ideal environment for infidelity?

Nashville therapist “A.J.” (who asked that her name not be used) says an environment like a gym or a workplace isn’t necessarily going to cause infidelity. But if someone is already vulnerable to cheating, certain environments can provide an ideal opportunity.

She says she’s seen a number of common dynamics that make a couple more vulnerable to infidelity. “Maybe the husband works long hours,” says A.J. “If you’re bonding at work and not with your partner…” she points out, “I mean, it’s hard enough…when couples are spending time together.

A.J. says this kind of opportunity can turn up anywhere: among co-workers who spend a lot of time together, with musicians on the road for weeks on end, or even between client and personal trainer. “It’s a perfect set-up,” she says, “whenever there’s a lot of one-on-one interaction.”

As for our original premise that the behavior of infidelity might actually spread in some environments like a contagion, it’s tough to prove. But a quote from that New York Times article about the Framingham might offer some possible conclusions:

“… Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking…. [they] hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior.”

So maybe there’s something to our idea of a culture of infidelity. If we get another case at that same gym, I’d be willing to call it a trend…

KDG/THH

Against Your Better Judgement

Check out this NPR story about Terry Harrington, a man not merely wrongly convicted, but actually framed for a 1977 murder by Iowa prosecutors. It seems police and prosecutors manipulated and concealed evidence that pointed to another suspect, leading to the wrongful conviction of Harrington, who served 25 years before his conviction was overturned.

Harrington was black. The likely murderer was white. Did this fact play a role in what would seem to be the cynical and self-interested motives of an Iowa justice system determined to remove an unsolved crime from the books at any cost? That's a pretty difficult question to answer, perhaps even for the principal players involved. Certainly they allowed something other than facts to influence their prosecution of the case.

Most of us harbor some kind of prejudice, even if we don't know it. We make judgements. It's how we organize our observations about people and their behavior. 

But sometimes we don't even realize we're making a judgement. We unwittingly dismiss people or assign them motives based on our assumptions about their age, race, gender, profession, education, attractiveness, accent, or dress. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this phenomenon in "Blink," citing a variety of studies about how we perceive people instantaneously, before we are even conscious of our perception. Our minds make connections we aren't aware of, such as connections between black males and violence, in one of his examples.

And there's this startling pair of statistics: only around 14% of American men are more than 6 feet tall, as compared with more than 58% of Fortune 500 CEOs. Why the shortage of short men in corporate America's upper echelons? See this excerpt of "Blink" for Gladwell's unsettling assessment of how we choose leaders.

As investigators, these kinds of unwitting prejudices can hinder the quest for good intelligence. I found the following website interesting: Project Implicit has created a series of simple online keyboard-stroke tests that assess people's split-second reactions to information about race, gender, and other possible sources of bias. I took one of the tests and found the results both illuminating and fascinating. The race-bias test takes no more than 5 minutes, and it's almost like a quick video game. You can try it here. 

As if this all weren't confusing enough, it's not only our innate prejudices that can cloud our judgement. Sometimes information from clients, while often useful, can cause us to make assumptions about the subjects we're observing. That we're getting one side of the story is the very nature of the job. Even if our clients aren't actively trying to bamboozle us (like about 95% of Thomas Magnum's damsels-in-distress), they're likely to tell their tale with a slant that ratchets up the purity and nobility of their motives and actions. Who wouldn't?

Case in point: the client tells you his wife hires a babysitter and goes out every Friday and Saturday night. He shows you receipts from her recent shopping sprees at Victoria's Secret and a cell phone bill with lots of calls to a mysterious number. All this is factual, useful, and possibly telling information. Then he adds she's been unkind, distant, and dismissive towards him lately, often doesn't answer his calls, speaks to him sarcastically, and picks fights. Less factual and quantifiable--a fine line between reality and perception here. Then he throws in that his wife's a manipulative, high-maintenance gold-digger who spends all his money on shoes and spa visits and is a lousy mother to their two toddlers. This last bit's pretty much devoid of fact.

What do we do with all that information? It's easy to sympathize with the client here, buy his story at face value, and let it fuel a little righteous anger on his behalf. We want justice for this poor guy and his little girls, and it's our mission to help him by catching his wife in the act. Suddenly we're the righteous crusader, and our work feels meaningful in a way that sifting through trash and watching a parked car for ten hours sometimes doesn't.

But once we decide the subject's not only guilty, but also evil, that's all we'll see. To a hammer, all the world's a nail; now everything she does reads as evidence of her narcissism and deception. Heck, maybe she even reminds us of that ex-special someone who...let's say, left quite an impression back in the day.

Suddenly, we're not searching for truth anymore. We've been programmed to look for the answer we think the client wants, and we want to please him. Ultimately, this doesn't serve the client's interests any more than those Iowa prosecutors' eagerness to convict someone, anyone, served the public interest in 1977. 

The client hired us to find out the truth, even if he doesn't grasp that at first. And the truth in the form of "actionable intelligence"--facts backed up by admissible evidence--is what we need to deliver. All that additional info about the shoes and the domestic cruelty? We sympathize, but we file it into the "irrelevant" pile and remind ourselves, yet again, to keep an open mind.

Divorce - An Economic Indicator?

How’s the economy doing?

The “numbers” often obscure the picture: the stock market surges while unemployment slowly spirals upwards. As for GDP and the TED Spread…um…what?!?!?  In the end, no two economists agree on the answer to the question.

For most folks, the real question is this: How does the recession affect my day-to-day life?

We’ve heard the stories: journalists, restaurant owners and employees, pilots, automotive dealers, and factory workers who’ve lost jobs and businesses, families who’ve lost homes. More insidious effects likely lie beneath the surface—stress-induced health problems, rising crime…and according to this MSN money article from earlier this year, a decrease in divorce filings.

At first glance, it sounds like a silver lining. It's not such great news for family lawyers and investigators who specialize in divorce cases, but so what? Could it be good news for families? A case of external stress bringing couples closer, maybe?

Phoenix family-law attorney Bonnie Booden says unfortunately, no. “…Most people in the middle-income brackets are getting by on whatever income they have,” she tells MSN money, adding that many couples are choosing to stick it out for the time being because the cost of splitting a household into two is prohibitive. 

Add this little tidbit from a recent Independent article,  “Why more desperate housewives choose to play away from home,” and you get a zesty stew of marital strife—increasing infidelity among women, middle-class couples who can’t afford a divorce.

Where does this leave spouses facing a lengthy in-home separation or attorneys and PIs in the uncomfortable position of playing counselor to an unhappily married client? It's damage control time, folks.

For a little help in the "making the most of things" realm, check out the work of Dr. John Gottman, the noted relationship researcher Malcolm Gladwell famously profiles in his 2005 book Blink. (see excerpt)

Gottman has observed thousands of couples for more than three decades, and he offers the following tips for improving relationships. For best results, steer away from the "four horsemen"--his term for the communications styles he considers most disastrous to relationships: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

You can read more about the four horsemen and myths of marital dysfunction here.

-KDG

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