Discovering Infidelity on Facebook - Robert Burriss

Social media apps connect us with friends and family even when we’re physically separated. Whether organizing events and get-togethers, sharing baby photographs with grandparents who live overseas, or simply updating our social circle about our feelings and activities, social media clearly serves an important purpose for hundreds of millions of people.

 

How do people react when they uncover unfaithfulness on Facebook?

But, as we all know, social media offers the opportunity for negative as well as positive behaviors. The relative anonymity of some social apps, and ability for anyone on the network to contact anyone else, means that trolling and abuse can quickly escalate. And the ease with which we can make connections, without which social media would cease to function, also offers opportunities for illicit relationship behaviors.

Put simply, the rise of social media has been a boon for those who are inclined to pursue extramarital affairs. With a pool of potential partners vastly larger than the number of people any individual could hope to meet in the real world, and ample opportunity for anonymous and furtive interactions, it shouldn’t be surprising if many are tempted to use Facebook to facilitate their infidelity.

Still, one drawback of sending sexualized messages to an affair partner is that there’s always the chance that your long-term partner will discover evidence of your transgressions. What happens then? How do we react? With social media a relatively new phenomenon, it’s unclear whether social rules that govern acceptable responses to online infidelity have emerged.

“I feel so bloody connected to you!”

Psychologists Michael Dunn and Gemma Billett of Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales decided to investigate.

They had a group of student-aged and heterosexual male and female volunteers view mocked-up Facebook pages. On each page appeared a message. The volunteers were asked to imagine they had discovered this message in their partner’s inbox or outbox (see the image below for an example).

The researchers wrote these messages themselves. Two of the messages were intended to reveal sexual infidelity: that the partner was having sex with someone else. Another two messages revealed emotional infidelity: that the partner had a close bond with someone else.

Now, when scientists attempt to script naturalistic interactions for use in their research, the results are often less than impressive. When scientists study humor, they write jokes that would fail to elicit a chuckle from a six year old. When they study courtship, they write chat-up lines so hackneyed they would make James Bond blush. But here, Dunn and Billett have outdone themselves. I am no longer in my early twenties, I don’t use Facebook, and I am not a philanderer, so I am perhaps not the best judge of whether these messages appear genuine. What do you think?

Robert Burriss Ph.D.