So I conducted a little mini-experiment here on G&WS concerning accountability differences between the sexes?

Question

I was curious to see how an event (specifically cheating on ones spouse) would be judged by people, and how changing the s*x of the cheater affect who is to blame. I set up two nearly identical questions in two different sections of yahoo. In both questions, a spouse has cheated on a partner (wife cheats in the first question, husband in the second). People are asked to rate (scale 1-10) how responsible the "cheater" is for his/her actions.

Wife Cheats

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Atlk8P6HMPJJo4GDKSuUwCnsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20080625135838AAWp7Xa

Husband cheats

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Anh8WFfDr1wBfLQcKKhSWH3sy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20080625135626AABvdoL

From my calculations, for the same trangression, a man would be held 95.2% accountable while a woman would be found 87.5% accountable.

I calculated it as follows

Anytime a number is given, it is used

Anytime two numbers are given (ie wife 5 husband 5), it is used

Answer 1

You didn't set up the experiment correctly. You failed to control the variable of where you posted the questions. Those who post in the marriage... section and those who post in GWS may not be similar populations. I recommend redoing the study by posting identical questions in the same section. The problem is that there are too many variables in your study. You have the male female variable, which is your independent variable, and then you have the percent accountability, which is your dependent variable. You run into trouble when you include the different forum variable. Is the difference because of the forum or because of the gender? You see the problem?

This is an interesting study but try it again please. Perhaps you should try it again with both questions in both sections? It might also be interesting to try it with a female name and avatar and see if the answers are influenced.

Also, if you did this enough times (over a period of months or years) you could chart how the percentages change. Right now you're dealing with a small sample, but if you track how many people answer and what the percentage is each time, you can actually chart it. After collecting at least 30 samples over time, you can draw some more reliable conclusions. You need more than 30 responses, or 30 calculated percentages (depending on how you choose to set up your statistical analysis) to have a large enough sample to really draw conclusions.

Edit: I calculated the numbers myself, without including calculations for the wife when the husband was in question and vice versa (that would be the correct way to calculate) and I got wife = 89.65% responsible, and husband 96.4% responsible.

There was an outlier that I simply noted as "10." Hendrix, in the question about the wife, he said she was 1.0x10to the 22 power, or a one with 22 zeros after it. I think that one, if included in the same way the "11" was included would throw the whole thing way out. I don't have my scientific calculator right now but suffice it to say, the results would show the wife more than 20 times more responsible than the man. I suggest answers which exceed 10 either be thrown out or reduced to 10 across the board for consistency.

Now I am going to look at the questions for more subtle bias. I want to compare what percentage of the time the husband and wife were called a s**t and how often they were expected to be "above" such behavior.

I'll be right back....

OK, so the wife was called a s**t or w***e 12.90% of the time, the husband, 0.0% of the time. The wife was seen as failing to be "above" such behavior 6.45% of the time and the husband, 3.84% of the time. Of course, none of this means anything because the sample size is so small and the controls so lax that we can't draw any conclusions. This is an interesting little study though. It would be interesting to conduct this study with an adequate sample and proper controls. If I do, I'll keep you all posted.

Mike: I know what you  mean, people might get suspicious about why you post the same questions. I would recommend waiting a while, definitely. I would love to conduct a more thorough study of attitudes about cheating. If you can be contacted by email, and would be interested in furthering the research, let me know and I will find some scholarly articles for a literature review. Overall  though it's very interesting since it used to be the woman was blamed more and the man was expected to cheat. Definitely attitudes have changed. It would be interesting to gauge what they are now. Thanks for the interesting mini-pilot-study.

Answer 2

I disagree with Deva kinda....this is the first mini experiment I've seen on here done correctly.  Much better then the do you care if you wife has slept around in the past with other men: compared to do you care if you husband has used prostitutes in the past.  

(round applause to you)

She is right that for a conclusive study you need more then 31 answers for input.  1000 and your getting there for a real one anyway....

Cheater is a cheater...even if a spouse is an AA member and abusive...the cheater is to blame his or her actions....which should have been getting help or leaving not cheating.

Answer 3

Sorry your control group is not a significant representation of the norm in our society.  Your research was seriously flawed and you also had too small of a sample to prove anything.

Answer 4

Seems to me that they are both accountable but that men are viewed as more inclined to cheat because historically males were away from the home more than women. That isn't the case anymore as women are not as housebound as they were 50 years ago.

There is some difference in the way men proceed in ending a marriage. They wait until they have someone lined up. Women will divorce for any number of reasons and don't need to have a replacement lover. I read about this in several books on marriage. Men fall out of love and wait for the in love condition before they ask for a divorce. They also will stay married, but cheat, just to keep their money.

C. :)

Answer 5

You certainly do not need this study to confirm your supposition.  In heterosexual relationships, if a man cheats on his significant other he is vilified and condemned for it as he rightly should be; when a woman cheats on her significant other, her significant other is blamed in many instances.  Many automatically think her male partner came up short in some area of the relationship, hence giving her good reason to cheat on him.  Contrariwise, men who cheat are always looked upon disapprovingly, and their female partners are hardly ever blamed for their cheating on them.

Answer 6

When you listen to the news anchors you hear the standard "our poll has a 3% +/- margin of error".   Those polls have hundreds and/or thousands of responders.   And they can vary by 3%

Your samples are not large enough to have any significance.    They were too dissimilar to meet with any legitimate research criteria, ie control (similar age, education, experience for each respondent, where posted, when posted).  So your margin of error is way more than the 5% difference you got.   Actually - they would be deemed to be about equal because of the margin of error.

Answer 7

This is where obsessing on averages, and ignoring what the data are actually saying, is misleading.

In both questions, the vast majority of people who actually answered the question (as opposed to extranseous comments) said 10. One question got more responses. In both cases a very few people help the other spouse partly to blame -- the question that got more answers got one or two more of these.

If you were to plot all the data on a graph, you'd see that there are huge clumps, with most of the data on the 10-spot for both scenarios. Thus, the "difference" you're seeing (one more person who thought both spouses partly responsible happened to answer one question) is not significant.

BTW, you might not even have gotten that tiny difference if you hadn't made the age disparity so huge. It's considered perfectly OK for men of even 50 to go after girls of 19; but considered sick for even a 30 year old woman to do so. (Notice how many people remarked on the boy's age, and the age disparity in the wife-cheated version. Also notice how much uglier the language was in describing the wife.)

So, taken all in all, if anything, the answers came down much harder on the woman than the man.

Oh, and, about the difference in the categories -- it would also have been sounder to pick better categories. Either completely irrelevant in both cases; or maybe one Etiquette the other in Social Sciences: Other. One one in Marriage and one in Family (similar groups of people focussing on each category).

Maybe in in Psych, one in Mental Health (then, a week later, trade them).

Anyway, the modal response was 10 for both spouses. That's the real finding. Not that one or two more people gave lower numbers in one.

Answer 8

I think that if a husband cheated on his wife, then there was a reason such as he was not turned on. If a wife cheated on a husband, then there was probably the same reason, she wasn't turned on. I don't care about ethics or gender, if someone is not happy with a relationship, it is all their right to do something about it. What they choose to do about it is the only factor of difference. If they make out with other people that make them happier, then Ok. However I think it is best to end the relationship with the less than inriguing partner, at some point, sooner the better to let both move on as soon as possible, instead of trying to make up excuses, and cover up things, because that is just too stressful. Bottom line here is that, you have to strive for happiness, and if your spouse isn't cutting it, than chances are, they aren't too happy either, so give yourselves both a break, move on.