Cheating Fathers = Cheating Sons

Study shows cheating fathers produce cheating sons

Men have long been advised to look at their mothers-in-law to gauge how age may treat their wives. Now a new study suggests that women might do well to scrutinies the habits of their fathers-in-law for advance warning of their lovers’ fidelity.

Research carried out by Czech scientists into reasons why some people cheat in long-term relationships found that, while men and women both had affairs, men were more likely to stray if their fathers had been unfaithful as they were growing up.

In a study presented at a conference of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, Jan Havlicek and his colleagues found that daughters were not affected in the same way by their mothers’ infidelity. Havlicek said that, as boys grew up, they learned from their social world behaviour that was appropriate and what they could get away with. Their father was the obvious role model, he added.

The study’s findings would appear to be borne out by examples of womanizing fathers and sons in public life, including the golfer Tiger Woods, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British soccer player Ryan Giggs.

Havlicek, who is based at Charles University in Prague, recruited 86 couples for the research and questioned the men and women individually and in confidence about their relationships, their attitudes toward sex, their family backgrounds and their infidelities.
Havlicek does support the idea that men and women have affairs for different reasons. Havlicek and his team found that whether or not a man was satisfied and happy in his main relationship had no effect on the likelihood that he would stray.

Men usually have affairs because they want sex and a greater number of sexual partners, not because they are fed up with their wives, said Havlicek. Women, on the other hand, were much more likely to stray if they were dissatisfied with some aspect of their relationship. Havlicek believes women have affairs to find a new partner.

“It might be best to stay in your relationship because, in some cases, it’s better to have someone who’s not perfect than to be alone — particularly when you have children,” he said. “But in the meantime, you can look around for some other options. Many of the women we interviewed said that’s just what they were doing.”

Martie Haselton, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of California in Los Angeles, said the fact that daughters did not appear to be as affected by parental infidelity in the same way as sons were explained by genetics: “While good-looking fathers tend to have good-looking sons and those men tend to have more opportunity to play away”, she said, “attractive daughters of attractive mothers would behave differently.”

Source:

• Charles University, Prague
• http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2011/06/27/2003506826