Cheats in the bedroom are cheats in the boardroom

Working life

Cheating on your spouse goes hand in hand with cheating in the workplace.

That’s the conclusion of a provocative new study that found a strong correlation between adultery and workplace misconduct by corporate executives and financial advisers.

The study came about when finance professors at the University of Texas at Austin and Emory University were able to examine customer lists from Ashley Madison, a dating site for married people looking to have affairs, or “discreet encounters” as it puts it. A computer hack in 2015 had exposed the names and personal data of more than 30 million users.

The researchers looked at four groups among the site’s users: brokers, corporate executives, whitecollar criminals and police officers. They found that Ashley Madison customers generally were more than twice as likely to have violated professional codes of conduct compared with a control group, according to authors John Griffin, Samuel Kruger and Gonzalo Maturana.

“Our study indicates cheating in one context carries over to cheating in others,” said Griffin, who has a specialty investigating Wall Street misconduct. “We’re not trying to debate ethics or lecture people. All we’re doing is examining the data and the data is fairly strong,” he said.

The findings add to the debate about something long considered off limits in corporate boardrooms: the personal lives of executives. That was until the MeToo era, a movement against sexual harassment that has led to exits of some CEOs.

The study found that 4.1 per cent of individuals accused of violating securities laws by the US Securities and Exchange Commission between 2010 and 2015 had paid accounts at Ashley Madison. That compared to 1 per cent of the control population, made up of people with similar work histories but no misconduct charges.

Chief executives and chief financial officers who had accounts were twice as likely to have engaged in a financial misstatement or be the focus of a class action securities lawsuit between 2008 and 2014.

Cheating brokers were more likely than the control group to have black marks on their records with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

The professors encountered a few research hurdles, including ethical questions about using Ashley Madison data. They concluded it was in the public domain. Also, the site, whose slogan is “Life is Short. Have an Affair,” had some fake users. So Griffin and his co-authors narrowed their study to customers who had matching addresses from credit card numbers.

There is also the question of whether members of the control group engaged in marital infidelity outside of Ashley Madison.

But Griffin is confident in the findings, to be published in the peerreviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“If you’re foolish to put your name into such a site, you’re foolish enough to make other mistakes,” said Davia Temin, founder of crisis consultancy Temin & Co in New York.

If you’re foolish to put your name into such a site, you’re foolish enough to make other mistakes.

Crisis consultant Davia Temin