CEOs Who Cheat in Bedroom Will Cheat in Boardroom: Study
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They got their data from the Ashley Maddison hack and then cross referenced that with police records of people who got caught. I'm not sure this is a very valid study.
From previous experience consuming public record data sources programmatically, a proof of concept would take no more than a full day of work. I am not suggesting one do this, only that pandora's box is already open.
In fact, the latter ones are so ubiquitous, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a person in a major US city in their 20s who was single for a period of time in the past 5 years and haven't used one of those apps.
And soon, it will the premise of everyday life in the US. Whoopee!
Or said in one word: blackmail.
There's no sugar coating it. You'd be collecting data points and analyzing them to pursue your own justice without due process. That's quite a dangerous thing to claim to want to do in the name of "insider risk management".
I don't support blackmail in any form, full stop. I do want to know if you're going to embezzle millions of dollars before you do, as do shareholders or customers (if you're managing assets) of the organization.
There is no person that is so intelligent that he/she can cheat for long and not eventually get caught. If people want to know the truth about a person badly enough, they will.
How do you know? Wouldn't the very best never get caught and therefore we'd never know?
How do you explain all of the unsolved crimes?
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/395069137/open-cases-why-one-...
Getting “caught” so far has not mattered and only resulted in further consolidation of power. Correlating that so far with infidelity, the only takeaway is that you should put all your mistresses under an NDA, which also wouldn’t have come up if he didn’t run for office resulting in the feds raiding his lawyer’s office and indicting the lawyer due to conduct that became part of the national spotlight! These are things that don’t happen, so all you have to assume is that the President wasn't the genius that invented these tactics and merely used tools available.
The main point I am making here is that this is enough information to rationalize proving an absence:
There are many many people like him at least in an even distribution throughout society. Let alone people with a network of enablers.
In fact, cheating has little to do with how intelligent you are and how well you are at containerizing different parts of your life so that they never cross. It is ridiculously easy to cheat if you travel a lot on your own.
See also psychopathy and sociopathy.
Using the Ashley Madison data is basically what we would call a "reduced form estimate". The idea is that someone in the Ashley Madison data is more likely (or at least not less likely) than a comparable individual not in the Ashley Madison data to cheat on their spouse. They would like to measure whether or not people actually cheat, but they can't, so they measure this instead. This kind of reduced form estimate is a fairly common thing when you can't measure actual treatment compliance, but you can measure an "invitation to treat". We, in fact, know that Ashley Madison wasn't actually used for cheating because there were no (zero) real women on the site. Extensive analyses of the data leak suggest basically that men signed up and were faced with phony bots. But the idea should still be that the choice to sign up on Ashley Madison reveals an attempt to cheat.
The other major challenge for the design is that the control group of CEOs need to have what we would think are baseline similar propensity to commit fraud etc in all respects except for the choice to cheat. So, at the very least I would want to do a matching, weighting, or propensity score design that accounts for differential company characteristics (sector, size, age, any characteristics we would a priori affect propensity to engage in financial malfeasance.) If what we learn is that people who run shady payday loan companies also cheat on their spouses, then this is maybe not interesting. But if what we learn is that among F2000 blue chip companies in similar sectors, cheating spouses are more likely to be cheating CEOs, this is more interesting, right?
I agree with you that it's possible that the degree of difficulty / competence factor might be a confounder. Probably they could compensate for this by looking at something other that rate of conviction for malfeasance, rather by modelling types / degrees of malfeasance and degree of difficulty for getting caught.
Finally, the casual inference here is impossible. So it's possible that they have a good design to answer a question they're not asking. I would assume the default assumption is not that cheating on one's spouse causes one to cheat on financial things, but rather that both are outcomes which flow from an underlying propensity for deceit. In this case, the main takeaway is that early indicators of deceit may allow us to head off or catch financial malfeasance. That's interesting, but maybe not the exact question they're asking.
I'd be really interested in reading the final thing because I could see it going either way. I think it's an interesting proposal for a design. Would love to see a pre-print
There were numerous bots and fake accounts to attempt to make it seem as though there were more women on it, and I'm sure the gender ratio was absurd, but I seriously doubt the number was 0.
Wikipedia discussion of the bots : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison#Fake_female_bot...
This is my recollection. I can cite no source for evidence.
Cheating is not associated with low intelligence but with a corrupt character.
That said, the conclusion is not surprising. One measure of personal integrity is whether or not a person will do (or not do) what they "promise." This is typically referred to as "keeping your word" in English, the concept is fairly universal in my experience but different cultures refer to it in different ways. From what I have read it is a particularly strong characteristic value in "honor" cultures.
Of course there are 'levels' to these sorts of promises, like "I will be home for dinner tonight" is a much less "serious" vow than "I will forsake all others."[1] And again, in my experience, people I have known have a sort of 'internal measure' of what promises they are willing to break and which ones they aren't. Ethics classes are all over these sort of discussions.
As the marriage vow of fidelity is considered a fairly "strong" vow (high consequence for violating it), it seems reasonable to extrapolate that if someone was willing to violate that promise then mere 'business' promises would be similarly fair game.
Always a good thing to know where your boss stands on such things.
[1] A typical marriage vow promising monogamy.
That reason is, mostly, vulnerability to blackmail.
Group 1 treats it as a normative statement about the world: "I want X" means they should have X, and arrangements of the world in which they don't have X are ones in which the world has morally wronged them. This injustice means they're owed redress, which makes it morally and socially acceptable to do whatever necessary to take from the world what it wrongly denied them. Anything they do is justified; they're just reclaiming what's already theirs.
Group 2 treats "I want X" as a positive (non-normative) statement about themselves, like "I had toast for breakfast." It may inform their plans and decisions but doesn't justify behavior that's normally unjustified.
Everyone is in (1) some of the time, many are in (1) most of the time, and some are in (1) all the time.
You can see this every day in common, totally mundane scenarios. I guess including the home and the boardroom.
A random example (which doesn't hinge on legal vs. right, although it seems to): It's illegal in some U.S. states to change lanes across a solid white divider when driving, especially if you're about to make a turn.
There are intersections where the turn lane's solid section is so long, and the block before the intersection is so short, it's basically impossible to merge where it's legal. Especially with any traffic, there's just no time to cross before the solid.
But there's room! Once you're in the solid zone, there's no one blocking you.
Merging there would be illegal. There's the fully legal option to wait at the light, then go on straight, then turn at a block down the road where the solid is short.
But that's inconvenient. You want to get home. But merging here would be illegal.
But you want to.
So people partition.
Neurotypicals understand that other people exist as separate individuals. Dark triad types are utterly self=centred and only aware of their own desires and interests.
Other people either satisfy their desires or hinder them - sometimes actively, sometimes just because they're randomly in the way.
The person who frustrates - or even just distracts - a dark triad individual is considered evil. They must be removed, humiliated, punished, or destroyed in some other way.
Some people are much better at lying than others. I know because I am absolutely terrible at lying and anybody who knows me reasonably well can tell when I'm lying. And I've come across plenty of people who are great at it.
War is the art of deception and the first casualty of war is the truth.
The cheats just figure this out and supply an item which is already in tremendous demand - absolution of responsibility.
Of course, over time the cheats will think they can get away with anything and go on to use this skill in all aspects of their life. And some get caught, but not enough for the cycle to stop repeating. :-)
The section about bagels and that that management where more likely not to pay for their bagels in the honesty basket.
“ Feldman’s bagel business is a great example of the decency and goodness of mankind. After years of delivering bagels, Paul Feldman noticed certain trends, and he gathered data on his bagel sales. This data showed that the smaller offices that he delivered to practiced honesty more often than the bigger offices.”
http://www.geocities.ws/john_russey/philosophy/Ethos_Anthrop...
This is an example of the “just world fallacy.” There are many people so intelligent that they can cheat for so long and not get caught. Look at Michael Jackson. He died innocent in the eyes of the law.
Or look at the Zodiac killer: he’s still out there. Whole lotta people “trying to find the truth about that person”, as you say, and after decades and decades they got nothin’.
The world is not fair or just. Cheaters can cheat and get away with it, and they can do this in perpetuity. To think otherwise is to make a classic logical error.
If people want to know the truth about a person badly enough, they’re fucked. Because the truth is elusive. And the world ain’t fair.
> "[Robson and Safechuck] have previously testified under oath, under intense cross-examination, [have] maintained for twenty years a consistent story about Michael Jackson being innocent, and they come forward and completely change their story. That in itself is discrediting."
Looks more like they realized they could make a bunch of money on a controversial "documentary" without getting hit with a defamation lawsuit, since MJ is dead.
> American singer Barbra Streisand spoke in Jackson's defense, saying "his sexual needs were his sexual needs" and that the accusers had been "thrilled" to be with him. She added that the accusers were "both married and they both have children, so it didn't kill them".[73]Streisand later apologized and expressed sympathy for the accusers.[74]
What a comment coming from a woman that didn't even want to have a nude picture in the press. Which blew up in her face and is called that the Streisand effect.
It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California inadvertently drew further public attention to it.
But, today I learned, the name seems to have been coined to describe something else a couple of years later [1]:
Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term in 2005 in relation to a holiday resort issuing a takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals) over use of the resort's name.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect#Origin_of_the...
They only testified on Michael’s defense team under pressure and duress and witness tampering. Safechuck and Robson are definitely legit.
And I don't mean that as a jab. I really think he was so messed up by his abusive upbringing and subsequent life that he may not have been fully accountable.
"Affluenza" on steroids.
Zero insane people have the ability to negotiate contracts like MJ did. Michael was a ruthless and canny businessman and anyone who thinks he was “insane” is not familiar with the absolutely fiendish and dark level of planning he put into his rape career. The dude had silent alarms outside his bedroom. That shows a level of foresight and planning that would get an insanity defense thrown out of court instantly.
in short Michael was guilty as hell and if you watch the documentary I bet you a million dollars you will renounce your “MJ truthing. “
One thing I didn't realize, and which changed my thinking about the subject, was that the kids were alone with him one at a time in a serialized manner. From the descriptions I always thought it was more like a sleepover party atmosphere at Neverland and why I was not inclined to believe the allegations.
To me, Diane Dimond said it best: “Is Michael Jackson the incredible victim of multiple extortion attempts? Or is he simply a man that is a pedophile?”
I can’t believe the amount of MJ truthing in this thread and Im glad you’ve seen the light. I agree that the stories in the doc may not be 100% credible, but Jimmy Safechuck is simply not a Machiavellian personality type, IMO. I strongly believe Safechuck and Robson, strongly believe that MJ was guilty as hell, and thanks for circling back to discuss your findings.