But if I hear that someone was unfaithful to their spouse, my business trust in them goes waaay down.
If they're willing to break trust with the person closest to them in their life, what chance do I have as a mere business partner of not being screwed over at some point?
Same here. I actually don't know why it doesn't seem to affect people's thoughts about politicians. People are absolutely willing to separate what they know about a person's personal life from what they think about that person's politics.
For me it's a scarlet letter. I get maybe an hour of talk about each candidate when there's an election, and it's one-way. I don't get to ask them anything, I just get told some mix of what they say and what the news says. Why would I trust someone who has demonstrated untrustworthiness to the one person they've spent the most time with?
I just don't get why people are so willing to create a business box-of-facts and a personal-box-of-facts when they discover something like this. Fact is business relationships are personal. You even do the same things when you're meeting business partners for heavens sake: One of you invites the other out and pays for it. You go for a meal or a drink. You go to gatherings together. Ghosting each other (LOL).
That's a bit like expecting someone to be mean to you because they're mean to their brother. Close relationships are often conducted in a manner far different to other relationships. What if the person wants some space but the other doesn't give any? What if their spouse is mean but they put up with it because they have children? There could be a hundred reasons.
Above all though, life is complicated, and in the case of politicians the field is often limited (by those with real power) to one liar who might be less worse than another liar. I'm actually surprised that people pick so well given these constraints.
There’s a person on HN who comments frequently. Very level headed, measured, informative comments. Always tries to lower the temperature of discussions. Very refreshing to read their comments.
I followed them on Twitter and found a very different approach. It felt like two different people. But honestly they were able to compartmentalise these two personas and it worked.
I figured I should probably compartmentalise too. I wouldn’t invite the Twitter persona to a technical discussion but I would invite the HN persona. And as long as only the HN persona showed up, what does it matter to me what the Twitter persona does on the weekend?
It’s certainly not unheard of, so I’ll keep sweeping personality assessments based on cheating at bay.
There’s clearly also other reasons, I’m not saying cheating partners are always poor martyrs of circumstance.
If someone is a nice, cordial and all around good person and you hear they cheated on their wife you might give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment. If someone behaves like the person who would cheat you now have the smoking gun.
Why do egoists cheat on people? Because they don't care.
Why do good people cheat? Because their relationship didn't provide them with something they needed and they weren't able to either communicate their needs properly to their partners or end the relationship.
> Hey, I love him and if he doesn't know it doesn't hurt him and if I ask for permission not only will it hurt him, but he won't give it to me anyway. So I'll just lie to him.
Which kinda blew my mind. I understand cheating as a I-messed-up thing or as a my-partner-literally-and-believably-threatened-suicide-if-I-left-them thing but an ongoing, decades long deception? Man. That's wild.
I used to knew someone like this. "Love and sex are different, separate things." It taught me to be more guarded about who I associate with.
Don't get me wrong, two wrongs never make a right, but the reasons why people behave the way they do tell more about a person than their actual behavior. Cheating is never right, but sometimes what it tells you about the person is more them being a tragic person than a bad person. It depends.
Cheating on someone is just such a noisy signal. You don’t know why, or what’s wrong with the relationship. You mostly don’t know who is cheating, at best you have a biased sample. You don’t know what they are like to their parents or children, or frankly even their partners - are they loyal to them in other ways, caring for them when they need it?
Relationships are super complicated and judging them from outside takes a psychology degree and extra training. I’m not going to jump to conclusions from a Boolean variable.
Agreed, I wouldn't either.
However the point of my comment was to explain that the variables rarely are boolean and never come in isolation (unless someone talks to you about someone else whom you never even heard of).
For me all these traits don't necessarily mean anything. You can like children and pets and still be a mass murderer, you can hate children and pets and be the most honest, most cordial person on earth.
When using outside traits to form an image about people your confidence in that image should never be exceptionally high. However cheating is not an outside trait, it is behavior.
A single imstance of observed behavior will still not say much. But at some point the confidence raises. If a stranger yells once at the waitress that adds one data point with low confidence to my list. If I cannot judge the situation because I didn't see what it was about that confidence might be close to nonexistent. Even if I fully recognize the situation I still can't be totally confident, maybe the guy has a bad day, maybe he has a history with the waitress etc.
However if I see the same guy being mean to different people for a prolonged period of time, my confidence in all other explainations will naturally fall and my confidence in the theory that the guy is mean will rise.
That doesn't mean the guy is an asshole everywhere in his life. Maybe he is super caring with his kids or old mother etc.
> If they're willing to break trust with the person closest to them in their life, what chance do I have as a mere business partner of not being screwed over at some point?
That's a very American perspective. People position on extramarital affair is extremely culturaly dependant.
It goes from deep public revulsion despite statitics showing people massively cheat in the extremely puritanical USA to silent acceptance in a "what I don't know don't hurt me" in part of Europe.
People business life and private life are not the same things. I would avoid making too many black-and-white extreme judgments based on things you necessarily have a very narrow view.
Nobody likes it but feel powerless to change it.
But I wouldn’t say it’s viewed positively or even neutrally.
It has absolutely nothing in common with hitting your spouse. It is extremely frowned upon to openly display it but relatively accepted if it's discreet. It's very correlated to the relation a population has to sex. People in very religious countries where sex is seen as moraly dubious have very strong view against infidelity and people in countries with a more casual view of sex don't think it's such a big deal.
France is a relatively extreme example. The last Pew Research Center study shows that only 47% of the French thinks that infidelity is moraly unacceptable and there is no large gap between women and men answers.
It's just not seen as morally disqualifying. People view cheating as a mostly private matter and acknowledge it happens. When it was revealed that the former president was having an affair with an actress, it barely impacted his popularity.
In Europe you can still very clearly see which countries have a protestant, "work hard or go to hell" attitude to life, and which have an, oddly, Catholic "let's enjoy life and see how it goes" approach. Religion participation rates have dwindled away in Western Europe for sure, since WWII if not before.
I'm also not so sure about the accuracy of your Catholic stereotypes. The greatest German industry and wealth is in the Catholic south ("upper Germany"), for example, and not in the Protestant North or Northeast. Similarly there are huge differences between Northern and Southern Italy yet both are Catholic, so I don't think it's religion that is the difference maker when comparing, say, Germany and Italy's productivity and work habits.
I think the overall point is quite valid. If you look at a whole host of societal norms in the US, they will be quite puritanical, compared to a bunch of [formerly] Catholic places, even though the US is far more socially liberal than many (most?) Catholic countries.
You can always argue about what words to use to quantify, is it "extremely" puritan or merely "strongly influenced", not sure this can lead anywhere.
Honestly, I don't see this and think it's both bad history and bad social commentary. Cities all across the country let people walk into a store and steal whatever they want without prosecution. Homeless people defecating in city squares. Higher levels of corruption and bribery than in Europe. Much more more crime and lawlessness than in Europe. Certainly doesn't seem puritanical to me.
If you are seriously interested in the U.S. founding, I'd recommend reading Albion's Seed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed
Yes, there were puritans in New England. But also tobacco farmers in Virginia, Cavaliers, and Scotch-Irish and border English in the South, and the Spanish Catholic settlers in California and Florida. Incidentally the first European settlement of the US was Spanish Catholics. And then of course waves of primarily Catholic immigrants from Europe in the 1920s and the current wave of primarily Catholic immigrants from Latin America.
It might be interesting to note that historically the U.S. was viewed (by Europeans) as a corrupt, lawless country, made wealthy by enormous land/person ratios. It was only after WW1 that the U.S. began to flex its economic power but it still maintained a "gangster" reputation, and in fact was the home of many world famous gangsters and scoundrels, together with grifting machine politics in all the major urban cities from Boston's Irish machine that gave us the Kennedy dynasty to Huey Long's machine in the South and virtually everything in between. Puritan was simply not the first word that came to mind in any meaningful description of the U.S. dating from the 19th century onwards.
Texas just made abortion illegal. There was a huge scandal because someone inadvertently displayed a nipple on live television. The definition of nudity includes showing a mere breast. A majority of people think you can’t be moral if you don’t believe in god. People regularly swear on the bible in court.
> but it still maintained a "gangster" reputation
Because it made alcohol consumption illegal out of a rigorous conception of moral purity.
The USA remains heavily influenced by the puritain ideas in its culture. Far more than a country like France where 70% of the population says they are not religious and 29% say they don’t believe at all.
One, I think in modern use "puritanical" doesn't really mean literally specific to the Puritans. They were a fringe group even in their heyday. Rather, it's a wider characterisation of certain protestant churches, Lutheran and Calvinist come to mind too. These emphasise a hard work ethos, education, and de-emphasise "earthly pleasures" in whatever guise. Certainly that's how I [ab]use it in this context.
So yes, while actual Puritans were a small fraction of the US melting pot, plenty of conservative protestants joined them. In this [1] Wikipedia table, you can see US population in 1790. If you narrow focus to Europeans, you're hard-pressed to find any Catholics there! Ulster Scottish/Irish are protestant, Germans may include some Catholics, then there's the French and that's it.
> It might be interesting to note that historically the U.S. was viewed (by Europeans) as a corrupt, lawless country
I couldn't help but think that the US gangs (at least those that made it to popular culture) were Italian and Irish.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_...
That's a tough sell if you ask me.
Reminds of the droning crowds who claimed in March 2020 that masks don't work "because there is no supporting research".
What am I supposed to take from that? That you're for the use of scientific research here?
> Reminds of the droning crowds who claimed in March 2020 that masks don't work "because there is no supporting research".
Since you brought it up, maybe if you supported looking into the research more often you'd be aware of how little supporting evidence there is - not research, there's been research but it has failed to find the evidence you seem to believe exists.
From[1]:
> This recent crop of trials added 9,112 participants to the total randomised denominator of 13,259 and showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.
> It would appear that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.
From[2]:
> Evidence from 14 trials on the use of masks vs. no masks was disappointing: it showed no effect in either healthcare workers or in community settings. We could also find no evidence of a difference between the N95 and other types of masks but the trials comparing the two had not been carried in aerosol-generating procedures.
> But what of the folk walking down the road, going to the supermarket or watching the ducks in the pond?
> The answer is simple: we do not know.
From[3]:
> Unlike other studies looking at masks, the Danmask study was a randomised controlled trial – making it the highest quality scientific evidence.
> In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19.
> When it comes to masks, it appears there is still little good evidence they prevent the spread of airborne diseases. The results of the Danmask-19 trial mirror other reviews into influenza-like illnesses.
> But overall, there is a troubling lack of robust evidence on face masks and Covid-19.
They go on but I think that's enough, even for someone who appears to abhor research as much as you. If that's not the case then I suggest making yourself clearer in future rather than trying to pass off the blame through straw man responses.
[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
[2] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-masks-on-or-off/
[3] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-masks-stop-the-spread...
We found that communities with high reported mask-wearing and physical distancing had the highest predicted probability of transmission control.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7...
Not a shocker really given how all successful containment measures over the pandemic did include masks (same for earlier SARS outbreaks). And we literally had a hundred years worth of practice using masks for airborne transmission diseases to draw conclusions from.
> What am I supposed to take from that?
That it's entirely possible to use common sense to gauge everyday risks without demanding a peer reviewed study. Crossing into traffic is dangerous. Mechanical barriers help catch particles. Deceptive people are less trustworthy. A formal study would often quantify that, but coming to opposite conclusion than common sense concept happens very infrequently and then usually warrant a replication study.
However the dynamic with online peertards is they use proof requests as an attempt to shut down the discussion, knowing all well that finding supporting research (which often does exist!) in unfamiliar field is a lot of work. When people object to that, the perfect trifecta of cookie-cutter strawman, ad-hominem and non-sequitir accusation follows.
In our case you didn't seem to bother looking for peer reviewed research that cheaters are more (or even just as ) trustworthy as baseline, which would be a really remarkable, counter-intuitive result worth sharing. Nope, you'd rather latch on an entirely reasonable comment and insist that not playing along with your foolishness is anti-intillectualism.
It's also entirely possible to be wrong, and divorce or being cheated on is not an "everyday" risk, hence the challenge you encountered.
> In our case you didn't seem to bother looking for peer reviewed research that cheaters are more (or even just as ) trustworthy as baseline
Why should I need to? I know you want to make this personal as you keep engaging in rudeness and ad hominem but it's got nothing to do with your claim, and I'm not making a claim.
Just try backing it up instead of deflecting and being rude.
As to your study in the Lancet, did you read it? Even glance across it?
> Methods > Serial cross-sectional surveys were administered via a web platform to randomly surveyed US individuals aged 13 years and older, to query self-reports of face mask-wearing.
Amusing. I really think you should read the articles written by the esteemed epidemiologists I supplied, especially where they talk about what makes a good study.
Back to the topic, I found this interesting, though I am unqualified to judge it and only read abstract and conclusion: https://psyarxiv.com/2stcv/
To address your point, the cheating could have arisen from emotional issues that hadn't been consciously acknowledged and couldn't be addressed until after the cheating occurred. If that person goes through therapy and deals with their dysfunction I'd suggest it was a transformative process and you're not dealing with the same person who cheated.
To what degree should you make someone pay for something they didn't do to you?
Haven't you made mistakes and learnt from them and grown as a human?
All I'm suggesting is to be very cautious about passing character judgement on others based on old data. You may be fine with the false positives but it's a lagging indicator at best.
I think rushing to conclusions and acting on those is scarier in a business partner, than how they choose to live their personal life.
I'd assume GP would only hold this judgement for someone cheating, not swinging.
The main point was trust. Trust is earned.
Whether you break a promise with your life partner or your business partner, you've destroyed a chunk of your reputation.
although some people are mixing both up, most of people i have worked with manage to separate.
one of my moost loyal colleagues is cheating on his wife for years. and yet, he is loyal to the tasks and to the company.
hence, i find your view a little naive and funny and perhaps would label it with some -ism if there was some -ism term for what you think. making conclusions on people based on a thing that is 100% private and not related to the professional life is an -ism.
As long as it filters false positives fine, false negatives are casualties.
We all have some filters in similar ways. I wouldn't want to work with a guy that shows violence to their family. I just don't want it. Simple as that.
This is some sort of an ESG
For a partner, business is rational until it's not. If things start to go wrong. If lots of money is on the line and the contract is not iron clad.
I've seen enough times in my life that people who justify shady actions with excuses in one area of life will do the same in another, when the stakes are high.
i'm sure his wife thinks he is 'loyal' too :^)
I’m going through a business situation at the moment where rationality on both sides has been very low.
When I saw the article title I had the thought that what I’m going through is like a divorce and maybe I could get some insight from the article.
Great article but didn’t help me at all :)
To me he has simply been unmasked as someone who is doing whatever he is currently incentivized to do, rather than someone who respects agreements. When you respect agreements it means you stick to it even when the situation changes to make it less favorable. When people do this it makes a lot of things much easier, since agreements can be relied on.
If you've ever been screwed over in business, you'll find your partners go to all sorts of lengths to pretend they were within their legal rights, which are conveniently just next to their moral obligations.
Just because you do not know whether someone cheated on their spouse does not mean they did or didn't or would or wouldn't. It means you don't know.
And just because someone did or was willing to do something in one context does not mean they would do so in another different context, but they would probably do so in a similar context.
His wife: “My husband is cheating at work and scamming his company, and yet he is the most loyal husband to me and our kid.”
This loyal colleague was probably extremely loyal to his wife for a time, too.
It's entirely another thing to sneak around - to do something you promised not to do, but in secret, so you don't get caught.
It is my observation and experience that the kind of person who breaks trust in secret is not someone I want to rely on in other parts of life.
Where do you draw the line?
Depending on the culture, the fear is that such "emotional cheating" will either eventually lead to "physical cheating" or even worse (probably feared more by men), lead to a dissolution of the relationship (without necessarily involving cheating) (probably feared more by women).
Any kind of interaction of one partner with an outside party can become suspect of containing emotional content, which the other partner believes they are entitled to. In graver cases it may even imply a diversion of resources (time, mind space, wealth, etc.) towards the third party that the partner believes is entitled to.
If homosexuality and bisexuality wasn't an even bigger taboo, all relationships and interactions would have the potential for "cheating emotionally".
Intimacy happens at more than just the physical level, and most people reserve some types of intimacy (physical or emotional) for their significant other. When you cross the boundary of intimacy you normally set for people other than your significant other with someone else, that can easily be interpreted as disingenuous or betraying to your SO.
Precisely, I didn't mean for that comment to sound like an endorsement. Maybe I should have used a "/s" but it's not actually sarcasm, it was just meant to illustrate what some people believe. My bad. From the little I have seen, MGTOW fall into the trap of believing possessiveness is only applicable to women, along with other stereotyping misogynistic beliefs.
In case I actually gendered the explanation, I did not mean to. Either partner can be possessive. I do not know whether there are studies on which direction it happens more often.
> Intimacy happens at more than just physical the physical, and most people reserve some types of intimacy (physical or emotional) for their significant other. When you cross the boundary of intimacy you normally set for people other than your significant other with someone else, that can easily be interpreted as disingenuous or betraying to your SO.
The point is that each partners boundary is a personal thing, it may be agreed upon in a couple if it was discussed in advance and it can be shifted afterwards. And if it is discussed, it may be set in the same place for both partners or not. But by default, if it is not discussed, it is likely to be different. And people are likely to judge others assuming that everyone's boundary is in the same place.
The boundary can be set anywhere but it is important for each partner to know the other partners boundary and decide whether it is something they can live with or not, in which case it is better to find someone who is a better fit, otherwise the result will be resentment, betrayal and conflict.
So for example, going on dates with someone else than your SO? I can see how that would be betraying/cheating in a way, though I'm not sure if "emotional cheating" is a good way to express it.
I feel is totally ok to judge someone for their actions, not so much for things they have no control over.
That said, I usually don't date expert meditators, so wouldn't expect my partner to have a perfect control over their emotions. But I would expect them to have sufficient control over their actions. So that is where I draw the line.
Who has never lied or "broken trust in secret" in their lives? You'd hold someone forever accountable for making a horrible mistake that had nothing to do with you?
People who cheat do it consciously.
What about American citizens with dual citizenship? Is it ok to do business with them?
People who start their job search before quitting their current job? Should they be considered at all for employment.
People who convert from their religion at birth? Can they be trusted?
Is it ok to be unfaithful before marriage (dating/cohabiting), before you met the person you are supposed to be with the rest of your life? Is it ok to be unfaithful after marriage has ended (dating/marriage)?
What has this got to do with anything? Being told by your country you should feel a certain way is a one-sided arrangement. It's totally unrelated to voluntarily deciding to make a promise to someone, and arranging for all your friends and relatives (and god, if that makes sense to you) to be present while you make that promise.
You are implying that the national indoctrination is the same, but it's obviously not. Lots of people have to listen to that indoctrination but doesn't agree with it. Loyalty cannot be broken when it was not given in the first place.
Job search: this is a real topic of debate in the business world already, but seems pretty commonly accepted due to the deteriorating nature of employer-employee relationships.
Religious conversions: the "you don't get to choose birth religion" argument from above combined with the inherently illogical nature of religion makes this one nearly impossible to judge on.
Unfaithful before marriage: seems pretty easy to toss this into the same category as "unfaithful during marriage".
Not trying to be flippant, but I genuinely do see basically all of the cases you listed as strictly less serious than being unfaithful during a committed relationship.