Here’s an excellent article on psychology, writing and motivation: “Psychology, Motivation and the Art of Medieval Chess” by Christopher Chabris & Dan Wegner. In it, Chabris states that: “There is one psychological fact about cheating women…which is that it may be hard for men to stop themselves from doing it.”
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Chabris and Wegner demonstrate this in a series of experiments (here is the second one) in which they examine how people describe their thoughts after being cheated on (which we will not do here). The results are very interesting. The simple phrase “I would have cheated” about three times as often as the more complex phrase “I would have cheated if I could, but I couldn't stop myself.”
What does this mean? It means that people think they are capable of stopping themselves when they are not — because they think it would be easier to lie and say, “I was going to stop myself, but I didn't.”
What causes women to cheat?
Cheating is a very personal matter, as the pages of the Cheating Buster Project say. It can be really hard to figure out what drives women to cheat. For some of us, the answer is obvious: it’s our guy. While this is certainly not the case for all women (for example, cheating with your boss isn’t totally in your control), we can all agree on one thing: there are certain aspects of our behavior that we don’t want to change.