Not bothered by celebrity infidelity? This psychological trait might be why

Many social media users condemn celebrities who cheat on their partners, yet new research suggests that the intensity of that outrage is not the same in everyone. A survey of more than one thousand Japanese adults published in Behavioral Sciences found that people who hold a strong belief that the world is fundamentally fair reported less anger and disgust when reading about celebrity affairs and were, in turn, less willing to pile on public blame.

The investigators set out to understand why some people are quick to excoriate famous figures for marital misconduct while others remain relatively unmoved. In Japan, online “flaming” incidents have grown sharply since the early 2010s, with high-profile affairs receiving millions of hostile comments.

Earlier work suggested that a motivation to restore justice explains why bystanders scold wrongdoers, yet most studies have focused on crimes or fictional scenarios. Celebrity adultery is different: it breaks social expectations but is not illegal, and the perpetrators are individuals whom many fans already admire. This combination raises a puzzle. Does a strong desire for a just world push observers to punish the famous for cheating, or does positive regard for celebrities soften the urge to condemn them?

Adding to the complexity, outrage at sexual betrayal is steeped in visceral emotion—people often feel angry or disgusted long before they reason about fairness. By bringing these strands together, the authors hoped to clarify how beliefs about fairness and raw emotions interact to fuel or dampen public shaming.

To probe these questions, the team partnered with a large Japanese online research firm and conducted a cross-sectional survey over two days in March 2018. They invited men and women across five age groups and both metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions, ending with 1,186 respondents whose average age was about forty-five years. The gender split was almost equal, and the quotas helped align the sample with national demographics, reducing the chance that results were skewed by overrepresentation of a particular group. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, and each person received a small cash honorarium equivalent to roughly forty United States cents.

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After giving informed consent, volunteers answered several scales presented through a secure website. First, they completed three statements measuring the belief that the world is just—for example, rating agreement with “effort is eventually rewarded.” Responses ranged from zero (“strongly disagree”) to five (“strongly agree”), and higher averages indicated a stronger conviction that virtue is rewarded and wrongdoing punished. Although brief, the scale is widely used in Japan and showed acceptable internal consistency in this sample.

Next, participants read a short prompt asking them how they typically feel about infidelity. They then rated three emotional reactions—anger, disgust, and feeling “dirty”—on the same six-point scale. These items captured the gut-level revulsion that often accompanies moral judgments about sexual betrayal.

Finally, each participant evaluated five real-world scandals that had made national headlines: affairs involving a popular singer, a politician, a traditional comic storyteller, a successful actor, and an actress. For each affair, respondents indicated how acceptable they found the misconduct and how much they agreed that the celebrity’s behavior was unforgivable. The researchers averaged these answers to create an overall index of blame. By using actual scandals, the study avoided purely hypothetical judgments and ensured that respondents were reacting to events that had provoked real online fury.

The research team first ruled out common-method bias, a statistical issue that can inflate relationships when all data come from the same questionnaire. They then confirmed that the three concepts—belief in a fair world, negative emotions, and blame—were distinct yet related. With these checks complete, they applied structural equation modeling, a technique that estimates how well a set of paths among variables fits the observed data. Age and gender were included as controls because younger adults and women often express stronger disapproval of infidelity in earlier research.

The emotional storylines turned out to be the main drivers of condemnation. Stronger anger and disgust were linked to harsher judgments toward the cheating celebrities, replicating decades of evidence that moral emotions spur punitive impulses. In numerical terms, a one-unit rise in negative emotions corresponded to a sizable jump in blame on the six-point scale.

The belief that the world is fair told a different tale. Instead of stoking outrage, a stronger fairness belief predicted milder reactions. People high on this belief reported less anger and disgust and, through that emotional channel, assigned less blame. Even after accounting for feelings, the direct link between fairness belief and blame remained negative, though smaller, suggesting that the conviction that justice prevails may also temper condemnation through cooler cognitive routes.

These findings surprised the authors because they originally expected the opposite. Drawing on earlier Japanese work stressing karmic ideas that wrongdoers should face consequences, the team hypothesized that fairness believers would demand tougher punishment to restore moral balance. Instead, the data aligned with several Western studies showing that people who believe in a fair world often view celebrities in a positive light and extend leniency to them, perhaps because they assume admired figures must be “good people” who deserve benefits. In short, for non-criminal misbehavior such as adultery, the desire to see a fair world appears to reduce eagerness to shame rather than increase it.

Gender offered one more nuance. Women expressed stronger anger and disgust than men, consistent with previous work suggesting that women tend to be less tolerant of infidelity. Yet once emotions were in the model, gender had no additional effect on blame. Age did not meaningfully predict any of the main variables.

The study has some limitations to note. All measures were self-reports gathered at a single point in time, so they capture associations but not how beliefs and emotions unfold across a news cycle. The sample was Japanese, and cultural factors such as Buddhist notions of karmic balance might shape reactions differently than in Western countries, where adultery norms and celebrity culture vary. Finally, although the use of real scandals boosts ecological validity, it also means that personal feelings about each celebrity—admiration, envy, or indifference—could sway responses in ways not captured by the study.

Future investigations can build on these insights in several ways. Longitudinal designs that track social media posts before, during, and after a scandal would show how emotions flare and fade over time and whether appeals to fairness influence that trajectory. Cross-cultural comparisons could test whether the soothing effect of believing in a just world emerges in societies with different moral scripts around marital fidelity. Researchers might also experiment with online interventions—such as prompts reminding users that legal remedies exist or delaying comment posting—to see if activating fairness reasoning or giving emotions time to cool can curb flaming behavior.

The study, “Belief in a Just World Decreases Blame for Celebrity Infidelity,” by Ching-Yi Huang, Takashi Arai, and Tsuneyuki Abe.