Ashley Madison is a Canadian online dating and social networking service that launched in 2002. It was founded by Darren J. Morgenstern and gained its name from two popular female names in North America. The website is explicitly marketed to people who are married or in committed relationships.
The primary target audience consists of individuals looking to have extramarital affairs. The official slogan of the company famously states that life is short and encourages people to have an affair. The platform provides a digital space for people to pursue romantic or sexual activity outside of their primary relationships.
Unlike many traditional dating platforms, the website operates on a credit system instead of monthly subscriptions. Men are required to pay a certain number of credits to initiate a conversation with another member. Any subsequent messages between the two users are then complimentary.
The company also offered a privacy feature that promised to completely delete a user’s profile and data for a nineteen-dollar fee. The business has faced substantial criticism over the years for its controversial premise. Some consultants in the dating industry accused the company of building a business on the backs of broken hearts and ruined marriages.
Company executives often defended the platform by suggesting that a simple website cannot convince a happy person to commit adultery. They occasionally argued that having an affair could actually help preserve some marriages. The company also utilized provocative advertising strategies, using billboards and television commercials to generate shock value and media attention.
In its earlier years, the website was criticized for artificially inflating its user base. Analysts discovered that the company used tens of thousands of automated bot accounts to send fake messages from fictitious women to male users. Company executives eventually phased out these automated bots by late 2015.
The 2015 Data Breach
This phase out occurred around the same time the company faced its most significant crisis. In July 2015, a group of hackers known as The Impact Team breached the company’s databases. The hackers demanded that the parent company, Avid Life Media, shut down the website immediately.
When the company refused, the hackers released the personal information of millions of users onto the internet. This massive data leak exposed the private details of thirty-seven million people worldwide. The released information included names, home addresses, search histories, and credit card numbers.
The data breach revealed that the paid deletion feature did not actually erase user information permanently, and supposedly deleted data was easily recoverable. Following the massive leak, the company’s chief executive officer stepped down from his position. The parent company eventually rebranded itself to Ruby Corp and agreed to pay more than eleven million dollars to settle a massive class action lawsuit.
Despite the negative publicity, the platform continued to operate and reported tens of millions of members in subsequent years. The immense scale of the data breach created an unusual opportunity for scientists to study infidelity. Before the leak, most psychological research relied on self-reported surveys where people might hide their cheating habits.
The exposed data allowed researchers to analyze the actual behaviors of millions of paying users. This information provides evidence regarding the geographic, demographic, and psychological factors that drive people to seek affairs online. Scientists quickly began parsing the data to understand the minds of the people using the platform.
The Geography of Cheating
In 2018, scientists Michael L. Chohaney and Kimberly A. Panozzo analyzed the geographical distribution of users in the United States. Their study was published in the Geographical Review. The researchers mapped the billing addresses of over seven hundred thousand paying subscribers.
They compared these locations with various demographic factors to understand the market determinants of online infidelity. The analysis revealed that income is the leading determinant for using the service. This finding suggests that internet-facilitated infidelity behaves much like a luxury good.
Wealthier individuals might use the site because they have the disposable income necessary to afford messaging credits and the costs associated with conducting a secret affair. The researchers also found that areas with high population density tended to have higher spending rates on the website. High population density provides a greater sense of anonymity, which helps people feel secure when seeking an illicit connection.
A person in a large city is less likely to accidentally encounter someone from their existing social network. The researchers also noted that religiosity negatively correlated with subscription rates. Areas with a higher concentration of religious congregations saw fewer users paying for the service.
Motivations for Seeking an Affair
Understanding the geographic spread of users naturally leads to questions about their personal motivations. A 2023 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior explored the relationship quality of people using the platform. Scientist Dylan Selterman and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of users at two different time points.
They wanted to know if people only seek affairs when their primary marriages are falling apart. “I have been studying infidelity for over ten years,” explained Selterman. “One of the things I learned is that infidelity is not monolithic.”
“There are many factors that contribute to people’s decisions to cheat, sometimes not having anything to do with their primary or spousal relationships,” Selterman noted. The results challenged some common assumptions about infidelity. The researchers found that a low quality of relationship with a primary partner was not always the main driver for cheating.
“The fact that we did not observe significant correlations between relationship quality and whether or not participants had an affair was very surprising,” Selterman explained. Many users reported experiencing high levels of love for their spouses. They generally indicated that their marriages suffered from very low levels of sexual satisfaction rather than a lack of emotional attachment.
About half of the participants reported that they were not sexually active with their primary partners. “In our sample of Ashley Madison users, we found that overall, sexual dissatisfaction was high and a large number of participants reported not having sex at all with their partners or spouses,” Selterman stated. “So they looked for affairs, and some of them had affairs, and among those folks who did have an affair, they experienced high satisfaction with their affairs and low levels of regret.”
“They seemed to still maintain love and intimacy with their spouses,” Selterman continued. “It seems like they genuinely feel like they didn’t do anything wrong, which is remarkable given how highly stigmatized infidelity is.” Having an affair did not reliably predict that the user would eventually divorce their primary spouse.
Another perspective on motivation comes from a 2020 study published in The Journal of Sex Research. Scientists Jana Hackathorn and Brien K. Ashdown surveyed over five hundred members of the website. They asked participants directly about the reasons behind their search for a secondary partner.
“We have always been interested in the motivations to engage in infidelity,” Hackathorn and Ashdown previously told PsyPost. “However, until now we hadn’t had access to a population that was specifically using an online website for that behavior.” The responses provided evidence that dissatisfaction with the primary partner is indeed a consistent predictor for some users.
“One of the things that we found to be most prevalent in the data was that the secondary partner was not as big of an influence or motivation to cheat as the real world might lead us to believe,” the researchers told reporters. “The biggest influence or motivation to cheat was dissatisfaction in the primary relationship, especially for males.”
The researchers found distinct differences based on gender and personal traits. Women on the platform tended to report seeking an affair because they felt neglected in their primary relationship. Men were more likely to report seeking a secondary partner simply because they wanted more frequent sexual encounters.
This desire for more sex was strongly linked to an unrestricted sociosexual orientation. Sociosexual orientation refers to a person’s willingness to engage in sexual activity outside of a committed relationship. Individuals with an unrestricted orientation feel highly comfortable with casual encounters.
Categorizing Online Infidelity and Mate Poaching
Beyond basic motivations, scientists have also categorized the specific types of affairs users pursue. In 2021, a separate study in The Journal of Sex Research examined the exact behaviors taking place on the platform. Scientists Ashley E. Thompson, Delaney Wilder, and Danica Kulibert surveyed over one thousand users.
“The inspiration for the study dates back to my doctoral work on infidelity that was designed to assess what behaviors people are engaging in and the proportion of adults that demonstrate a double standard,” said study author Ashley Thompson in an interview with PsyPost. “In one of the studies comprising this project, I discovered that anywhere from ten percent to forty-five percent of adults reported having participated in a behavior that they also judged as unfaithful.”
“After this study, it became clear to me that monogamy may not be an ideal option for many and that alternatives might be a more fitting relationship structure,” Thompson explained. The researchers identified three distinct categories of behavior taking place online. These categories included sexual behaviors, technology-based actions, and emotional connections.
“Although Ashley Madison is traditionally viewed and marketed as a tool to facilitate infidelity and to engage in extramarital affairs, I was interested in determining what exact behaviors people participate in and how many do so with their romantic partner’s approval or permission,” Thompson stated. Participants reported engaging in technology-based behaviors, such as sending explicit text messages, most frequently.
This aligns with psychological theories that suggest the internet facilitates sexual behaviors through anonymity, affordability, and accessibility. The digital environment lowers the barriers that normally prevent people from pursuing an affair in the physical world. The study revealed some unexpected demographic trends regarding who participates most often.
Women and older adults actually reported engaging in these behaviors more frequently than men and younger adults did. This finding contrasts with traditional theories suggesting that men are always more likely to pursue infidelity. The researchers noted that women might experience a higher volume of messages on the site, giving them more opportunities to engage.
The scientists also examined the role of partner consent among the users. They found that roughly seventeen percent of the participants actually had a primary partner who consented to their use of the website. These individuals were engaging in consensual non-monogamy rather than deceptive cheating.
Users with consenting partners reported greater perceived improvement in their primary relationships compared to those hiding their activities. This indicates that open communication about external partners can sometimes yield positive results for a primary relationship. Not all users are married people looking for other married people.
A 2021 study in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking explored the concept of mate poaching on the platform. Scientists Liesel L. Sharabi and her colleagues defined mate poaching as attempting to attract someone despite knowing they are in an exclusive relationship. The researchers surveyed users to understand their goals and their likelihood of meeting someone in person.
Participants provided open-ended descriptions of the relationships they were seeking. These goals ranged from short-term sexual encounters to long-term emotional affairs and entirely new exclusive relationships. The scientists used structural equation modeling to analyze how attitudes influenced behavior.
This mathematical approach helps researchers understand complex relationships between multiple psychological variables. The analysis showed that a user’s general attitude toward online infidelity predicted their actions. Users with highly permissive attitudes were much more likely to express intentions to poach another person’s partner.
These strong poaching intentions then served as a bridge to real-world actions. High poaching intentions significantly increased the likelihood that a user would try to meet an online match face to face.
Rationalizing Betrayal
Transitioning an affair to the real world requires a degree of mental gymnastics for many people. A 2022 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships investigated how men who cheat rationalize their behavior. Scientist Cassandra Alexopoulos surveyed over one thousand male users of the website.
She wanted to understand the thought processes that provide comfort to people violating the boundaries of their primary relationships. “In the past, when I would write these research papers about infidelity, it’s par for the course to discuss the feelings of guilt and shame that cheaters often report,” explained researcher Cassandra Alexopoulos. “I became very interested in the process of rationalizing a behavior to the extent that one would be willing to perform that behavior over and over again.”
The research focused on the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person experiences mental discomfort from holding conflicting beliefs or violating their own moral standards. To relieve this discomfort, people often use justification strategies to make their actions feel acceptable.
These strategies might include trivializing the bad behavior or denying personal responsibility for the actions taken. The study found that frequent offline infidelity was actually linked to positive changes in self-concept. Instead of feeling guilty, many frequent cheaters altered their view of themselves to justify the affair.
“The data suggest that, as a means of justifying your own behavior, self-concept change is the only strategy that people find useful to get to the point of engaging in offline infidelity,” Alexopoulos noted. “In other words, telling yourself for example, ‘This new relationship makes me more exciting or fun,’ seems to allow cheaters to reduce their feelings of discomfort.” The researcher noted that strategies like denying responsibility become unreasonable in a person’s mind once they cheat multiple times.
Public Reaction and Victim Blaming
While users often rationalize their behavior, the general public tends to react with severe judgment. The 2015 data breach offered scientists a chance to study how society views people exposed in a scandal. A 2017 study in The Journal of Social Psychology examined the public demonization of the website’s participants.
Scientists Brien K. Ashdown, Jana M. Hackathorn, and Jordan Daniels analyzed the psychological traits that lead people to harshly judge victims of a hack. The researchers suspected that religiosity would predict negative attitudes toward the exposed users. The analysis showed that religious identification alone did not directly predict demonization.
Instead, a psychological trait called sex guilt acted as a necessary mediator. Sex guilt is a negative emotional response and an expectation of punishment for violating standards of proper sexual conduct. Individuals with high levels of sex guilt were highly likely to demonize the exposed users.
This judgment was not limited to just the people seeking affairs. Participants with high sex guilt also harshly judged the website owners and the hackers who stole the data. The scientists noted that these individuals tend to react negatively to any situation involving inappropriate sexual behavior.
The same research team expanded on these findings in another 2017 study. Published in Psychology & Sexuality, this research by Hackathorn, Daniels, Ashdown, and Sean Rife looked at additional predictors of victim derogation. Victim derogation occurs when people blame individuals for their own misfortune, often to make sense of a chaotic world.
The scientists measured various traits, including jealousy and the belief in a just world. The results indicated that high levels of personal jealousy positively predicted the demonization of the website’s users. People who are naturally prone to romantic jealousy felt a stronger urge to judge the exposed individuals.
The researchers also found a connection with age. Younger participants were more likely to demonize the users than older participants were. The scientists originally hypothesized that a strong belief in a just world would predict harsh judgment.
The belief in a just world is the psychological assumption that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. The data showed that this belief did not significantly predict demonization in this specific case. The researchers speculated that the public might have viewed the data breach as a mild injustice rather than a severe trauma.
The intense public judgment of the users was clearly reflected in news coverage. A 2018 study in the International Review of Victimology examined how print media portrayed the data breach. Scientists Cassandra Cross, Megan Parker, and Daniel Sansom analyzed over six hundred distinct newspaper articles from Australia and Canada.
They used sociological theories to understand how journalists and readers discussed the exposed individuals. The researchers framed their analysis around the concept of the ideal victim. An ideal victim is someone who is perceived as entirely innocent, weak, and engaged in a respectable project at the time of a crime.
Society usually grants these individuals total sympathy and blamelessness. The scientists observed that the media heavily framed the dating site users as non-ideal victims. The news coverage contained a dominant narrative of victim blaming.
Many articles and reader comments suggested that the users deserved to have their privacy violated because they were seeking affairs. The researchers noted a secondary narrative where some journalists tried to refocus attention on the criminality of the hackers. Even in these attempts to defend the users, the writing still exhibited subtle elements of victim blaming due to the adulterous nature of the website.
The existence of this online platform and the subsequent exposure of its database provide a unique window into human behavior. Scientists have gained unprecedented insight into the geographic and psychological factors that drive extradyadic relationships. The research shows that motivations for infidelity are complex and do not always stem from a failing marriage.
The studies also reveal how society responds to moral transgressions with intense judgment and victim blaming. People exposed in the data breach faced harsh public scrutiny, demonstrating how quickly society assigns blame to those deemed morally compromised. This intersection of technology, secrecy, and human nature continues to offer rich material for psychological exploration.
