Access Hollywood
One thing that came out of the hack on Ashley Madison was the information that the site was overwhelmingly dominated by male users. Data is now revealing, however, that among those men (and women) currently using the site, the majority were Republicans.
Ashley Madison is the world’s leading website for married people seeking additional relationships. According to their numbers, for all of those conservatives who claim “family values,” they’re more apt to compromise their morality if it is expedient for them to do so.
However, 89 percent of cheaters “say that opposing political views would compel them to cheat on their spouse.” Of those Ashley Madison users, 60 percent self-identify as Republicans. Those that are cheating also indicated that they’d prefer to cheat with a fellow Republican (55 percent).
“It’s surprising […]
Not a particularly legitimate data source, Stephan.The members of the Ashley Madison survey domain are self-selected, which means conclusions based on the results are untrustworthy. Here’s the report of a much better study which (as one would expect) indicates men of either party are equally likely to cheat but, interestingly, Democrat women are slightly more likely to than Republican women. What I find most interesting, considering the many anti-religion stories that get posted in Schwartzreport, is that religiously committed people are the least likely to cheat. https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900008269/how-race-religion-political-party-and-age-can-indicate-whether-men-or-women-will-cheat.html
Paul —
Here we go again. You just don’t do the research. The Ashley Madison data was not analysed, or not just analysed, by Ashley Madison, an organization I for one had never heard of previously, but by Annalee Newitz for Gizmodo, who has written about the organization several times. https://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database-1725558944. This same analysis by the way has also been reported in Newsweek http://www.newsweek.com/republicans-more-likely-cheat-spouses-democrats-882482. That said, this is an analysis, as the report I published said, of the AM participants. It is not the population of America as a whole, and I did not say that.
Second, Ashley Madison from a few minutes research on it appears to be an organization that is overwhelmingly male and mostly a manifestation of the sad lustfulness of middle class men. But the data cited in the piece I ran is sound.
Third, you cite a Mormon newspaper, citing the far right Institute for Family studies. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/right/. Really.
Fourth, it is true I find that much of human misery traces back to religion but, at the same time, I strongly support spirituality, and see the two as quite distinct. All religions have some view on spirituality, but not all spirituality is religious. It is an important distinction.
— Stephan
Ah, Stephan I “cite a Mormon newspaper, citing the far right Institute for Family studies”? That’s ad hominem at its finest. What matters is the data and the analysis. In this Ashley Madison case, it’s irrelevant who does the analysis. It’s the data set that is untrustworthy. GIGO as they say. The reason here is that there are possibly other reasons why the data might skew Republican, even if adultery turns out to be equal-opportunity (as the IFS research argues). One might be that Republican adulterers experience higher guilt levels, and so if they desire to cheat might be more inclined to seek out the anonymity that AM (I presume) offers. Another might be that Republican adulterers might have a greater fear of being caught if they follow traditional means of finding a mistress. And there might be other factors. I don’t know the likelihood of any of these, but they do seem plausible. ANYtime you have a self-selected data set, as you do here, your analysis is going to be less trustworthy than a random sample of the broader population. This is lazy research with unjustified conclusions.
You find that identifying the newspaper as Mormon oriented and the Institute right wing is ad hominem? If I published an article about abortion that appeared in L’Osservatore Romano would it be ad hominem to note that it was a paper oriented to the faith of the Roman Catholic Church? If I published an article promoting coal, would it be ad hominem to note that it was written by a coal baron? You have a very different idea than I do about what is ad hominem. When a source is known to have a blatant bias I think it is important to draw my readers’ attention to that known bias, so they can calibrate their assessment of the material.
You assert that the data is flawed yet that same data was published by Newsweek, as I noted, as well as other mainstream publications. You are correct, there may be many reasons why an individual might commit adultery, but that is irrelevant to the point of the article. As is how the feel about what they are doing.
The Ashley Madison data set is as you say self-selected, but the point is one goes to Ashley Madison precisely because one does want to commit adultery, and the majority of people who do this are Republicans. There is no flaw in that. It is a simple statement of fact.