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Issues of Justification in Relationships between Men and Women: Critical Essay
The first factor that comes into play for cheating to even be a possibility, is the decision-making process. Meyering and Eping-McWherter (1985), stated that there are two preconditions for extramarital relations to occur; permissive attitudinal orientation and opportunity. The idea of this is that if your personal standards are against cheating and you do not give yourself an opportunity to cheat, then you will not be faced with the decision. These researchers conducted a study to look at this phenomenon of extramarital affairs by hypothesizing that males would differ from females in six different ways. In order to test these differences both married and single people completed a questionnaire looking at their attitudes toward extramarital affairs. In general, subjects who did not intend to become involved in cheating saw a high likelihood of negative consequences. However, overall men had a greater expectation to become involved in an extramarital affair, as they viewed problems in marriage and the new experience of someone else as justification. Whereas on the scales women ranked higher on all items about feeling guilty if they cheated, and men rated higher on all justification items. This evidence shows that men are much more permissive and can be influenced by perceived payoffs, whereas women are much more responsive to risks and think about all the problems they would trigger.
Another interesting finding within this study is that the results will vary depending on if you are asking married or single people. The single people within this study did not vary with their responses, both genders looked at the risks and thought it would be likely for problems to occur. It is interesting to look at how womens perspectives of cheating remain the same when single and married, whereas mens views become much more permissive when they become married. This study helps people understand that cheating is a decision and that gender does play a role in how cheating is perceived and decided. This study would be more reliable if it was random and was not only about midwestern adults. As well, more research is needed in regard to decision-making as there are many more possible decisions that people are faced with that might make them more or less probable to engage in extramarital affairs.
Following the ability to make a decision to cheat, people then begin to try to justify the reason why cheating might be okay. It is very common for people who have cheated or are thinking about cheating to be able to justify their actions and convince themselves that what they are doing is okay. This idea was looked further into by Glass and Wright (1992), as they explored the extent to which individuals would feel justified having extramarital relationships. Keeping in line with the previous research that has been done on gender differences, they assumed there would be a large difference in what men and women justified. It was thought that men would approve of sexual justifications, and women would approve of emotional justifications (Glass & Wright, 1992). Justification for cheating was evaluated within three categories; sexual justification, love justification, and emotional justification. The assumed results were accurate for men, as their sexual justification scores were significantly greater and almost double womens scores (Glass & Wright, 1992). However, it was inaccurately predicted that women would be able to justify emotional intimacy more. The results actually showed that men’s and womens justification scores did not differ for emotional intimacy. Instead, surprisingly 77% of women and only 43% of men justified falling in love as a justification for cheating.
The results of this study in particular bring in a new perspective as it does not only focus on the sexual aspect of extramarital affairs but also on the emotional component. However, if you think about it – how different are emotional justification and the justification of love? In order for someone to fall in love with someone else, they would first have emotional intimacy to get to that point. As well, it is important to mention that although this study represents a wide variety of national representation, it still does not give an accurate representation of a population. This survey was nonrandom, and data was collected at an airport, which only gave a representation of upper-class married professionals. As well, participants were asked to mail back their responses, which is not the most reliable way to receive data as only certain people may decide to fill it out and send it back. If everyone completed the survey at that moment, the results might have been more accurate.
The results from Glass & Wright partially fall in line with the study done by Meyering and Eping-McWherter. Within both of these studies, men are able to justify cheating much more easily if it has anything to do with sex. The difference between these studies is that the study in 1985 shows women as being very against cheating. Except when you put in the component of falling in love as a justification the results sky-rocketed and perceived women as being much more permissive with cheating. It is very difficult to compare these two results because the participants were asked many different things. This is the first study where men and women
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