Tampa Currently Holds the Title for the Worst "Cheating Quotient"
By Marcie Barnes
Over the past several months we have been collecting emails from a certain subset of the population we were very interested in - cheating married men. Or at least, married men expressing interest in cheating. During the course of our experiment, we found it very interesting that the rate of emails coming in from our advertisements was sometimes just as swift from smaller cities such as Baltimore as from larger cities such as New York. So, we applied a little math and came up with a "cheating quotient."
How did we lure these potential cheaters into sending us emails? That was pretty easy, actually. We set up classified ads in each of the twenty largest metropolitan areas of the US which basically were from an "attractive" married woman asking specifically for a married man with whom she would like to have an affair with. And the emails came pouring in. Out of a total of about 1400 emails, only about seven (from Seattle, Houston, Minneapolis, San Diego and Boston) were from people (usually impolitely) providing their distaste for our ad. The remainder, however, seemed to be from eager, well-qualified men of all ages and races eagerly looking forward to communicating with our fictitious housewife. Many even sent pictures of their private parts in order to, I guess, entice her.
We only counted the emails that came in during a two-hour period while the ad ran on craigslist.org - these ads always ran during a workday sometime around the middle of the day (but never between the traditional lunch hour of 12-1). We threw out a few that came in from singles hoping to be eligible to join in on the fun.
To give you an example of the frequency patterns we became interested in: the metro area of Tampa, which currently holds the worst cheating quotient title, recorded a whopping 100 unique emails in a 120 minute period, second only to New York City's 125. But, you see, the male married population of New York is 7.5 times larger than that of Tampa! So, in order to come up with our quotient we came up with a formula that calculates the male married population of each metro area with the amount of emails we received in order to present you with the cheating quotient.
We plan to continue these experiments into the future so that we may gather enough data to make our findings more statistically significant. We also plan to run similar ads looking for married women who want to cheat, to be fair. But what we want to know is, what do you think? Why is the interest in cheating so much different from city to city?
Please take a moment and digg this post!
You can help participate in the Great Cheating Experiment - to find out how send an email to info@thescienceofcheating.com. Do you live in one of the 20 metro areas we targeted and want to know if your man sent us an email? Just ask and we will be glad to check for you.
