So say you’re having a secret affair, squeezed into your busy schedule as you juggle your family life with illicit interludes. What would you rather be doing—having torrid sex with your lover or filling out a survey about it? You could always do the survey during family time—just make sure that your spouse isn’t looking over your shoulder. With increasing privacy concerns about various government agencies, Google, Amazon, Facebook and others grabbing all your phone and computer data, would you really want to be filling out a questionnaire on your laptop about your adulterous behavior? Do you really want the government to know you’re cheating on your spouse as well as on your taxes? Then if you did decide to do it, why would you choose to tell the truth about something that is traditionally kept secret and lied about? If you were having an affair, why would you want to admit that in a survey? Alternatively if you weren’t getting enough nookie, you might want to exaggerate your AQ—adultery quotient.

So, when you look at the results of any survey, whether it’s about cheating or cheese, it’s worth considering who the participants are. Busy, successful people would be unlikely to want to spend their time on it. Is it a self-selecting group? If it’s an online survey commissioned by a commercial organization, are they only targeting their customers or potential customers? How many people are in the survey? Are the questions designed to get exaggerated results to maximize the chance of the study being publicized by the media? What are the questions asked? Are they too vague or too specific to be useful? Are there only “Yes” or “No” boxes, with “Not sure” or “Sometimes” responses off the table?

Many companies and lobbying groups run online surveys on their websites that are considered newsworthy enough to frequently be reported in the media. This is despite the fact that often such studies are based on a small, biased group with results that would never be considered scientifically valid. Now that we are in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, with the addition of a crowded blogosphere where everyone is desperate for page views, creating a click-bait story out of questionable data has become standard operating practice. The “publish now, fact check later or not at all” mentality in online journalism is brilliantly deconstructed in Ryan Holiday’s book, Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.

Some time ago I got some publicity from one of those doctors’ groups for which you pay an annual fee over and above your health insurance premium to get greater access to the physicians as they all have much smaller case loads. The brochure touted a survey showing vastly improved patient outcomes compared to doctors outside the group. However these glowing statistics were based on only 15 physicians within the group, most likely cherry-picked, all based in one state that was different from my own. Not the most medically sound research, to say the least.

Who are the people that are willing to put in the time to complete surveys? Frankly, I feel besieged by them. As soon as any technician has finished your repair job, a call comes through asking you to evaluate his performance. You’ve talked to someone at your bank, and within a few days, someone from their market research department is asking you to complete a survey about it. They’ll usually call when you’re on the can. Whoever you do business with will harass you with emails and phone calls saying “You’ve been selected to complete a survey” or “Tell us how you think we can improve.” Well, by not hassling me with asinine surveys, that’s how.

Perhaps, as soon as a guy has finished his business with a call girl, the escort agency will phone him up to measure his satisfaction: “How convenient was she to use? How did she compare to your wife? Would you recommend her to your friends, sir?”

Ashley Madison, the dating site for those outgoing folks who seek extramarital affairs, got a lot of press in 2019 from a survey that appeared to show that cheating makes some women feel empowered. The site touts its euphemistically-named “Good Wife Study” as a report on female sexuality and cheating habits. Interestingly, I could not find a similar Ashley Madison report for males. Maybe calling a survey on male cheating a “Good Husband Study” would be just a little too much Orwellian doublespeak. Ashley Madison’s survey respondents are a skewed population at best, but might the “Good Wife” data be almost entirely fictional? As the British online news website The Week reported in August 2015, numerous tests on stolen data leaked by hackers earlier that same month revealed that nearly all female Ashley Madison accounts were fake or dormant.

In 2014, Gleeden.com, an extramarital dating website popular in France, commissioned an online poll on infidelity from the Institute Francais d’Opinion Publique. When looking at such surveys, the saying, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics,” tends to come to mind, as vast numbers of surveys by commercial organizations are designed to come up with results that benefit them, drawing conclusions from thin or skewed data. Nevertheless, this poll came up with findings about Gallic infidelity that are at least entertaining to look at. Using a sample of about 800 people in France, it found that 55% of men and 32% of women admitted being unfaithful, a rate that has increased since the 1970s. More left-leaning than right-wing voters acknowledged their infidelity. Were lefties really more likely to stray or were they simply more honest in admitting to it? 63% of French couples believed that it was possible to love their partner while being unfaithful to that person, yet 68% of the French people polled said it was possible to stay faithful to one person for one’s entire life. So some of the same people must have answered “Yes” to both of these questions. However, “possible” is a very vague word. Does it mean “likely” or that “there’s a chance, but only a small chance?” Were the participants talking about themselves or some arbitrary random person? Thus this study shows that in France there’s hope for monogamy as well being in love with two people at once, perhaps with the same person being able to be both monogamous and simultaneously be in love with two partners. Or maybe the study doesn’t show that at all. I’ll leave you to decide.