On 16 July 2025, a stadium camera at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, moved across the crowd and stopped on two people in an embrace. They ducked out of frame within seconds, and the singer on stage joked that they were either having an affair or were just very shy. Three days later the man, who was the chief executive of a software company called Astronomer, had resigned. The woman, the company’s chief people officer, was on leave at that point. Both were reported to be married to other people. The company said its leaders are expected to set the standard in conduct and accountability, and that the standard had not been met.
Now go back to January 1996 and the small town of Jarnac in south-west France, where François Mitterrand was being buried. Behind his coffin walked his widow Danielle and their two sons. Just behind them walked Anne Pingeot, who had been his mistress for some thirty years, and their daughter Mazarine, who was 21. The French public had learned of Mazarine’s existence only a year or so earlier. When Danielle took the young woman in her arms, the photograph went around the world. France is also the country where Pew Research found, in 2013, that fewer than half of the people asked (47%) called an extramarital affair morally unacceptable. Four in ten said it was not a moral issue at all.
These are two stories about married people and an attachment outside the marriage, and the public reactions to them were very different. One clip turned into a corporate crisis in three days. One arrangement of some thirty years came into public view at a funeral. So what turns a matter between a few adults into something millions of strangers hold a view on? I decided to investigate the Biological, Psychological, Social and Political aspects of this phenomenon and I must admit, the recent resignation of NVIDIA founder and CEO was a trigger for investing time in this.
What biology says
Monogamy is unusual among mammals. In 2013 Dieter Lukas and Tim Clutton-Brock analysed 2,545 mammal species and found that about only 9% are socially monogamous. The habit arose independently 61 times. In nearly every case it came from species where females lived alone and a male could not guard more than one of them. The authors cautioned that humans descend from group-living apes and carry a thick layer of culture, so these data do not transfer straight to us.
But I guess that the tendency to stray is partly inherited in people. A study of more than 1,600 pairs of female twins in the United Kingdom, by Cherkas and colleagues in 2004, found infidelity to be 41% heritable. A later study of 7,378 Finnish twins and siblings, by Brendan Zietsch and colleagues, put the figure at 62% for men and 40% for women. Heritability tells us how much of the variation across a population links to genes. It does not tell us that any one person is fated to stray. The individual genes found so far have small and tentative effects, and thousands of genes shape any behaviour. A person with a higher inherited tendency is likely to find temptation more rewarding, and may still never act on it.
The Cherkas study also asked about attitudes. Attitudes towards infidelity showed no genetic influence at all and came entirely from upbringing and surroundings. So the inclination is partly inherited, while the disapproval is taught. We will come back to that gap.
Folklore adds a worry about paternity, so it is worth checking the number. In 2013 Maarten Larmuseau’s group matched Y chromosomes against Flemish family trees going back several centuries. They estimated that only 1 to 2% of children per generation were not fathered by their mother’s husband. Some earlier behavioural studies had suggested 8 to 30%.
What psychology says
Therapists and survey researchers give two different pictures. The first comes from the therapy room. Esther Perel is a couples therapist and the author of The State of Affairs. From years of sessions she argues that many affairs are a search for another self more than for another partner. She reports that people in good marriages stray as well, and she describes the search as one for aliveness. That is a clinical observation, a lens with no population estimate attached.
The second picture comes from a survey. In 2011 Joris Lammers of Tilburg University and his colleagues asked 1,561 professionals about their position in their organisations and about their past and intended infidelity. The more power a person held, the more likely they were to have been unfaithful or to expect to be. The reason was confidence: power raised people’s belief that they could attract partners. The pattern was the same for women and for men. Lammers told NPR that the most powerful people in the sample were about 30% more likely to have had an affair than the least powerful.
Then there are the base rates. In the General Social Survey in the United States, 20% of ever-married men and 13% of ever-married women report sex outside the marriage. The sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger found that the overall rate has stayed near 16% for thirty years. Important to note that these are self-reports about something that 89% of Americans told Gallup in 2025 is morally wrong, so the true figures may be higher. In a cross-cultural study of 160 societies, the anthropologist Laura Betzig found infidelity to be the cause of divorce cited most often. The act is common, and the condemnation is close to universal.
What societies say, and what they do
Disapproval of affairs is one of the most widely shared moral views that Pew Research has measured. In 2013 it asked people in 40 countries about eight behaviours. A median of 78% called married people having an affair morally unacceptable, and only 7% called it acceptable. France was the exception. Only 47% of French respondents called it unacceptable, four in ten said it was not a moral issue, and 12% called it acceptable.
Pew repeated the exercise in 25 countries in 2025. The median was 77%, and at least half of the adults in every country took that view. Of the nine behaviours tested, affairs drew the strongest disapproval. Nine in ten Americans said it was wrong, and so did 92% of people in Indonesia and in Turkey. France (53%) and Germany (55%) were still among the least likely to say so. In the United States, the share of adults calling affairs morally acceptable has not passed 12% in any Gallup poll since 2001.
Laws change more easily than that, and India offers a recent example. For 158 years Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code made adultery a crime for one party only. A man who had sex with another man’s wife without the husband’s consent could be prosecuted, and the wife could not. On 27 September 2018 a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court struck the section down unanimously in Joseph Shine v. Union of India. The judges described the section as rooted in the idea that a woman has no sexual autonomy of her own. Adultery remains a ground for divorce in India, but it is no longer a crime.
The court removed the penalty. Moral opinion, as the surveys above suggest, tends to move more slowly. My reading is that this gap helps to keep a private matter public. When the state stops judging an act, the public carries on judging it, without rules of evidence or a right of reply.
Why leaders’ affairs become national business
The public does not treat all affairs alike, and the pattern is easiest to see among leaders. Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern became public in January 1998. In a Gallup poll on 19 and 20 December 1998, just after the House of Representatives impeached him, his job approval was 73%, the highest of his presidency. The same public tells Gallup year after year that affairs are morally wrong. Many Americans seem to have held both views at once and judged the man separately from the job.
Nestlé dismissed its chief executive, Laurent Freixe, in September 2025. It said he had an undisclosed romantic relationship with a direct subordinate, which breached its code of business conduct. A company spokesperson told Reuters that he had first denied it to the board.
The most recent case is the largest. On 8 November 2026 Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, told his staff in an email that he had been unfaithful to his wife. He did not name the woman. The New York Times had reported that US officials suspected a businesswoman linked to him of working for Chinese intelligence. Beijing denied this, and the board said it had no reason to believe that national security or company secrets were compromised. Republican chairmen of three House committees asked him to testify. On 11 November the Times reported a second relationship, with an executive who reported to him, and the board accepted his resignation that day. The chief financial officer, Colette Kress, became interim chief executive.
In each of these exits a second issue sat beside the affair. Astronomer’s board cited a conduct standard. Freixe had failed to disclose the relationship and then denied it. Huang’s case carried questions of national security and a reported relationship with a subordinate. Lammers’s findings suggest such cases are not random. If power raises confidence and confidence raises the odds of an affair, organisations that give people more authority are likely to see more such cases among senior people. Fortune noted that Nvidia had concentrated decision-making in Huang for 33 years and had named no successor. Boards would do better to plan for such cases than to be surprised by them.
For boards, I would put four factual questions ahead of the moral one. Is there a reporting line between the two people? Was the relationship disclosed? Does it create a conflict of interest? Did anyone lie about it when asked? A board can answer these with evidence and apply them the same way to every executive, whatever the volume of the public reaction.
Now, the deeper stuff…
Why outrage feels good
Even when an affair is none of our business, we hold views about it, and there is evidence about why. In 2016 Jillian Jordan, Paul Bloom, David Rand and their colleagues studied people who pay a cost to punish wrongdoing that did not harm them. Those people were trusted more, and they did behave more trustworthily. The punishment works as a signal. A later study found that people reported more outrage when they had no other way to show they could be trusted.
Robin Dunbar’s work on everyday conversation adds the social side. In his 1997 study of conversations in public places, about two-thirds of the talk was on social topics. A study published in 2025 found a larger share, about 85%. Dunbar argues that this talk bonds groups, as grooming does among primates. He also argues that it helps a group watch for members who take more than they give.
An affair involving a visible person fits both mechanisms. It looks like a breach of trust, which any onlooker can condemn at almost no cost online, in front of a large audience. It is also the kind of news a group wants to pass on. I think this explains a good part of how a few seconds of video grows into a national story.
What our reaction reveals
The strength of the public reaction is out of proportion to what most of us have at stake. We are not the spouses, we are not the shareholders (full disclosure – I am a shareholder on NVIDIA though my holding is insignificant), and most of us will never meet the people involved. So it is fair to ask what the anger is protecting. I see three possibilities, which I offer as hypotheses that fit the evidence above. Remember, these are hypothesis, not my professional opinion.
The first is the gap between what we say and what we do. Nine in ten Americans call affairs wrong, and about one in six ever-married Americans reports one. Condemning an affair in public costs us almost nothing and tells our group which side of the line we stand on. It may also reassure us that we are on the right side of it.
The second is a wish we do not admit. Perel describes affairs as a search for aliveness and for unlived lives. The twin studies suggest the pull is inherited to some degree, while our disapproval comes from what we were taught. Carl Jung called the parts of ourselves that we refuse to admit the shadow. He said we tend to meet them first in other people. The idea is hard to test experimentally, but in my work with business leaders and I have noted this more often to be the cause.
The third is what we ask of leaders. We hand our ideals about loyalty to the people who lead us, and a lapse may feel like a betrayal of something we lent them.
The part of us that gets suppressed, then, is the ordinary, wanting, undecided part that lives beside the committed part. A society that cannot say aloud that desire continues after commitment is likely to push it into secrecy.
None of this excuses deception, abuse of power or the damage to a family, and those still deserve accountability. My only submission is that the next time a clip like this reaches you, notice your first reaction before you post, and ask what exactly you are defending. It could very well open doors to greater awareness about self and as a great man once said “Unexamined life is not worth living.”
Following Sources were consulted in writing this article:
- Lukas and Clutton-Brock (2013), The evolution of social monogamy in mammals, Science: AAAS summary
- Cherkas and colleagues (2004), twin study of female infidelity and attitudes, Twin Research: PubMed 15607016
- Zietsch, Westberg, Santtila and Jern (2015), Genetic analysis of human extrapair mating, Evolution and Human Behavior: doi
- Larmuseau and colleagues (2013), Y-chromosome and genealogical data on paternity in a Flemish population: PubMed 24266034
- Esther Perel, The State of Affairs (2017): NPR Fresh Air interview
- Lammers and colleagues (2011), power and infidelity, Psychological Science: PubMed 21771963
- Wendy Wang, Who cheats more? Institute for Family Studies: article
- Nicholas Wolfinger (2017), America’s new generation gap in extramarital sex, Institute for Family Studies: article
- Laura Betzig (1989), Causes of conjugal dissolution: a cross-cultural study, Current Anthropology 30(5) http://laurabetzig.org/pdf/CA89.pdf
- Gallup (2025), moral acceptability: adultery and cloning seen as most immoral and trends in acceptance
- Pew Research Center (2014), results of the 2013 survey in 40 countries: What’s morally acceptable?
- Pew Research Center (March 2026), 25-country survey fielded in 2025: report
- Supreme Court Observer, Joseph Shine v. Union of India: judgment in plain English
- Gallup (1998), Clinton job approval after the impeachment vote
- Reuters via TimesLive (2025), Nestlé removes Freixe
- Axios (8 November 2026), Huang’s letter to staff
- Al Jazeera (8 November 2026), Nvidia investigates Huang over affair
- Saudi Gazette (November 2026), Huang admits affair, House committees ask him to testify
- Fortune (9 November 2026), Nvidia’s power is built around Huang
- CNBC (11 November 2026), Nvidia board meeting on Huang’s fate
- NVIDIA Form 8-K (11 November 2026), CEO transition
- Axios (2025), Astronomer CEO resigns
- Irish Times (1996), Mitterrand’s funeral, and AFP via Courthouse News, Mitterrand’s secrets
- Jordan, Hoffman, Bloom and Rand (2016), Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness, Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16981
- Jordan and Rand (2020), Signaling when no one is watching, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Read here
- Dunbar, Marriott and Duncan (1997), Human Nature 8; Szala and colleagues (2025), How much conversation content is actually social, Language and Cognition: Link to the paper