RERUN
Claim 38

Do happier marriages mean fewer affairs?

Independent rebuild

The study said people happier in their marriage had fewer affairs, by 2.28 on its scale for each step happier. The Lab will retrace it when forecasting closes.

Whose code is this?

Our own small program, which fits the paper's model on a public copy of the same 601 answers. It isn't the author's code. Nobody has run it on the real data yet, us included. It was tested only on made-up data with a known answer, and the Lab runs it once forecasting closes.

See the code

It's one of the most reused data sets in economics teaching, so its numbers get copied into textbooks again and again.

We test one thing: does this code and data give this number? That's not the same as the science being right. The forecast price never changes the verdict.

See the proof
-2.28affairs scale per step of marriage happiness, the paper says. Counts if between -2.33 and -2.23.
Where the number comes fromMarital happiness ... -2.28 -5.61Table 3, Psychology Today data, second set of estimates, read from the page image of the author's free copy

The exact claim as posted

Do happier marriages mean fewer affairs? A 1969 survey of 601 readers found a coefficient of -2.28

Fair (Journal of Political Economy, 1978) studied 601 married readers of Psychology Today who answered a 1969 survey. He fitted a model of how many affairs each had in the past year, with their own rating of their marriage from very unhappy (1) to very happy (5), plus occupation, age, years married and religiousness. Each step happier came with fewer affairs: a coefficient of -2.28. This refits the same model with our own small program on a public copy of the same 601 answers. The rebuild isn't the author's code, so a mismatch ends as inconclusive.

Make a forecast
  1. People forecast
  2. Forecasting ends
  3. The Lab retraces it
  4. Verdict posted, open to challenge
  5. Winners collect

What we didn't check

  • Whether the sample was fair or large enough.
  • Whether test data leaked into training or tuning.
  • Whether the result holds on new data.
  • Whether the study's method was the right one for its question.
  • Whether magazine readers who answered a survey stand for everyone.
  • Whether the answers were honest.

Reading how the odds moved…

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What the Lab retraces

Source
https://doi.org/10.1086/260646
R. C. Fair; rebuild by the RERUN project, Rebuild: MIT. Data: GPL (R package AER), fetched from Rdatasets, not redistributed.
Code, at this exact version
https://github.com/Maveri-Q/rerun-rebuilds
commit 6b8ba2d5f26fdf4837a71dfffb43b175586424d3
Commands
python3.11
$ python affairs-1978/rebuild.py Affairs.csv > rerun_output.txt && cat rerun_output.txt
Where the result is read
rerun_output.txt using regex marriage_rating_coefficient (-?[0-9.]+)
Data files
Affairs.csv
fingerprint 68fbf471924508e2b86c913b7ade8adf291498517bb12bbd8e5318fe04482a0b
Limits
2 CPU, 4 GB, 15 minutes
54627c1f8e08c7254bd35014e11f39bf9026e7a455b69158bfd89b159898b95a
Show the claim exactly as stored on the blockchain
{"artifact":{"commit":"6b8ba2d5f26fdf4837a71dfffb43b175586424d3","data":[{"path":"Affairs.csv","sha256":"68fbf471924508e2b86c913b7ade8adf291498517bb12bbd8e5318fe04482a0b","url":"https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/csv/AER/Affairs.csv"}],"entrypoint":"python affairs-1978/rebuild.py Affairs.csv > rerun_output.txt && cat rerun_output.txt","output":{"extractor":{"expr":"marriage_rating_coefficient (-?[0-9.]+)","type":"regex"},"path":"rerun_output.txt"},"repo_url":"https://github.com/Maveri-Q/rerun-rebuilds","runtime":"python3.11","setup":[]},"metric":{"comparison":"within_tolerance","name":"change in affairs a year for each step happier in marriage (tobit coefficient)","reported_value":"-2.28","tolerance":{"type":"abs","value":"0.05"}},"private_data":null,"resources":{"cpu":2,"max_minutes":15,"mem_gb":4},"source":{"authors":"R. C. Fair; rebuild by the RERUN project","doi":"10.1086/260646","license":"Rebuild: MIT. Data: GPL (R package AER), fetched from Rdatasets, not redistributed.","type":"paper","url":"https://doi.org/10.1086/260646"},"statement":"Fair (Journal of Political Economy, 1978) studied 601 married readers of Psychology Today who answered a 1969 survey. He fitted a model of how many affairs each had in the past year, with their own rating of their marriage from very unhappy (1) to very happy (5), plus occupation, age, years married and religiousness. Each step happier came with fewer affairs: a coefficient of -2.28. This refits the same model with our own small program on a public copy of the same 601 answers. The rebuild isn't the author's code, so a mismatch ends as inconclusive.","title":"Do happier marriages mean fewer affairs? A 1969 survey of 601 readers found a coefficient of -2.28","version":1}

Community notes

Notes are people's own words, kept on the blockchain. They never change a verdict, and the Lab's AI never reads them. Posting costs a little NEAR for storage, and what isn't used comes back.