Rubbin Hood

I grabbed my boyfriend's phone to look something up, and I found a Google search for local massage places that offer "happy endings." He says that he and his friends were just goofing off. Am I an idiot to believe him?

--Disturbed

His "goofing off" is reminiscent of the "but I was just curious!" web searches that juries hear about -- stuff like "Does arsenic have a flavor?" "How much antifreeze does it take to kill a 226.5-pound man?" and "Who's got the lowest prices on shovels and tarps?" Sure, it's POSSIBLE that your boyfriend is telling the truth -- that he and his buddies were searching out massage parlors RIGHT NEARBY! just for a giggle. To determine how likely it actually is, consider that people don't behave randomly. We're each driven by a varying combo of personality traits -- habitual patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior that are relatively consistent over time and across situations. For example, an introvert will not suddenly become a party animal (unless we're talking the taxidermied kind that's stuck into the "fall leaves" centerpiece). Research by evolutionary psychologists David Buss and Todd Shackelford found three personality traits that are strong "predictors of susceptibility to infidelity." One is narcissism -- being self-absorbed, admiration-seeking, empathy-deficient, and prone to scheming userhoood. Being low on "conscientiousness" is another -- reflected in being disorganized, unreliable, and lazy, and lacking self-control. Last, there's "psychoticism," which, despite its Bates Motel-like moniker, reflects a con artist-like exploitativeness, impulsivity, and lack of inhibition -- not necessarily exhibiting those things while going all stabby on some lady enjoying a shower. Consider whether your boyfriend's "just Googling for kicks!" claim is odd and uncharacteristic or whether it's part of a pattern reflecting one or more of the lovely cocktail of traits above. Patterns of behavior predict future patterns of behavior -- for example, trying to get you to believe that he only goes to strip clubs for the music and that he really was just working late with his boss, Mr. Camerino, who seems to have developed quite a thing for body glitter.