Leaked Ashley Madison Data Shows (Misleadingly) Alabama Leads Nation in Infidelity

Leaked Ashley Madison Data Shows Alabama Leads Nation in Infidelity

As a long time interpreter of data, I'm going to spoil your fun by saying there is something wrong here. Whenever states are ranked on any category you can imagine, Alabama and Mississippi are always nearly identical. In this case, Mississippi is almost the most faithful state (#2) while Alabama is the least faithful. I ain't buyin' it.

Furthermore, here's a list of the five least faithful: Alabama, Colorado, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Connecticut. As Sesame Street would say, "one of these things is not like the others."

An analysis of PAID accounts at Ashley Madison shows that the following are the top five: New Jersey, D.C., Connecticut, Massachusetts, Colorado. Same list, except with Massachusetts replacing Alabama. Make more sense to you? So ... what happened to Alabama in the analysis of paid accounts? It's one of the ten states where people are LEAST likely to participate in Ashley Madison, along with several other states that are similar culturally and economically (like Mississippi).

The most likely explanation for this seeming contradiction is that Alabama is first in the alphabet, and it's probably just the one people choose when setting up a fake free account. To a lesser extent, the same hypothesis could also explain why Arkansas is #6 in free accounts and #49 in paid accounts.