MBTI Types and Infidelity: What Personality Reveals About Cheating
TL;DR: No MBTI type is doomed to cheat. A bored ESTP is not automatically less faithful than a loyal ISFJ. Situation, values, and relationship health matter more than the four letters.
You typed "which MBTI type is most likely to cheat" into Google because you want a name. A type you can flag, a letter combo you can screenshot and show a friend. I get it.
The honest answer is that four letters don't predict whether your partner sleeps with someone else. What they do influence is the shape of the temptation — how it shows up, how long it lingers, what finally tips somebody over the edge. That's different from a ranking, and it's more useful.
Below is what the actual infidelity research says, plus the cognitive-function patterns that matter. I'm going to name the types people assume are cheaters and explain why that reputation is mostly wrong.
The question is kind of broken
Searching for the "most likely to cheat" type bakes in three assumptions that don't survive contact with the data. It assumes cheating is driven by personality. It assumes a type behaves uniformly across 3 million people. And it assumes knowing someone's letters tells you their character.
None of that holds up. Studies on infidelity keep landing on the same finding: situation beats trait. Opportunity, dissatisfaction, and personal values predict cheating better than any personality score. A committed ESTP is more faithful than a miserable ISFJ, every day of the week.
Personality still shapes relationship patterns, though. Worth looking at.
What the research says actually predicts cheating
Before we get into types, here's the short version of the predictors that show up over and over in the literature.
Relationship-side: low satisfaction, feeling neglected, bad communication, sexual mismatch, emotional distance. Individual-side: a prior history of cheating (the single strongest predictor we have), low commitment to monogamy as a stated value, avoidant attachment, and a combination of high novelty-seeking with low conscientiousness. Situational-side: travel, alcohol, peer groups that normalize affairs, and big life transitions like a move, a baby, or a death in the family.
Your MBTI type is not on any of those lists. Neither is your Big Five profile, your Enneagram number, or your zodiac sign. That's the baseline.
Cognitive functions and how they show up in relationships
Now the interesting part. Function stacks don't predict cheating, but they do shape how attraction and boredom and commitment feel from the inside.
Se types — ESTP, ESFP, ISTP, ISFP
People running dominant or auxiliary Se live in the physical present. They notice the room, the smell, the glance across the bar. Novelty lights them up.
That can create risk. Se types are responsive to attraction in the moment, bored by routine, and sometimes pulled toward impulsive choices before the long-term brain catches up. On the other side of the ledger, when a Se type is engaged in a relationship, they're all the way in — authenticity matters to them, and the deception that cheating requires tends to feel gross. ISFPs in particular sit on a deep Fi value base that makes lying to a partner internally unbearable.
The gap to pay attention to: Se types aren't more likely to want to cheat. They're slightly more likely to act on a want before they've talked themselves out of it. Intention and impulse aren't the same variable.
Ne types — ENTP, ENFP, INTP, INFP
Ne types run on possibility. They see the alternate timeline, the could-be, the stranger on the train who might be the one. Grass-is-greener thinking is their default weather.
Risk-wise: they idealize potential partners, get bored with familiar rhythms, and build emotional connections through intellectual chemistry — the kind of slow slide into an affair that starts with "we're just friends who really get each other." Protective factors: ENFPs and INFPs sit on the same deep-Fi value base as ISFPs, and betrayal scrapes against their sense of self. INTPs and ENTPs tend to analyze a struggling relationship rather than escape it, which isn't romantic but is effective.
Fantasy isn't action. An ENFP who imagines six parallel lives every week is not six times more likely to cheat than a stoic ISTJ.
Fi types — INFP, ISFP, ENFP, ESFP
Fi means deeply held personal values and a loud internal sense of what is and isn't me. For most Fi users, betraying a partner feels like betraying themselves. Casual affairs are rare here.
The failure mode is different. Fi types can fall hard for someone and convince themselves it's "true connection" that overrides the existing commitment. The script is usually "following my authentic feelings." Translation: they've rationalized an emotional affair. The impulsive hookup isn't really their genre; the soulmate narrative is.
Fe types — ENFJ, ESFJ, INFJ, ISFJ
Fe types prioritize harmony and their role in other people's lives. They notice what the partner needs, often before the partner does. Commitment feels like a moral structure, not just a preference.
Where it gets tangled: Fe types often can't leave a bad relationship cleanly. They stay to avoid hurting the other person, resentment builds underneath, and in rare cases an affair becomes the messy exit ramp they couldn't negotiate directly. Not sociopathic. Just cowardly, and specific to people who care too much about others' feelings to have a hard conversation.
Ti types — INTP, ISTP, ENTP, ESTP
Ti is about logical consistency and compartmentalization. The upside is that Ti users often value keeping their word for its own sake and find the operational overhead of cheating (hidden phones, cover stories, remembering which lie you told) offensively inefficient.
The downside is the same compartmentalization. A Ti type can genuinely file "my marriage" and "this affair" into separate mental boxes and not feel the contradiction until it's too late. Paired with Se (ISTP, ESTP), that logic-plus-impulsivity combo is the pattern most people have in mind when they accuse these types of cheating.
Most Ti users land on the same ethical answer Fe users do, by a different road.
Si types — ISTJ, ISFJ, ESTJ, ESFJ
Si types respect history. Vows matter. Tradition matters. The 8-year-old photo on the fridge matters. These are the types most likely to stay married for 40 years without incident.
When they do cheat, it's almost never impulsive. It's years of unaddressed dissatisfaction cracking at once. The partner is stunned because nothing was ever said — but the resentment was compounding silently the whole time. If you're married to an Si type and you think you're fine because nothing's been raised, ask. They're not going to volunteer it.
What the actual studies find
Not much MBTI-specific work exists, and what's out there has methodological issues. The cleaner findings come from the Big Five.
Extraversion correlates weakly with infidelity — extraverts have more social opportunities and respond more to external stimulation. That'd put E types at slightly elevated risk, but "slightly" is doing heavy lifting.
Low conscientiousness is the bigger one. Impulse control and long-term planning matter a lot. That maps loosely to P preference in MBTI, though loosely is the word.
Low agreeableness also correlates with cheating. That roughly maps to thinking-dominant types who haven't developed their feeling function, but this is confounded by gender, satisfaction, and a dozen other variables.
The real headline: effect sizes are small, methods are often weak, and individual variation eats the type differences alive.
Types people assume cheat — and why they're usually wrong
ESTPs. Charming, present-focused, physical — so of course the forums decided they're the cheating type. In practice, committed ESTPs are often fiercely loyal because authenticity is their actual value. The version of themselves they can live with doesn't include being a liar.
ENTPs. Flirtatious, novelty-loving, argue about everything. But debating whether something is ethical and doing it are separate operations. Plenty of ENTPs are more faithful than they look because they've actually run the thought experiment.
INFJs. The "too pure to cheat" reputation is the most dangerous one on this list. No type is immune. INFJs who develop an intense emotional connection with someone outside the relationship are very good at convincing themselves it's fate, not infidelity.
ISTJs. Loyal, duty-bound, faithful — mostly true. Until the day it isn't. An ISTJ who's been quietly miserable for 12 years can leave in a way that looks sudden from the outside but has actually been building since year 3.
What actually matters
If you came here worried about a specific partner, or about yourself, swap the personality question for these.
Communication. Can you talk about dissatisfaction without it blowing up? Relationships where hard topics are discussable rarely produce affairs. It's the silent ones that break.
Commitment. Has this person stated explicitly that they're monogamous? Do their actions line up with their words across years, not months?
Satisfaction. Sexual, emotional, intellectual. Any of the three going hungry creates vulnerability. All three going hungry is a countdown.
Values and history. What does this person believe about cheating, and have they done it before? Past behavior is a better predictor than any test result.
Boundaries. Do you both agree on what counts as cheating? Emotional affairs, flirting, porn, a coworker lunch? Clarity prevents "I didn't realize that was a problem."
So what's the answer
There's no MBTI type that's most likely to cheat. There are function stacks that shape how attraction and boredom feel — nothing more.
Faithful INTPs exist. Cheating INFJs exist. Every type contains the full range.
If you came looking for a type to avoid, you're solving the wrong puzzle. Pay attention to character, satisfaction, and whether hard conversations can actually happen. Those three beat any four-letter code at predicting who stays and who strays.
Curious about your own patterns around connection and commitment? Take our comprehensive personality test to see your psychological drives mapped out.
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