Cheating couple caught, affair
Do women possess the innate ability - some might even call it supernatural power - to spot a cheater at first sight? Is a man's character that easily read by a woman's mere gaze?
Research discussed in a recent article in the Daily Mail suggests that there may be some truth to the idea that women can intuitively determine whether or not a man is likely to do them dirty or not - or at the very least, the study suggests that women are better at sussing out a rat than men.
To test whether or not people can accurately assess a man's sexual fidelity (or lack thereof) simply by looking at their face, researchers at the University of Western Australia asked both men and women to look at nearly 200 photographs.
The photos were simple headshots of men who the participants had never seen before. The men in the photos had provided the researchers with information related to their sexual history, essentially sharing whether or not they'd ever been unfaithful.
In the end, the experiment revealed that women generally possessed the greater ability to judge a man's character from his photo. According to the researchers, the women correctly rated a man as untrustworthy or unfaithful 62 percent of the time, only failing to get it right 38 percent of the time.
By contrast, men only got it right 23 percent of the time, and got it wrong 77 percent of the time.
Researchers hypothesize that women may have evolved this unique form of intuition to save themselves the heartache and trouble of getting involved with - and potentially pro-creating with - the kind of man your grandmother may have referred to as a cold-blooded bastard.
"It may be that women have evolved the greater ability to make accurate assessments than men because the costs of making mistakes, for women, are greater," said Professor Leigh Simmons, lead author and Director of UWA’s Centre for Evolutionary Biology.
More from Chatelaine:
- When internet porn becomes cheating
- If a friend's spouse is cheating, should you tell?
- Is he cheating? Six telltale signs
- Is it still cheating if there's no sex?
- How one woman successfully changed her man
Connect with Chatelaine:
