Physical Wellness

Women Can Tell a Cheating Man by Just One Look

By Drishya Nair | Update Date: Dec 10, 2012 02:05 PM EST

Beware men, as you may be judged by your face. A new study suggests that even though ancient insight tells us not to judge a book by its cover, sometimes it may be right to do so. According to the study, many a times, women can rightly tell if a man is a cheater by merely looking at his face.

However, men are apparently not capable of such a judgment about women.

This is "the first evidence that faithfulness judgments, based solely on facial appearance, have a kernel of truth," the researchers write in the paper, according to businessinsider.com.

"It seems remarkable that such impressions have any accuracy at all, given how poor accuracy is even with extensive behavioral information."

For the study, the researchers quizzed 34 male and 34 female university students to rate the photographs of 101 male and 88 female faces on how masculine or feminine the faces were, and how likely, they thought, they were to be a cheater.

Reportedly, the images were created in 2005 by the researchers, led by Gillian Rhodes of the University of Western Australia, and included pictures of about half self-admitted cheaters.

Merely by looking at the pictures, women were found to be relatively accurate, with them going wrong 38 percent of the times at telling cheaters from faithful men.

While there was a link found between unfaithfulness and masculinity pointed out by female participants, it had no connection to the man's attractiveness.

On the other hand, men did not seem to be able to accurately point out photographs of women who were cheaters. Men went wrong 77 percent of the times.

Also, in case of men, the researchers found that they tended to link a woman's attractiveness and femininity were with unfaithfulness, "indicating that men perceived attractive, feminine women as likely to be unfaithful. However, there was no evidence that they were," the researchers write, according to the report.

In another study, researchers suggested that the masculinity of a man's face isn't linked to testosterone levels, or to how strong their immune system is (signs of a evolutionarily good partner). Since cheating is evolutionarily bad these subconscious readings of a man's face may be present in women helping her choose the right mate, the report said.

The study was published Dec. 4 in the journal Biology Letters.

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