Men Can Identify Cheating Women From Images, Study Claims

A new study claims that men are tuned by evolution to tell cheating women from the faithful.

According to Daily Mail, fatherhood is resource intensive for men, who in the pre-DNA identification days would have no way to tell if a child is really theirs or born of another man. This meant they needed to be able to tell if their women were cheating on them. Researchers sought to determine if men could accurately tell from images of stranger women which of them were faithful.

The experiment involved showing men 34 images of women in pair. The researchers knew which of the women were faithful and which were involved in extra-pair copulations. The study showed that men could tell the more faithful women apart.

"When asked to choose the more faithful of two women, they performed significantly above chance, although the ability to judge faithfulness at above-chance levels did not generalize to all pairs of women," researchers wrote in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The findings of the study were replicable in another set of participants.

"Due to the significant fitness cost associated with cuckoldry, it would be adaptive for men to have evolved the ability to predict or detect unfaithfulness in a potential partner," they wrote.

"These results show that men's judgments of faithfulness made from faces of unfamiliar women may contain a kernel of truth," the researchers added.