RESEARCH CENTRE: Cheaters, your face will give you away

It is no secret that women have caught up with men when it comes to infidelity. Women now cheat nearly as much as men, only that they are way more sneaky about it, and don’t get caught nearly as often.

The only way to really catch a woman cheating might be to enlist the services of a private investigator. However, if findings of a new study conducted by Australian researchers are anything to go by, men may not require the services of a private eye to bust their cheating partners, because, apparently, men can tell if their women are cheating, just by looking at their (women’s) faces.

In this study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers found that men could predict whether a woman is faithful or not after a brief glance at her face or photograph. To prove their thesis, the researchers recruited 100 men who took part in two experiments.

In the first experiment, the respondents were given 17 cards with images of two different female models on each card. The researchers asked 43 men to rate the faithfulness of the female models on a scale of one to seven by looking at photographs of their faces or their full bodies. The models had previously divulged their cheating history to the researchers. Half of these women had had at least two affairs while the other half had never cheated on their partners.

Up to 59 per cent of the men picked out the cheaters accurately, with nothing more to go on than just the photographs.

In the second experiment, the researchers used 60 men aged between 18 and 35 years to find out if the judgments arrived at by the first lot in the first experiment would be replicated in this second group.

They were. Notably, the men did not rely on the looks of the women to decide whether they were unfaithful. “This was unlike women who have previously been found to rate men’s faithfulness through specific physical attributes such as masculinity,” said evolutionary psychologist Dr Samantha Leivers, the study’s lead researcher.

However, it seems that men can only tell if you’re a cheater when weighed against another woman. In the study, men were not able to rate the faithfulness of individual women when the comparison with another woman was removed.