Unfaithful men can’t hide their lying eyes, study reveals

Infidelity is pretty much written all over the faces of some men, a new study suggests.

The study suggested male cheats were given away because they tended to have more masculine facial features such as squarer chins, more prominent brows and angular jaws. Picture: Supplied

Male adulterers have another reason to mend their errant ways: sexual unfaithfulness can be judged from men’s faces but not women’s, a study has suggested.

Experiments showed that both men and women were able to predict with a significant level of accuracy which men were philanderers, merely by looking at photographs of faces.

Women, by contrast, proved to be utterly inscrutable. The subjects were not able to predict which females had a record of being unfaithful.

The study, published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggested that male cheats were given away because they tended to have more masculine facial features — squarer chins, more prominent brows, angular jaws and so forth.

The researchers, led by Dr Yong Zhi Foo of the University of Western Australia, said an ability to spot unfaithful males may have given ancient humans an evolutionary advantage. “Given the reproductive costs of being cheated on, evolutionary theories predict that it would be [beneficial] for individuals to evolve strategies to prevent sexual infidelity,” they wrote. “Accuracy in judging sexual unfaithfulness of others might represent one such strategy.

“In this context, judgments of the propensity for sexual unfaithfulness made from the faces of strangers could play an important role in reducing the risk of developing relationships with partners who may prove unfaithful.”

Having a macho face, they added, was “a well-established signal of propensity to adopt short-term mating strategies”.

The researchers asked more than 1500 subjects to look at photographs of nearly 200 men and women who had been questioned about their faithfulness and whether they had ever tried to “poach” somebody else’s mate.

The subjects were asked to rate the attractiveness of the people in the photographs and how feminine or masculine their facial features were. They were also asked to estimate the likelihood of the person in the picture having cheated on a partner or having tried to seduce somebody else’s.

Both men and women were able to estimate faithfulness for men with a level of accuracy that was significantly better than chance alone.

Women could not be read in the same way — perhaps, the researchers said, because a more feminine appearance did not correlate with unfaithfulness. It was also possible, they added, that an evolutionary ability to identify female cheats had been stumped by cosmetics.

The ability to detect male philanderers was far from perfect. Fewer than a fifth of the subjects had a solid ability to detect unreliable men. Attractive men were rated as appearing more unfaithful, but were actually less likely to be so than their plainer peers.

The Times