There may be some truth in judgements that men make about women’s sexual faithfulness based on their looks, according to researchers. A new study suggests that just by comparing photographs of two unfamiliar women, men have some ability to accurately judge which one is more likely to cuckold them. The findings are published in a recent issue of PLOS ONE.
As part of a PhD carried out at the University of Western Australia, Dr Samantha Leivers was looking for evidence that men had evolved an ability to assess a woman’s faithfulness. She got men to compare 17 pairs of photographs of unfamiliar women who were matched for age and ethnicity. One woman in the pair reported never having had sex with someone other than her partner while in a committed relationship. The other reported having extra-partner sex on at least two occasions.
Dr Leivers asked men to judge which woman in each pair was likely to be more faithful. This “forced choice” task was carried out twice with different groups of men. Dr Leivers found that just by looking at women’s faces, men’s judgments on faithfulness were accurate 55 to 59 per cent of the time. Given that one might expect to choose correctly 50 per cent of the time by chance, she said this level of accuracy was “statistically significant but modest”.
“We don’t expect them to be 100 per cent accurate when they are literally just looking at someone’s face for a few seconds,” Dr Leivers said. “The fact that they’re showing any accuracy from this limited information is pretty cool.” Previous research that got men and women to judge faithfulness in the opposite sex by rating a whole series of photos on a scale showed women were accurate at faithfulness judgments but men were not. “We show for the first time that men’s judgments of faithfulness from images of women can contain a kernel of truth,” Dr Leivers said.
Measures of trustworthiness
But there appears to be differences in which measures men and women use to identify faithfulness. Unlike women in the previous studies, the men in this study used perceived trustworthiness as a gauge for faithfulness.
One possibility is that the same visual cues used to make judgments about faithfulness may be used to make judgments about trustworthiness. “For example, emotional expression has been found to influence a number of trait judgments including perceived trustworthiness,” the researchers said. So even though the faces shown to the men had neutral expressions, there may have still been perceived subtle differences in emotion expression.
