In the aftermath of the Derick Hougaard cheating scandal, we got to wondering if there’s a way to figure out if someone is being unfaithful apart from reading their texts or walking in on them.

If you didn’t know there was a Derick Hougaard cheating scandal, you can catch up on that here.

Researchers were wondering the same thing – about cheating, not about Derick Hougaard – which is why they looked into whether you can tell if someone is likely to cheat just by looking at them.

Here’s The Guardian with what they found:

Experts found men with more “masculine” faces were more likely to be thought to be unfaithful, and such men also self-reported more cheating or “poaching” of other men’s partners.

…The team said being suspicious of men with masculine features – such as a strong browridge, strong jaw and thinner lips – might have offered an evolutionary advantage, allowing heterosexual women to spot a flaky partner and men to recognise a potential rival who might seduce their partner or leave them raising someone else’s child.

Women could also spot unfaithful men by looking at a mugshot.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers described how they asked heterosexual white participants to judge the facial features of 189 white adults who had been photographed and taken part in previous research. Overall, 293 men and 472 women rated pictures of women, while 299 men and 452 women judged images of men, rating on a scale of one to 10 how likely they thought each person was to be unfaithful.

The results showed men and women as a whole gave higher scores of unfaithfulness to the images of men who had self-reported cheating or poaching.

Before you head home to suspiciously scrutinize your partner’s face though, you should know that the findings shouldn’t be accepted as a universal truth.

People should be wary of deciding whether someone is a love rat based on impressions of facial features alone.

…the team stressed many other factors are linked to whether someone is unfaithful. “The actual unfaithfulness varies in our sample of faces, and 4-8% of this variation is accounted for by the average perceived unfaithfulness of those faces,” said Dr Yong Zhi Foo, the first author of the research from the University of Western Australia.

The take away here is that you should trust your instincts.

And always check the closet if he’s in bed looking shady when you get home.

[source:guardian]