“It was written all over her face” is an expression of guilt that we should be paying more heed to, if the latest study is anything to go by.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia published research this week which suggests that men can successfully judge the character of women simply by looking at one small photograph of her face.
Think this sounds too obscure to be true?
The team took a group of male participants for the study, where each respondent was handed 17 cards – each with two photographs of separate women on them.
The women were matched for age and ethnicity, but had one slight difference.
One of the women on the card had always been faithful to her partner, the other had in the past, been caught cheating on her existing partner.
Led by Dr Samantha Leivers, the men were then asked to identify the heartbreaker in each set – with no details to go on other than the women’s features in the photographs.
The men were successfully able to identify the woman who had once cheated 55 – 59% of the time, states as “statistically significant but modest”.
Speaking about the results, Dr Leivers said:
“We don’t expect them to be 100pc accurate when they are literally just looking at someone’s face for a few seconds.
“But the fact that they’re showing any accuracy from this limited information at all is pretty cool.”
So how were men reading the women’s faces to identify a past behaviour?
Despite showing neutral expressions, the scientists believe the subtle differences in the female subjects’ facial expressions helped men identify the truth.
Dr Leiver and her team now plan to follow up this study by further researching a link between expressions and emotions:
“More research is needed to determine the visual cues that men use to make their judgments of faithfulness, including emotion expression and other face gesture clues.
“However, we know for the first time that men’s judgments of faithfulness from images of women can contain a kernel of truth when they are able to directly compare images in a forced choice task.”
H/T The Telegraph
