Odd reads dug from the net
JUST when we thought it couldn't get worse than Fifty Shades of Grey, I found these charming old book titles on the internet.
Personally, I have always wanted a jumper hand-knitted by a rabid monkey, and I’ve always wondered about the depths of Kenny Rogers. The embalming book would THEY say you should never judge a book by its cover. But men might be able to tell how faithful a woman is just by looking at her face, researchers have discovered.
Men who were asked to study photographs of 34 women were able to identify which of them had previously cheated on their partners 59 percent of the time.
The researchers asked the men to look briefly at the women’s photographs, but gave them no additional information about them. The photos were shown in pairs – where one of the women had cheated on a partner at least twice, and one had always been faithful. When asked to choose the more faithful woman, the men “performed significantly above chance”, the study found.
The experiment was repeated with another sample of men, yielding similar findings.
In the first test, the men successfully chose the faithful woman 55 percent of the time. This averaged out at a 59 percent success rate over the two experiments.
Previous research has suggested that attractiveness can act as a cue for how faithful a woman is perceived to be, but this study found no link between the men’s judgements and those women rated as more attractive. It was not clear, therefore, why the men rated faces in a particular way, and further research is needed into what cues men look for when be a very handy read – straight after reading I Married A Dead Man, followed by Cooking To Kill. assessing how trustworthy a potential partner is.
But the scientists said that, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that men would have developed the ability to spot a cheater because men can never be sure a child is genetically theirs.
This means they could spend all their time and energy raising a child that is not theirs – and would therefore not pass on their genes – if their mate became pregnant by another male, they explained.
Publishing their findings in the journal PLOS One, the researchers wrote that, because of the “significant cost associated with cuckoldry”, men would probably have “evolved the ability to predict or detect unfaithfulness in a potential partner”.
The team, from the University of Western Australia, added: “Previously, accuracy in faithfulness judgements has only been found for women judging men’s faces.
“It is striking that men were able to show any accuracy from images alone after only a brief presentation.”
The psychologists from New York University also found the brain decides a person’s trustworthiness before we have even consciously perceived who they are.
The brain takes just 33 milliseconds – a tenth of the time it takes to blink – to decide whether someone can be trusted. – Daily Mail