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Strangers Could Tell This About Your Relationship by Watching You for Just a Few Minutes

Strangers Could Tell This About Your Relationship by Watching You for Just a Few Minutes

"An evolutionary advantage."

By watching a couple for just a few minutes, strangers are able to discern with relative accuracy how well that relationship is going at least in terms of fidelity, according to a recent study.

Photo credit: Shutterstock Photo credit: Shutterstock

"People can determine whether complete strangers were cheaters or non-cheaters by simply watching them interact for a short period of time," Dr. Nathaniel Lambert, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University, told the Huffington Post about the research conducted in collaboration with researchers from Florida State University.

The researchers filmed couples interacting and then had others who didn't know them watch some of the footage.

"[R]aters were able to accurately identify people who were cheating on their romantic dating partner after viewing a short 3- to 4-min video of the couple interacting," the authors wrote in the study published in the journal Personal Relationships.

The researchers conducted a second study filming different couples and using different people to rate the footage and got the same results.

Lambert told the Huffington Post that while the strangers were not always right in their guess as to if one of the partners was cheating or not, he said the correlation was more than could be left to chance.

Why do humans seem to possess an ability to spot cheaters? More research needs to be done to find out more about that, but study co-author Dr. Frank Fincham with the Florida State University told the Huffington Post that it could be "an evolutionary advantage."

A different study that came out a couple of years ago also found that women seem to have the ability to tell if a man were more likely to be faithful just by looking at his face.

(H/T: Huffington Post)

Front page image via Shutterstock.

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