Lying about wanting a serious relationship, about your romantic past or about other partners: at the start of a relationship, deception remains a strong fear for many women. Between dating apps and fleeting dates, many of them say they have developed reflexes to sniff out lies, without always knowing which ones are really useful. A recent study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science described in detail 5 strategies women use to detect deception in love.
Why women develop tactics to detect deception
The authors rely on evolutionary psychology: in the case of deception on intentions (promise of a lasting relationship when the objective is only sexual), the costs have historically been heavier for women. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, educational burden… female parental investment makes sexual deception particularly costly, while a man can theoretically withdraw after intercourse without immediate consequences.
This asymmetry probably generated a strong selection pressure encouraging women to develop specific defense mechanisms. Researchers view this interaction as a form of arms race: while men evolved deceptive tactics to obtain short-term sexual partners, women likely co-evolved detection strategies to protect themselves.
To identify these protective tactics, a first qualitative study asked 147 American students (average age 19) to describe what they do, or avoid doing, to avoid being deceived in a romantic context. The responses were condensed into 43 behaviors, then submitted to 249 other students who indicated how much they would use each of them. “Women can employ diverse strategies to counter sexual deception in dating and mating contexts. These include family supervision, religion and modern cultural mechanisms like social media” specifies Peyman Sayyad, psychologist and main author of the study.
The 5 strategies that women say they use in love
The statistical analysis grouped the 43 behaviors into five main areas:
- Integration: introduce the partner to their family or meet theirs
L’Integration comes first: the fact of involving loved ones acts as a filter, allowing the past, lifestyle and intentions of the partner to be verified under the gaze of the family.
- Reluctance: slowing down the pace of the relationship and delaying intimacy
Just behind, the Reluctance consists of not rushing into commitment or sexuality, in order to observe one’s behavior over time and allow possible warning signals to emerge.
- Social networks: investigate your online presence
Strategies related to Social networks
are based on the comparison between what he says and what his profiles or those of his friends show.
- Religious agreement: favor a partner sharing the same religion
L’Religious agreement starts from the idea that a practitioner respects certain moral standards more.
- Active distrust: asking monitoring questions and testing for consistency
Finally, the Active distrustthe least popular, includes questions whose answer is already known to test honesty.
What these strategies say about current romantic relationships
The study also links these tactics to personality. Women who are most open to relationships without commitment report less recourse to family integration and religious filtering, considered less necessary when the objective is a short-term relationship. Those with a more avoidant attachment style use Reticence more, which limits both emotional intimacy and the risk of exploitation. In contrast, self-perceived romantic value and neuroticism (the persistent tendency to experience negative emotions) did not predict strategy choice. “This study examines women’s counterstrategies to sexual deception in a context of free-choice mating that minimizes parental involvement, which departs from ancestral conditions that prevailed for much of human history“, underlined Peyman Sayyad.
The authors point out several limitations of their study: a sample restricted to young American students, a Western context of free romantic choice and declarative responses which do not always reflect real behavior. They also raise the possibility that certain men have developed counter-strategies to circumvent these defenses, which would make this deception/detection “game” even more complex.
For researchers, these strategies do not guarantee avoiding any manipulation, but they illustrate the way in which our romantic behaviors remain shaped by old issues, readjusted in the era of applications and social networks.