Staring: This sort of behaviour is attributable to DNA, scientists claim (Picture: Getty)

If you catch your man’s eyes wandering when a beautiful stranger walks past, don’t blame him – it’s all the fault of evolution.

Chaps are naturally drawn to people they have never seen before while women prefer familiar male faces, a study reveals.

Men were shown pairs of photographs of women and asked to rate their attractiveness for the research at Scotland’s Glasgow and Stirling universities.

In the study, men were distracted by ‘new’ women (Picture: Getty)

When photos were produced for a second time alongside previously unseen images, they were distracted by the new women and tended to lower their rating of the original ones.


If that makes man sound stupid, women should not scoff too loudly because the same applied to them in reverse, with the ratings increasing the second time around.



The preferences developed because early man stood a better chance of reproducing if he slept with many partners while pre-historic women were more likely to survive with a trustworthy provider, the researchers suggest.

Much-photographed stars such as Rihanna should be a turn-off, according to the theory (Picture: File)

While the results, published in the Journal of Sexual Behaviour, make for interesting reading, women whose partners claim their ogling is genetic should not be fooled too easily.

By the logic of the experiment, men ought to find much-photographed stars such as Rihanna a complete turn-off.