Study: Women instinctively guard their sexual partners from ovulating women

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The team conducted four studies with a total of 478 heterosexual engaged or married women. All participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing online marketplace. In each study, the women were shown photographs of a series of women, and were asked how willing they would be, on a seven-point scale, for the women to befriend their partner.

Participants were significantly more likely to want to create distance between the photographed woman and their partner when the woman shown in the photograph was ovulating.

The women were not told which women were ovulating and, in all likelihood, they didn’t consciously consider the idea. But humans seem to be subconsciously aware of various physical cues that indicate when women are more fertile, as found by several studies.

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As the tests continued, the psychologists found that women were especially protective when subjects viewed their mate as desirable, and when the woman in the photograph was physically attractive.

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