Men, some more than others, seem to be living their lives suspecting everything their girlfriends, fiancées and wifes do, and a new scientific study comes to show that this tendency is an innate one, hardwired into their brains after countless generations have evolved the trait. The paper detailing the investigation, published in the May 16th issue of the scientific journal Evolutionary Psychology, shows that this type of behavior is, in fact, a cognitive bias, which helps men deal with situations that are uncertain, but which may actually be of some importance later on.

Paper co-authors Aaron Goetz and Kayla Causey have defined in their study cognitive biases as “psychological mechanisms that were selected not because they perceive the world accurately, but because they perceive the world inaccurately.” As examples, Wired reports, they give a few biases that are obvious in day-to-day life, such as estimating a distance to be larger than it is, perceiving a man that walks stationary as approaching (the brain work for self-preservations), or believing that large animals are sleeping rather than being dead.

In a study they've conducted, focused on 60 men and 89 women, the two researchers analyzed the proneness of each gender to feeling suspicion towards their partners. The results revealed that men were far more likely to exhibit this type of behavior than women, and the explanations for this are fairly simple, Goetz and Causey say. If a woman cheats on her man, and has a child from that affair, then the unknowing man would, from a strictly anthropological point of view, dedicate time and resources to raising a rival's offspring, rather than his own.

The experts add that the proneness to suspicions may be one of the self-defense mechanisms employed by men to prevent this type of behavior on the part of women. “The sum of these costs provided selection pressure for the evolution of an arsenal of anti-cuckoldry tactics in men,” the experts share. “This overperception is likely to be naturally constrained. An unchecked and unyielding suspicion of partner infidelity would not have been adaptive,” they tell to the men who might try to use the results of their study to explain their own paranoid or suspicious behavior to their partners.