‘Once a cheater, always a cheater’: People who have been unfaithful more likely to do it again, say scientists

One bad decision can have a knock-on effect for future relationships

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People who have been unfaithful in the past are far more likely to do it again, according to a new study.

The old adage ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’ has the ability to brutally tarnish your reputation in future relationships but it turns out that there is actually some science behind the saying.

That’s because, according to a new study from University College London, the more times a person cheats and subsequently lies about it, the less guilty they feel.

Published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the test saw participants provoked into lying in order to win a cash prize.

They were shown a jar full of coins and instructed to help a partner – who was shown a blurred image of that same jar – to guess how many it contained.

One group was told that they would receive a cash prize is their partner over-estimated the number of coins, which meant that they were more likely to exaggerate or lie.

During the tests, brain scans revealed that lying sparked a responses in the brain associated with emotions and that each time a person lied, this reaction weakened.

As such, their brains became desensitised to deceiving, and how much they were desensitised could predict how much more someone would lie the next time.

Researchers came to the conclusion that if a cheater feels guilty about lying the first time, they are much less likely to experience the same level of regret the next time.

“What our study and others suggest is a powerful factor that prevents us from cheating is our emotional reaction to it, how bad we feel essentially, and the process of adaptation reduces this reaction, thereby allowing us to cheat more,” study author Neil Garrett, a psychologist at University College London told Elite Daily.

“With serial cheaters, it could be the case that they initially felt bad about cheating, but have cheated so much they've adapted to their ways and simply don't feel bad about cheating any more.”

Similarly, another paper published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour discovered that those who had cheated in their first relationship were three times more likely to do the same in their next relationship.