Paging Captain Obvious:

Women also have specialized emotional defenses that protect them from being deceived. Research from the Buss Lab shows that women become extremely angry and upset when they discover that men have deceived them about the depth of their feelings in order to have sex. These emotions cause women to etch those deceptive episodes in memory, attend more closely in the future to possible instances of deception, and ultimately avoid future occurrences of deception.

In other words, women get mad when men lie to them. I wonder if men feel the same. Without a research study, I wouldn’t want to guess. (And what are these “specialized emotional defenses,” and how can they be biologically imparted?)

The quote is from David Buss and Cindy Meston’s Why Women Have Sex, an occasionally useful and often frustrating book that I describe in further detail at the link.

EDIT May 6 2010: Still, as Dawkins and Krebs observe in Behavioural Ecology on “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?”, “Whenever there is any form of assessment, for example in combat, courtship or between parents and offspring, bluff, exaggeration and deceit might be profitable strategies.” But in humans, this is obviously not a purely male or female strategy.