Scientific study shows ‘gaydar’ is real

Next time someone tells you they have a "gaydar," don't raise an eyebrow. Recently published research says it's real and more common than you think. And it is effective even just by looking at a person's face.  Unscientific talk about gaydar often assumes that body language and voice are key indicators of sexual orientation. But face alone enables many to make an accurate conclusion, according to a recent scientific study.   

According to psychologists Joshua Tabak of University of Washington and Vivian Zayas of Cornell University, people are able to identify sexual orientation with about 60 percent accuracy just by seeing facial photographs for 50 milliseconds. "Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive," write the authors. "But the effect is statistically significant — several times above the margin of error."

 

The psychologists conducted experiments among students from the University of Washington. The participants were asked to view standardized facial photographs and categorize them as gay or straight. The hair and ears were digitally removed, and each image was converted to grayscale so that participants relied on the bare faces. 

 

The scientific article "The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual Orientation" is published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.  Relevance to nondiscrimination policies

 

Tabak and Zayas explain that when we look at faces right side up, we process them in two ways. Through featural face processing, people generally register individual features like an eye, a nose, or a lip. Through configural face processing, we register the spatial relationships among features, like the distance between the eyes. 

 

In their research, the psychologists found that gaydar accuracy increased when the faces were presented right side up. 

 

"Our discovery — that accuracy was substantially greater for right side up faces than for upside-down faces — indicates that configural face processing contributes to gaydar accuracy. Specific facial features will not tell the whole story. Differences in spatial relationships among facial features matter, too," the psychologists write in an opinion piece in the New York Times. 

 

One example they gave is facial width-to-height ratio, a configural physical feature that differs between men and women. Men have a larger ratio, and reflects testosterone release during adolescence in males.

 

"Given that stereotypes of gender atypicality — gay men as relatively feminine and gay women as relatively masculine — play a role in how people judge others’ sexual orientation, our finding suggests that cues like facial width-to-height ratio may contribute to gaydar judgments," they say.

 

The study also found that participants had 64 percent accuracy at judging women's sexual orientation and 57 percent accuracy at judging men's. "False alarms" were the reason for lower accuracy for men's faces - participants were more likely to incorrectly categorize a straight man as gay than to incorrectly categorize a straight woman as gay. 

 

The psychologists say that perhaps people tend to classify men's faces as gay if they are perceived to be even slightly effeminate, while women's faces may still be seen as straight, even if they are perceived as slightly masculine. They observe that this is consistent with how society strictly applies gender norms to men. "Decades of research have established that, at least in our culture, it is considered much more problematic for a boy to play with Barbie dolls than for a girl to play rough-and-tumble sports," they add. - Carmela Lapeña/ HS, GMA News