‘Gaydar’ is real says University of Washington researcher

You’ve heard the phrase “gaydar,” the ability to judge a
person’s sexual orientation based on looks or a gut
instinct. A University of Washington researcher insists
it’s real and he set up experiments to prove it.

UW graduate student Josh Tabak says we make snap judgments
every day about people based on usually obvious visual
cues.

“What about something like sexual orientation?
It’s not physically obvious, it’s not like sex or race, but
at the same time, we have this idea in popular culture
that “gaydar” exists, that we can tell people apart just
by observation or intuition. It’s even in the dictionary,”
said Tabak.

In the experiment, Tabak showed 129 college
students 96 photos, sometimes upright, sometimes inverted,
half were of gay people, half straight. The students were
asked to make a quick judgment: “straight or gay.” The
images appeared for just 50 milliseconds, about one-third
the duration of an eye blink.

“It’s not subliminal, you know you’re seeing a
face but you really don’t feel like you know much else.
It’s really fast.”

The photos were grayscale, faces only, no glasses or
facial hair, no make-up, piercings or tatoos. The results:
For womens’ faces, the test subjects were 65 percent
accurate selecting sexual orientation. For mens’ faces, it
was 57 percent.

“Even when faces were upside the down, the
judgments of sexual orientation for men’s and women’s
faces were still above chance accuracy, which is
incredible,” said Tabak. He also thinks people might
unconsciously make gay and straight judgments.

The article appears in the online journal PLoS ONE.

The scientific value of this research might be to
prove that “gaydar” is real. The political and social
value might be greater.

“One of the main arguments used by opponents of
anti-discrimination protection for lesbian, gay and bi-
sexual people is the idea that, oh, if lesbian, gay bi-
sexual people would just quote, ‘keep it to themselves,’
then no one could discriminate against them because no one
would know.’ That’s not true,” said Tabak. “People can
tell. If they want to make these judgments, they’re not
going to be right all the time, but people have some
ability to judge this,” concluded Tabak.

Others, he admitted, have no “gaydar” at all.

Taybak said it’s interesting to him that people have
“gaydar” and to explore the mental processing that goes
on. But, he added, when it gets to pinpointing the exact
facial differences between gays and straights, he won’t go
there, saying, “it could be used by people who want to
discriminate and that would cross a moral line.”