Social Categorization of Sexual Orientation via Verbal Cues: Evidence From a “Who Said What?” Study

ABSTRACT

Even though an abundant amount of research has demonstrated the ability to identify others’ sexual orientation via minimal nonverbal cues, few studies, if any, have investigated the role of verbal information sources on the social cognition of sexual orientation. Herein, we aimed to explore whether verbal cues (gendered names) are adequate for triggering social categorization processes. Additionally, whether participant gender, target gender, and attributions toward homosexual targets differentiate sexual orientation-based categorization was examined. Our data showed that (1) participants categorized targets based on sexual orientation via semantic information, (2) female participants’ categorization tendencies were marginally stronger than the males’, and (3) negative attributions toward homosexual targets did not influence the categorization levels. Accordingly, the results contribute to the existing literature indicating the automatic detection of sexual orientation and clarify that perceivers not only use numerous nonverbal sources to extract categorical information about sexual orientation but also verbal cues.

KEYWORDS:

• Social cognition
• social categorization
• person perception
• sexual orientation
• gaydar
• verbal cues
• who said what?
• memory confusion paradigm

Acknowldgement

We thank Gülfem Sarı for her assistance with data collection and coding, and Aycan Kapucu for her insightful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Given the studies showing that perceivers’ sexual orientation has an impact on judgment accuracy of sexual orientation (see Johnson & Ghavami, 2011; Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2007), we performed the same analysis by removing the participants who reported a non-heterosexual orientation. Once again, while the main effect of sexual orientation-based categorization [F (1, 102) = 8.764, p = .004, η² = .079] and the sexual orientation-based categorization X participant gender interaction [F (1, 102) = 4.838, p = .030, η² = .045] was found, neither any main effects nor any interactions nor the covariate was statistically significant (all p’s < .101).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.