Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes, Faces, and The Gaydar Myth

Abstract

In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called “gaydar,” to detect who is gay. We propose that “gaydar” is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay). Another account, however, argues that people possess a facial perception process that enables them to identify sexual orientation from facial structure. We report five experiments testing these accounts. Participants made gay-or-straight judgments about fictional targets that were constructed using experimentally manipulated stereotypic cues and real gay/straight people's face cues. These studies revealed that orientation is not visible from the face—purportedly “face-based” gaydar arises from a third-variable confound. People do, however, readily infer orientation from stereotypic attributes (e.g., fashion, career). Furthermore, the folk concept of gaydar serves as a legitimizing myth: Compared to a control group, people stereotyped more often when led to believe in gaydar, whereas people stereotyped less when told gaydar is an alternate label for stereotyping. Discussion focuses on the implications of the gaydar myth and why, contrary to some prior claims, stereotyping is highly unlikely to result in accurate judgments about orientation.

Notes

¹The sample sizes reported in the present article excluded 13 participants who provided response sets, judging every target as gay or every target as straight, and four participants for whom the majority of their latencies were less than 100 milliseconds, indicating task inattention.

²Prior work (Freeman et al., 2010) has claimed that the face-based gaydar effect arises due to gay men's faces being more feminine than straight men's. Because facial “femininity” may affect quality ratings, or vice versa, we asked 20 undergraduates to rate the femininity of the faces on a 7-point scale (1 = Not at all feminine, 7 = Very feminine), then conducted analyses using the mean femininity rating of each picture. Femininity correlated with Orientation (r = 0.294, p = 0.059) and Quality (r = 0.361, p = 0.019). In a regression with both Quality and Femininity predicting Orientation, only Quality (β = 0.504, p = 0.001) predicted Orientation, not Femininity (β = 0.112, p = 0.438). This suggests that gay and straight men differ in their picture quality, which affects ratings of femininity, rather than their faces differing in femininity.

³We submitted the Study 5 gay categorization rates to a 2 (Quality: Matched vs. Unmatched) X 3 (Gaydar Belief condition: Gaydar Is Real vs. Control vs. Gaydar Is Stereotyping) X 2 (Picture: Gay vs. Straight) X 3 (Statement: Gay-Stereotypic vs. Stereotype-Neutral vs. Straight-Stereotypic) mixed ANOVA. The effect of Picture, F (1, 227) = 17.909, p < 0.001, was qualified by the Quality X Picture interaction, F (1, 227) = 18.497, p < 0.001, as in Studies 1-4. The main effects of Statement, F (2, 454) = 89.774, p < 0.001 and Gaydar Belief condition F (2, 227) = 2.510, p = 0.083 were qualified by the predicted Statement X Gaydar Belief condition interaction, F (4, 454) = 4.409, p = 0.002. There were no other main effects or interactions, F's ≤ 1.969, p's ≥ 0.162.

⁴It is important to note here that gaydar is defined as the ability to detect that someone is gay. Although the term gaydar has sometimes been applied to the use of eye gaze and other flirting behaviors (e.g., Nicholas, 2004), these behaviors involve detecting specific attraction or romantic interest, not one's general sexual orientation. If Man A initiates sustained eye contact with Man B, for example, Man B may correctly infer that Man A is attracted to him and therefore is gay or bisexual. Two men who fail to make eye contact, however, may be straight or may merely not be attracted to each other. Being able to correctly infer that someone is flirting or romantically interested in you is not the same as being able to detect someone's orientation regardless of his or her interest in you. We thank an anonymous reviewer for helping us to see the importance of explaining this distinction.