Voice and Prejudice: The Social Costs of Auditory Gaydar

ABSTRACT

It is a widespread belief that individuals are able to detect other people’s sexual orientation from vocal information alone (auditory gaydar). We argue that auditory gaydar, although often inaccurate, leads to stereotyping, avoidance, and discrimination of gay/lesbian-sounding speakers. Much like “social vision,” these voice-based inferences are driven by two distinct processes—a direct feature-based path and an indirect path mediated by categorization. As a way to either underline their social identity or prevent stigmatization, gay/lesbian speakers tend to modulate their voice depending on the interlocutor and on their conversational goals. Together, our findings suggest that vocal information plays a subtle but powerful role in intra- and intergroup communication.

Acknowledgments

We thank all the researchers and students who have collaborated in the studies mentioned in this article. The two authors contributed equally to this work.

Notes

¹ In this study the term “sexual orientation” is used merely to refer to the gay/lesbian and the heterosexual categories. Although we acknowledge the existence of other sexual orientations, we refer here to studies that conceptualized “gaydar” around the gay/straight binary categories.

² LG-sounding voices refer to voices of individuals who sound gay or lesbian regardless of whether they actually are LG. Very often those voices sound less masculine in the case of male speakers and less feminine in the case of female speakers. However, other acoustic features (e.g., sibilant/s/, duration of vowels, speaking rate) play a role in triggering the perception of voices as LG sounding (see Fasoli et al., 2016).