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.

Figure 1

Cropping example. This is a picture of a lab volunteer, cropped like the stimuli used in the present studies. The cropped pictures were placed on a white background larger than is shown in this figure.

Figure 2

Study 3 (Top) and Study 4 (Bottom) Results. Error bars are the standard error of the means. For both male (Study 3) and female (Study 4) targets, perceivers could not distinguish orientation from the pictures when the stimuli have been matched for quality.

Figure 3

Study 5 Results. Error bars are the standard error of the means. A 2 (Categorization Rate Type: Straight vs. Gay) X 3 (Gaydar Belief condition: Gaydar is Real vs. Control vs. Gaydar is Stereotyping) mixed ANOVA revealed that the main effect of categorization rate type, F (1, 230) = 22.694, p < 0.001, η² = 0.085, was qualified by an interaction with Gaydar Belief condition, F (2, 230) = 7.508, p = 0.001, η² = 0.056. After being told that gaydar is real, participants guessed that gay-stereotypic men were gay much more often than straight, and this difference was much larger than for participants in the control group. When participants were told that gaydar is merely another label for stereotyping, they were equally likely to guess that a gay-stereotypic man was gay or straight.

Figure 4

Fallacies of Accurate Stereotype-Based Gaydar. Mistaken conclusions about the accuracy of stereotype-based gaydar are facilitated by the base rate fallacy and the fallacy of the converse. Evidence of an accurate Group → Attribute stereotype (e.g., gay men possess attribute X), as in the top panel, must be adjusted for the base rate of gay men in the population (middle panel), before we can estimate the accuracy of the converse Attribute → Group stereotype (e.g., men who possess attribute X are gay), as in the bottom panel. Even implausibly high levels of Group → Attribute accuracy, as pictured, are highly unlikely to yield better-than-chance Attribute → Group accuracy. Mathematically, accurate stereotype-based gaydar seems highly infeasible.