Gaydar exists!

23 January 2008 in Human Nature, Notes by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

The mythical “gaydar” exists! Research shows we can pick someone’s sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time after seeing their photo for just 100 milliseconds. Hat-tip to 3 quarks daily.

Tags: homosexuality, sex

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Alastair on 23 January 2008 at 4:40 pm

Life imitates Futurama, again.

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Crispin on 23 January 2008 at 6:17 pm

“What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results,” says Ambady.

and … Still, he notes that with some of the images, accuracy regularly fell below 50%. It’s possible that some faces are just hard to read.

So… with most people, 70% of first impressions will get their sexuality, but with some people, 50/50 is as good as it gets….

Gells with my thumb-in-the-Wind prediction

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Stilgherrian on 23 January 2008 at 6:21 pm

And, here’s my strategy for getting the right answer 90% of the time, foolproof! Just answer every image with “straight”. If the sample is representative, there’ll be roughly 10% that are gay and you’ll be wrong. Otherwise you’ll be fine.

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