Gaydar exists!

[swestrup]

I've always been somewhat skeptical of those who claimed they could tell who was gay, and who not. I've certainly never been good at figuring it out. However recent studies have shown that most folks can (with 70% accuracy) determine the sexual orientation of someone from looking at their face for 1/10th of a second.

The researchers wonder what else we can reliably work out about someone from a simple glance.

Comments

[kishiriadgr.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty good at it, but I don't think I could tell from just photos of faces. Hair styles might be a tip-off, but I've figured out that people were gay without any specific cues from fashion. I've occasionally done it over internet.

[kino-kid.livejournal.com]

OKCupid used to have a game where 20 or so random profile pictures were displayed and you had to select who was gay and who was not. (No idea if people who identified themselves as bisexual were in the pool.) I usually scored about 85%, if I remember correctly. People have even more tells, when you aren't just working with a single captured image.

By the same token, mileage may vary depending on the person. A person with prosopagnosia wouldn't have a clue from someone's face, and there are probably many degrees of face-blindness and facial recognition.

[metawidget]

Give me a random cross-section of the population at zero seconds' examination apiece, and I'll be right somewhere between 90 and 97% of the time, depending on whose statistics you believe.

[pythonian.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised.

Detection of "the other", the strange, the different was and is a survival trait for both the individual and the community. The fact that such a basic need is no longer necessary for most "normal" situations in modern society is irrelevant.

Does it make for some amount of uneasiness or outright bigotry among some? Yes but that is a fact of our existence.

[pythonian.livejournal.com]

A corollary to this is our ability to size someone up as a potential mate in seconds. It's been noted that people make judgments based on the first 4 seconds of meeting someone. Perhaps that time frame has to be adjusted based on the article quoted above but the notion still stands. One's facial proportions, smell, movement, skin quality (clammy, dry, rough, smooth,...) all go into the evaluation. All this before the first conversation takes place.

As the saying goes, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression"

[rosy1.livejournal.com]

My gaydar is pretty well-honed. Or as a friend once told me, "you knew I was gay before I did."