Study Finds 'Gaydar' Up to 80 Percent Accurate on Sexuality

[IDemo]

By Jason Koebler
May 16, 2012 RSS Feed Print

"Gaydar," the ability to detect sexual orientation as if through radar, is real. And some people can guess with 80 percent accuracy, according to a new study.

In a study of college students at the University of Washington, most people were able to identify a person's sexuality with greater-than-chance accuracy based on black-and-white photo flashes of them for just 50 milliseconds—faster than the blink of an eye. Photos used in the study were digitally altered to remove hair, jewelry, and other "self-presentational" aspects of a person, suggesting there may be such a thing as a "gay face," according to researcher Joshua Tabak, a doctoral candidate at the university and lead author of the paper.

"The world's best lie detection experts top out at around 80 percent accuracy," he says. "Being at 80 percent accuracy on this type of judgment—just seeing a picture of a face in grayscale—that's pretty amazing."

But not everyone's "gaydar" is exactly on point. Some weren't able to guess sexuality at all, while others scored above 80 percent accuracy at identifying 96 randomly ordered gay and straight people. Overall, people were about 57 percent accurate at identifying the self-identified sexual orientation of subjects.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/16/study-finds-gaydar-up-to-80-percent-accurate-on-sexuality

[MisterP]

1. "as if through radar" is quite unclear--"radar" is actually an analogy

there's actually no electromagnetic interactions involved

[obxhead]

2. "Up to" is an important part of that headline.

"Overall, people were about 57 percent accurate at identifying the self-identified sexual orientation of subjects."

On average people are right slightly more than half of the time.

[snooper2]

3. It does make it easier when everybody is going for that beautiful, perfect look...

The one that only one man can truly achieve

[onehandle]

4. A former gay employee of mine told me this:

If a guy uses the word 'dude' too often, then he is gay.

He didn't say possibly or likely gay, he said, 'that guy is gay.'

[bluestateguy]

5. This will rub a lot of people the wrong way

I better just leave it at that.

[xfundy]

6. Wearing white socks is a dead giveaway.

At least I wear them.

[craigmatic]

7. did anybody else expect this to be an onion article?