“Gaydar”: The Perception of Sexual Orientation From Subtle Cues

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The Politics of Gaydar: Ideological Differences in the Use of Gendered Cues in Categorizing Sexual Orientation

Perceptions of Sexual Orientation From Minimal Cues.

People derive considerable amounts of information about each other from minimal nonverbal cues. Apart from characteristics typically regarded as obvious when encountering another person (e.g., age, race, and sex), perceivers can identify many other qualities about a person that are typically rather subtle. One such feature is sexual orientation. Here, I review the literature documenting the acc...

The fallacy of objective measurement: The case of gaydar∗

“Gaydar” colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation. But does gaydar really exist? If so, how does it work? Our research, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, shows that gaydar is indeed real and that its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features as well as the spatial relationships among fac...

The politics of gaydar: ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation.

In the present research, we investigated whether, because of differences in cognitive style, liberals and conservatives would differ in the process of categorizing individuals into a perceptually ambiguous group. In 3 studies, we examined whether conservatives were more likely than liberals to rely on gender inversion cues (e.g., feminine = gay) when categorizing male faces as gay vs. straight,...

Ecological Invalidity of Existing Gaydar Research: In-Lab Accuracy Translates to Real-World Inaccuracy: Response to Rule, Johnson, & Freeman (2016).

In recent years, several empirical studies have claimed to provide evidence in support of the popular folk notion that people possess "gaydar" that enables them to accurately identify who is gay or lesbian (Rule, Johnson, & Freeman, 2016). This conclusion is limited to artificial lab settings, however, and when translated to real-world settings this work itself provides evidence that people's j...