Overall, gaydar helps people make sexual orientation inferences that are better than chance guessing however, they are far from perfect.
![cute gay men faces cute gay men faces](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d6/89/81/d6898177372782ae4f628dfd1a16d650.jpg)
This suggests that gaydar really only distinguishes heterosexual from non-heterosexual, meaning it doesn’t necessarily help when it comes to making more fine-grained determinations. Also, when people are given the opportunity to guess a target’s sexuality on a spectrum-a la the classic Kinsey Scale-rather than making either/or decisions, gay and bisexual persons tend to be given pretty similar ratings. So what happens when bisexual people are included in gaydar research? It turns out that people can’t seem to reliably distinguish them as a separate group. Most studies of gaydar involve asking people to make either/or judgments: is this person gay or is this person straight? However, in reality, there are far more than just two sexualities out there. Put another way, when women are at peak fertility, their ability to distinguish men who are gay from those who are straight appears to improve. In a particularly fascinating study, researchers found that women’s gaydar was more accurate when they were ovulating than when they weren’t. For instance, people who hold anti-gay views typically perform worse in gaydar studies by contrast, sexual minorities and people who have more familiarity. Some people seem to have more accurate gaydar than others. It turned out that they often lacked insight, especially when they only had very minimal information to go off of, such as a cropped image of a face that only showed a person’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Further evidence for this point comes from studies in which people were asked why they made specific sexual orientation inferences.
![cute gay men faces cute gay men faces](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a2/91/b0/a291b0351e9358981406a623ff7baea1.jpg)
In other words, the more people think about it, the worse their gaydar is! This suggests that we don’t necessarily know what it is that we’re basing these determinations on. In fact, when people are asked to think carefully before making a sexuality judgment, gaydar actually becomes less accurate. These sexual orientation inferences occur very quickly and seem to reflect automatic responses. These wide-ranging findings suggest that gaydar can potentially pick up on everything from one’s looks to movements to speech patterns. In addition, they can detect sexual orientation from still images of faces that appear on a computer screen for just a fraction of a second. For example, people seem to be able to detect sexual orientation while listening to short audio recordings, but also while watching silent videos. These studies have focused on very different types of sexuality cues, too.
![cute gay men faces cute gay men faces](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/64/c3/1c/64c31c9e2c17e29391cc6fae19d88604.jpg)
Most scientific studies of gaydar suggest that there’s something to this idea. Below are of the major takeaways from his analysis. Nicholas Rule, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, published a paper earlier this year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in which he reviewed the accumulated scientific literature on this topic. What we’re talking about here are cases where people make inferences about others’ sexual interests in response to minimal information, such as the way someone dresses, walks, or talks.ĭr.
![cute gay men faces cute gay men faces](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2b/55/7f/2b557fb2adc60e4183b4dfacfef79182--handsome-faces-handsome-guys.jpg)
People talk about ‘gaydar’ as the ability to determine whether someone is gay based on their intuition about the person. Is gaydar really a thing and, if so, how accurate is it? Some researchers have argued that it’s real, while others have claimed that it’s a myth. Gaydar has been the subject of a fair amount of scientific controversy as of late.