{"id":49255,"date":"2012-12-27T13:02:15","date_gmt":"2012-12-27T18:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=49255"},"modified":"2013-10-31T04:46:14","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T09:46:14","slug":"gaydar-study-calibration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/27\/gaydar-study-calibration\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaydar Study Calibration"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. Originally c<\/em>ross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>The other day the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0had a\u00a0Gray Matter science piece<\/a>\u00a0by the authors of a\u00a0study in\u00a0PLoS One<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that showed some people could identify gays and lesbians based only on quick flashes of their unadorned faces. They wrote:<\/p>\n

We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they\u2019d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.<\/p>\n

…participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.<\/p>\n

Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive. But the effect is statistically significant \u2014 several times above the margin of error. Furthermore, the effect has been highly replicable: we ourselves have consistently discovered such effects in more than a dozen experiments.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This may be seen as confirmation of the inborn nature of sexual orientation, if it can be detected by a quick glance at facial features.<\/p>\n

Sample images flashed during the \u201cgaydar\u201d experiment:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is a statistical issue here that I leave to others to consider: the sample of Facebook pictures the researchers used was 48% gay\/lesbian (111\/233 men, 87\/180 women). So if, as they say, it is 64% accurate at detecting lesbians, and 57% accurate at detecting gay men, how\u00a0useful is gaydar in real life (when about\u00a03.5% of people<\/a>\u00a0are gay or lesbian, when people aren\u2019t reduced to just their naked, hairless facial features, and you know a lot of people\u2019s sexual orientations from other sources)? I don\u2019t know, but I\u2019m guessing not much.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I have a serious basic reservation about studies like this \u2014 like those that look for\u00a0finger-length<\/a>,\u00a0hair-whorl<\/a>,\u00a0twin patterns<\/a>, and other biological signs of sexual orientation. To do it, the researchers have to decide who has what sexual orientation in the first place \u2014 and that\u2019s half the puzzle. This is unremarked on in the gaydar study or the op-ed, and appears to cause no angst among the researchers. They got their pictures from Facebook profiles of people who self-identified as gay\/lesbian or straight (I don\u2019t know if that was from the \u201cinterested in\u201d Facebook option, or something else on their profiles).<\/p>\n

Sexual orientation is multidimensional and determined by many different things \u2014 some combination of (presumably many) genes, hormonal exposures, lived experiences. And for some people at least, it changes over the course of their lives. That\u2019s why\u00a0it\u2019s hard to measure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Consider, for example, a scenario in which someone who felt gay at a young age married heterogamously anyway \u2014 not too uncommon. Would such a person self-identify as gay on Facebook? Probably not. But if someone in that same situation got divorced and then came out of the closet they probably would self-identify as gay then.<\/p>\n

Consider another\u00a0new study<\/a>, in the\u00a0Archives of Sexual Behavior<\/em>, which used a large sample of people interviewed 10 years apart. They found changes in sexual orientation were not that rare. Here is my table based on their results:\"\"<\/a>Overall, 2% of people changed their response to the sexual orientation identity question. That\u2019s not that many \u2014 but then only 2.5% reported homosexual or bisexual identities in the first place.<\/p>\n

In short, self identification may be the best standard we have for sexual orientation identity (which isn\u2019t the same as sexual behavior), but it\u2019s not a good fit for studies trying to get at deep-down gay\/straight-ness, like the gaydar study or the biological studies.<\/p>\n

And we need to keep in mind that this is all complicated by social stigma around sexual orientation. So who identifies as what, and to whom, is never free from political or power issues.<\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. Originally cross-posted at Family Inequality. The other day the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0had a\u00a0Gray Matter science piece\u00a0by the authors of a\u00a0study in\u00a0PLoS One\u00a0that showed some people could identify gays and lesbians based only on quick flashes of their unadorned faces. They wrote: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,274,54,293,37],"class_list":["post-49255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biology","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-sexual-orientation","tag-social-construction","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49255"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58080,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49255\/revisions\/58080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}