Piggybacking on the research of others, Malcolm Gladwell taught America about “thin-slicing” — and how subtle cues, often picked up by your subconscious, can form a correct conclusion in fractions of a second. Among the researchers Gladwell cites in his research is Nalini Ambady, who collaborated on a recent study with Nicholas Rule to see whether college students could determine someone’s sexuality just by looking at them. The answer? More often than not, yes. And it takes less time than, well, the blink of an eye.
The methodology, relays Dave Munger:
They selected 90 photos of men from dating websites, carefully choosing only headshots that didn’t feature facial hair, jewelry, glasses, or other accessories. Half the photos were of men seeking male partners, and half were seeking female partners. Then the photos were shown in random order to 90 student volunteers. Photos were displayed for either 33 ms, 50 ms, 100 ms, or 6.5 or 10 seconds. In addition, some of the photos were shown with no time limit at all. Immediately after each photo was shown, a mask of scrambled face parts was shown to clear any afterimages. The students were asked to indicate whether the face they had just seen was likely to be gay or straight. Were they accurate? And if so, how quickly could they do it?
And the results:
The students responded significantly better than chance for every time period except the 33 millisecond exposure. A chance accuracy rate would be 50 percent, and even after just a 50 millisecond exposure, the students were accurate 57 percent of the time. When the results were corrected using signal detection analysis (to compensate for the fact that fewer than 50 percent of men are gay in real life), accuracy was 62 percent at 50 milliseconds, and as high as 70 percent when self-paced.
Now how about for some error correcting:
How about we take this to the next level?
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One potential problem with this experiment is the source of the photos. Perhaps men on dating sites deliberately present themselves as heterosexual or homosexual to make themselves more attractive to potential mates. To compensate, the researchers found photos of men from Facebook. They carefully chose only photos that were taken and posted by friends or family members, not the men themselves. They used the men’s profiles to learn if they were gay or straight, identifying 69 gay men and and 64 straight men. The photos were cropped to show only the faces — even hairstyles were removed. Then the researchers repeated the original experiment using just a 50 millisecond flash, since that had been the critical interval. Fifteen student volunteers viewed the photos.
Once again, the students were significantly better than chance at identifying gay men, with an accuracy rate of 52 percent, corrected to 54 percent using signal detection analysis. While this means the students were wrong 48 percent of the time, it’s nonetheless impressive, especially given the extremely short display time and the fact that hairstyles had been removed from the photos (which was not the case in the first experiment).
Why is being able to quickly surmise someone’s sexual orientation even useful? Well unless you’re an employer looking to exploit an ENDA-less nation, then there’s one other obvious function: “Rule and Ambady say it might have to do with efficient mate selection. Women need to be able to rule out unsuitable mates, while men need to determine who their potential competition is.”
That conclusion, of course, forgets that gay men and women can also determine the sexuality of strangers — and that gay men also need to rule out unsuitable mates (i.e. straight men), while gay women also need to know who their potential competition is (i.e. other lesbian gals).
What would’ve been truly interesting, or perfect for a follow up study, is to see whether it matters whether being straight or gay gives you better gaydar. Or Republican.
bill
I think that they should next study why heterosexuals are so MANICALLY obsessed with the very gay people they detest so much.
Qjersey
The sexual orientation of the study team was not mentioned…
alan brickman
why does it matter if someone is gay? everyone should be judged as a good person who matters…not just differences…
JD
in other news, you can also tell whether a flipped coin will be heads or tails to 52% accuracy. 54% using signal detection analysis.
give me a break.
B
No. 3 · alan brickman wrote, “why does it matter if someone is gay? everyone should be judged as a good person who matters…not just differences…”
What matters is that the test subjects could do better than chance in 50 milliseconds, but not 33 milliseconds. That provides a bit of data about the speed at which visual cues needed for a complex analysis are processed by the brain (guessing sexual orientation is not a trivial task – just try programming a computer to do it and see how far you get).
Dan
The students were accurate 57% of the time, but when hairstyles were removed, only 52%. Munger calls that “impressive”? It’s barely greater than chance!
Moreover, results are generally best when groups are of equal size, as in this study. So, accuracy would probably have been even lower if the researchers had used an accepted statistical techique to correct for the large number of gay men in the pictures, instead of using the offbeat signal detection analysis.
What these results actually suggest is that a man’s sexual orientation can rarely be detected accurately from facial features.
Michael Letterman
Yep I usually can tell pretty quick. Of course it helps when they lisp, wear scarves indoors in warm weather, use more product on their hair then carried in the Walmart health and beauty aid asile, have fauxhawk hairdos, smell more flowery then the local florist, oh and walk in pairs holding hands with another male.
Yep it’s as easy as can be.
hephaestion
Millisceonds??
neighborino
That is not a statistically sound correlation. The margin of error in general, and especially with such a small group, and a group of college students, is going to be so high that it wouldn’t be indicative of anything. First off, college students only make up less that 2% people in this country of 300 million, and this country makes up less than 5% of the population of the world. You’ve got a sample of a sample of a sample. And only fifteen people were surveyed for the second, ‘more fair’ study. Flip a coin fifteen times. Even though you’ll get something close to 50%, you won’t get it exactly.
Also, what was the racial makeup of this group? This matters because do you know what an Indonesia gay man looks like? A Congan? A German? A Brazilian-Japanese guy? It could be relevant to know if this is a cultural learning thing or a genetic predisposition thing as the authors of the study assert.
This is a bullshit study, is what I’m saying.
B
In No. 6 · Dan wrote, “The students were accurate 57% of the time, but when hairstyles were removed, only 52%. Munger calls that “impressive”? It’s barely greater than chance!”
What’s impressive is doing better than chance given the 50 millisecond duration of what they looked at – the duration would be longer than that if it showed two successive frames from a DVD or film. The frame rate for film in the U.S. is 24 frames per second, which means a new frame every 41.67 milliseconds.
Daniel
The results could also simply mean that gay men wax and/or trim their eyebrows more than straight men.
1EqualityUSA
My gaydar is accurate 95 percent of the time and the other 5 percent are latent. Usually if someone really hates gays and talks about gays a lot, my gaydar goes off of the scale, but visual data is required to lock in a true reading. Humans are evolving. I had noticed this more in New York City than anywhere else. On the streets of New York, we have thousands of people coming at us any given day, so because of all of the snap decisions about the throngs, the hoards of humans around, our senses have become sharper. Data is processed at lightening speed. If we all lived in Mayberry, where Floyd the barber, Barney Fife, and Aunt Bea and other familiar faces resided, the “reading” senses would be used to a much lesser degree. An element of danger and the unknown hones this very reptilian brain type of communication. In many situations, nurses have gotten to the point where we read minds, a very fine line between anticipating one’s needs and actually empathizing to a level beyond the ordinary. Spoken language is inefficient, especially when understaffing has everyone using every ounce of talent in their souls to do good work under duress. Nurses use every tool available to them, some inexplicable. Once, in New York, I hailed a cab with my mind. It was then that I had the notion that we are evolving. Body language, in all of its subtlety, speaks volumes.
Superman
These studies are ridiculous. “They used the men’s profiles to learn if they were gay or straight, identifying 69 gay men and and 64 straight men…Once again, the students were significantly better than chance at identifying gay men, with an accuracy rate of 52 percent…”
If the pics are roughly half of gay men and half of straight men, then the odds of identifying the gay ones are as good as flipping a coin. How is that “significantly better than chance”?!
It would have been better if the images reflected the gay population at large (two to 10 percent?) and have the students try to pick out the gay men. It would’ve been interesting to see how many straight men would have been misidentified at that point.
1EqualityUSA
A picture does not offer enough data.
Latebrosus
@Daniel: That’s what I was thinking.