"Gaydar" — the purported ability to infer whether people are gay or straight based on their appearance — seemed to get a scientific boost from a 2008 study that concluded people could accurately guess someone's sexual orientation based on photographs of their faces.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Sex Research, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison challenge what they call "the gaydar myth." William Cox, an assistant scientist in the Department of Psychology and the lead author, says gaydar isn't accurate and is actually a harmful form of stereotyping.
"Most people think of stereotyping as inappropriate," Cox says. "But if you're not calling it 'stereotyping,' if you're giving it this other label and camouflaging it as 'gaydar,' it appears to be more socially and personally acceptable."
Another reason people's judgments of sexual orientation are often wrong, Cox says, is that such a small percentage of the population — 5 percent or less — is gay.
"If you tell people they have gaydar, it legitimizes the use of those stereotypes," Cox says.
That's harmful, he says, because stereotypes limit opportunities for members of stereotyped groups, narrowing how we think about them and promoting prejudice and discrimination — even aggression.
Cox hopes his research counteracts the gaydar myth and exposes it as something more harmful than most people realize.
"Recognizing when a stereotype is activated can help you overcome it and make sure that it doesn't influence your actions," Cox says.
In a 2014 study on prejudice-based aggression, Cox and Devine had participants play a game with a subject in another room that involved administering electric shocks to the subject. When the research team implied that the subject was gay using a stereotypic cue, participants shocked him far more often than when the research team explicitly told them he was gay.
"There was a subset of people who were personally very prejudiced, but they didn't want other people to think that they were prejudiced," Cox says. "They tended to express prejudice only when they could get away with it."
This is a very interesting conclusion. I have to see the exact methodology they used for this.
tldr but yeah, I've DEFINITELY been 100% certain a guy was gay, only to find out he was straight a few times recently. I just think a lot more guys are "metro" now than before
