Gaydar is a hunch about someone, based on stereotypes of their look, voice, etc. While these can be misleading, they also often have a kernel of truth.
Many studies show that people can accurately guess a person’s sexual orientation using this intuition. Unfortunately, these studies are based on flawed assumptions.
Appearance
One of the first elements that triggers gaydar is appearance. This can include anything from facial features to body shape and movement. It can also include clothing choices, a butch style of dress or a masculine voice.
Many studies claim to demonstrate that people have a natural ability to pick out gay men from a crowd (also known as “gaydar”). The accuracy of this ability is generally higher than chance guessing. In most studies, participants can accurately predict sexual orientation about 50 percent of the time.
However, these studies have a major flaw. They fail to take into account the fact that there are far more straight people than gay people in a given population. As a result, the 60 percent accuracy reported in lab studies actually translates to 93 percent inaccuracy for real-world applications. This is called the false positive paradox. This is a very common error when trying to use statistics to measure human perceptions.
Body Language
Many people rely on their gut instincts to make snap judgments about others. These intuitions are often based on stereotypes, like that black men are dangerous or women won’t be good leaders. But sometimes, they can also be helpful, such as when you snag a crush on the subway and feel a “vibe” that he might be gay.
However, judging someone’s sexuality based on body language isn’t easy. For example, if someone sits with their head hunched forward or keeps a hand on their hip, it could suggest they want to maintain distance and avoid intimacy. On the other hand, a person who takes a step back when you approach them may be signaling their desire to get close.
In lab studies, humans were much worse than algorithms at identifying sexual orientation from facial expressions, with accuracy rates of only about 50%. That’s why it’s important to consider multiple factors when deciding whether someone is queer.
Personality
Gaydar is not only influenced by non-verbal clues, but also by a person’s personality. For example, straight people often assume that men who are fashionable or like shopping are gay. Other factors include a person’s occupation, the way he dresses and grooms himself.
Unfortunately, most of the scientific work that claims to demonstrate accurate gaydar falls prey to the false positive paradox. This phenomenon occurs when lab studies report high accuracy in judgments of sexual orientation, but that alleged accuracy is not replicated in real-life settings because the underlying assumptions are biased.
Moreover, most of the time researchers ask participants to make either/or decisions about whether someone is gay or straight. This makes it difficult to assess fine-grained differences in sexual orientation. For example, studies that ask participants to rate a target’s sexuality on a spectrum tend to find that gay and bisexual people are judged equally as either/or, whereas those who are heterosexual are typically seen as being closer to the middle of the Kinsey scale.
Sexuality
Research has shown that people can pick out sexual orientation from various cues. Some of these include a person’s clothes, style of walking and body makeup, the tone of voice used when speaking, overt rejections of traditional gender roles, and grooming habits.
Scientists have even figured out how to train gaydar, and their results show that participants can make sexual orientation inferences about people who aren’t there, or at least they can do better than chance guessing. But, like any kind of intuition, it can be flawed.
William Cox, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says relying on gaydar is harmful. He’s found that telling people they have gaydar legitimizes LGBT stereotypes, which can lead to prejudice and aggression. In one study, he had participants use their gaydar and then told some that they were using stereotyping; those who were given the latter description shocked a man a lot more often than those who weren’t.