A curious question, and also curious to know that this is a topic that has recently attracted the interest of researchers in the social sciences.
The ‘Gaydar’, as it has been called in studies of sensitivity in perception, refers to the ability to identify a person’s sexual orientation based on visual, auditory and olfactory cues, and it has been proposed that it could be related to the identification of possible sexual partners.
However, little is known about the role that aspects such as the sexual orientation of the judge or their interest in sex at the time play on this evaluation. To investigate these issues was the objective of a research published in Archives of Sexual Behavior (2014 ).
In the first experiment, heterosexual and homosexual women participated who had to assess the sexual orientation of men and women of both orientations . What they found was that, in general, the precision with which the judgments about homosexuality and heterosexuality were made was higher than expected by chance.
Additionally, women’s faces were better ‘tagged’ than men’s, and gay women showed more positive bias in assessing the homosexuality of the people in the photos.
In a second experiment, Minna Lyons and her team at the University of Central Lancashire contacted 100 heterosexual women and 20 homosexual women to rate the masculinity or femininity of the stimuli. The results showed that all women, regardless of their own sexual orientation, rated heterosexual girls as more feminine and less masculine than homosexual girls, and perceived gay men as more feminine and less masculine than heterosexual men.
It seems that we have a powerful perceptual system for social categories , although there is still much to study about how this ability has evolved or what its ultimate ends are.
In any case, having good perception skills is desirable if they can help us resolve important everyday situations and better adjust our behavior, without this serving to justify any type of discrimination.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
