Does Gaydar - that preternatural ability to detect whether someone is gay - exist?
Researchers Joshua Tabak and Vivian Zayas actually did the scientific experiment to find whether gaydar is real:
LinkWe 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’d 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.
Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.
Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive. But the effect is statistically significant — several times above the margin of error.
Is gaydar [...] real?
Does gaydar [...] real?
Does gaydar [...] exist?
Great, gaydar exists but it only works a little better than random chance. That won't lead to any awkward social situations.