AuditoryGaydar: Perception of Sexual Orientation Based on Female Voice

Abstract

We investigated auditory gaydar (i.e., the ability to recognize sexual orientation) in female speakers, addressing three related issues: whether auditory gaydar is (1) accurate, (2) language-dependent (i.e., occurs only in some languages, but not in others), and (3) ingroup-specific (i.e., occurs only when listeners judge speakers of their own language, but not when they judge foreign language speakers). In three experiments, we asked Italian, Portuguese, and German participants (total N = 466) to listen to voices of Italian, Portuguese, and German women, and to rate their sexual orientation. Our results showed that auditory gaydar was not accurate; listeners were not able to identify speakers’ sexual orientation correctly. The same pattern emerged consistently across all three languages and when listeners rated foreign-language speakers.

Voice Changes Meaning: The Role of Gay- Versus Straight-Sounding Voices in Sentence Interpretation

“…Gay and lesbian individuals are targets of stereotyping and stigmatization, even when their SO is not explicitly disclosed but "detected" by others from minimal cues such as voice (Fasoli et al, 2016). An increasing body of research has shown that listeners categorize speakers' SO according to how they sound (Gaudio, 1994;Linville, 1998;Smyth, Jacobs, & Rogers, 2003;Munson, 2007), even when they speak a foreign language (Sulpizio et al, 2015;Sulpizio, Fasoli, F., Antonio, R., Eyssel, F., Paladino, M. P., & Diehl, 2019), talk for a few seconds (Mack & Munson, 2012), or utter meaningless syllables rather than conveying a meaningful message (Tracy, Bainter, & Satariano, 2015). Sometimes this categorization process happens to be accurate, whereas at other times, it occurs on the basis of stereotypical ideas of how gay men and lesbian women are believed to sound (for an overview see Fasoli et al, 2016;Rule, 2017).…”

Gender (Conformity) Matters: Cross-Dimensional and Cross-Modal Associations in Sexual Orientation Perception

“…By referring to targets’ everyday appearances, straight categorization bias should have been reduced because the likelihood of introducing gendered fashions is increased (Lick & Johnson, 2016). Analogous to previous research (Kachel et al, 2018; Sulpizio et al, 2015, 2019), vocal stimuli in our study consisted of recordings of the same single read sentence for every target. In contrast to the visual stimuli, this possibly left too little space for interindividual differences (vs. 20-second excerpt of a read text used by Valentova & Havlíček, 2013).…”

“…We did not adopt this commonly used procedure but made straightness the effect to be explained (Bruckmüller, 2013). By doing so, we accounted for studies showing more straight than lesbian/gay targets to be accurately perceived (Lick & Johnson, 2016; Sulpizio et al, 2015; Sulpizio et al, 2019) and for studies showing that people are categorized as straight or nonstraight (Ding & Rule, 2012; Lick, Johnson, & Rule, 2015). Nevertheless, our findings are comparable to previous ones because the total numbers of lesbian/gay and straight stimuli were the same.…”

“…Most studies found that straight speakers sounded straighter than lesbian/gay speakers (Gaudio, 1994; Linville, 1998; Munson et al, 2006; Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, Garcia, & Bailey, 2010; Smyth, Jacobs, & Rogers, 2003; Sulpizio et al, 2015: Study 2; Valentova & Havlíček, 2013; Zimman, 2010), that SO was accurately perceived at above-chance level (van Borsel & van de Putte, 2014), or that the straighter gay men described themselves the more likely they were perceived as straight (Kachel, Simpson, & Steffens, 2018; Renn, 2003). However, some studies failed to replicate these findings (Piccolo, 2008; Sisson, 2003; Sulpizio et al, 2015: Study 1; Sulpizio et al, 2019). Voice-based studies used a variety of stimuli ranging from readings of a few words (Munson et al, 2006) to longer excerpts of spontaneous speech (Rieger et al, 2010; Smyth et al, 2003).…”

“…However, for female targets, valid SO information contained in videos with sound did not exceed full appearances but both did exceed speech alone (Rieger et al, 2010). However, comparative research on different implicit signals is lacking (voices vs. faces vs. combined vocal and facial stimuli; Miller, 2018; Sulpizio et al, 2019). Based on these theoretical considerations, we tested the following hypotheses:…”