Sexual Orientation Perception Involves Gendered Facial Cues

Abstract

Perceivers can accurately judge a face’s sexual orientation, but the perceptual mechanisms mediating this remain obscure. The authors hypothesized that stereotypes casting gays and lesbians as gender “inverts,” in cultural circulation for a century and a half, lead perceivers to use gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation. Using computer-generated faces, Study 1 showed that as two facial dimensions (shape and texture) became more gender inverted, targets were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Study 2 showed that real faces appearing more gender inverted were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the stereotypic use of gendered cues influenced the accurate judgment of sexual orientation. Although using gendered cues increased the accuracy of sexual orientation judgments overall, Study 3 showed that judgments were reliably mistaken for targets that countered stereotypes. Together, the findings demonstrate that perceivers utilize gendered facial cues to glean another’s sexual orientation, and this influences the accuracy or error of judgments.

Is Gaydar Affected by Attitudes Toward Homosexuality? Confidence, Labeling Bias, and Accuracy

“…Previous studies have suggested that attitudes towards homosexuality are associated with apparent transgressions of gender norms (Cohen, Hall, & Tuttle, 2009). Raters often use perceived masculinity and femininity in female and male targets respectively to judge sexual orientation (Freeman, Johnson, Ambady, & Rule, 2010;Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, Garcia, & Bailey, 2010), and the male and female images used in the present study were each rated as gender inverted in a previous study (Lyons et al, 2014). Therefore, future studies should obtain additional ratings of target masculinity and femininity to investigate the manner in which perceived masculinity or femininity may impact on rating confidence and homonegativity.…”

“Not Hiding, Not Shouting, Just Me”: Gay Men Negotiate Their Visual Identities

“…More recent research on heterosexuals' perceptions of gay male and lesbian appearance has found that the accurate judgement of sexual orientation on the basis of visual cues is underpinned by a gender inversion model of homosexuality (Johnson, Gill, Reichman & Tassinary, 2007). Freeman, Johnson, Ambady and Rule (2010) showed that both computer-generated and real faces that were judged to be more gender inverted were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the use of stereotypic gendered cues to judge sexual orientation increased the accuracy of perceiver judgements, except when judging photographs of gender atypical targets.…”

Introducing lesbian, gay and bisexual appearance psychology

“…The findings of one study showed that both computer-generated and real faces that were judged to be more gender inverted were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the use of stereotypic gendered cues to judge sexual orientation increased the accuracy of perceiver judgements, except when judging photographs of gender atypical targets (here judgements were consistently less accurate than chance) (Freeman, Johnson, Ambady & Rule, 2010). Until very recently, there has been little interest in the detection of bisexuality.…”