Is “gay face” real?

[archerships]

People can identify pictures of gay men at a rate above chance:

The January 2008 study investigated people’s ability to identify homosexual men from pictures of their faces alone. In an initial experiment, researchers Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady from Tufts University perused online dating sites and carefully selected 45 straight male faces and 45 gay male faces. All of these photos were matched for orientation (only faces shown looking forward were used) and facial alterations (none of the images contained jewelry, glasses or facial hair). To control for context, the faces were also cut and pasted onto a white background for the study. These 90 faces were then shown to 90 participants in random order, who were asked simply to judge the target’s “probable sexual orientation” (gay or straight) by pressing a button. Surprisingly, all participants (both men and women) scored above chance on this gaydar task, correctly identifying the gay faces. Even more surprisingly, accuracy rate was just as good when the images were exposed at a rapid rate of only 50 milliseconds, which offered participants no opportunity to consciously process the photo.

Original: craschworks - comments

Comments

[ersigh.livejournal.com]

I have wicked gaydar. I'm also decent at recognizing where people are from just from the way their mouths and the muscles in their jaw are shaped (different languages, different usage... Germans and Russians are especially clear to me).

So much shapes the way we look...

[evelynne.livejournal.com]

How interesting. I've noticed that it's often possible to tell if someone (of any race) is a visitor or immigrant versus a native American before they even open their mouths and speak with an accent. This happens even if their clothing and accessories are indistinguishable from everyone else's. Something about one's culture and upbringing is revealed in their faces, though I'm still trying to figure out how that is. I hadn't considered that it might be different muscle development based on language usage. I know that different subcultures within the US (street gang culture vs. non-gang cultures, for one) have different ideas about what one's public "face" should be (no eye contact, no expression versus smiling at strangers). So it makes sense that other cultural ideas about this would be visible in people's faces.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

Heh. My German friend says it's a "cornfed" look that Americans have.

[madbard.livejournal.com]

This one at least seems reasonably empirical. Though it's worth noting that profile photos on dating sites are skewed towards a style that telegraphs sexual culture. Driver's license photos would probably be a better data set.

[kynn.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

If you read the article, they address this concern in a later study.

[madbard.livejournal.com]

The followup just seems noisy, with its complex selection criteria. Also, peer-selected photos in that context is subject to the same kind of bias as self-selection, especially in gay culture. (Imagine a reverse scenario, where we culled pictures of women from male Facebook sites. Do you think they'd be orientation-neutral?)

They need to clear out of social networking entirely to get a less biased data set.

[white-lies.livejournal.com]

it's amazing what we can tell from faces:
http://www.facereading1.com/

this lady is an old friend of my grandmother's - it's SPOOKY how good she is.

[ernunnos.livejournal.com]

There are people who can do it reliably. I first heard about it reading Paul Ekman's books. The version I can find online is actually by way of Malcolm Gladwell.

...Tomkins came to visit Ekman at his laboratory in San Francisco. Ekman had just tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, who were hostile and murderous and who had a homosexual ritual where pre-adolescent boys were required to serve as courtesans for the male elders of the tribe. For six months, Ekman and his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, had been sorting through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes, focusing just on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen, in order to compare the facial expressions of the two groups. Ekman set up the camera. Tomkins sat in the back. He had been told nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?" Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and, while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, 'I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too."

I haven't heard if he's cataloged the features that indicate homosexuality, but in the TV show "Lie To Me", which is based on Ekman, one of the plots in the last season hinged on the use of this gaydar, so I'm inclined to believe he has. (He's an advisor to the show.)

[h-postmortemus.livejournal.com]

The study is deeply flawed because they used online dating sites. So the actual orientation of the photos is unknown, plus there's no way of knowing how many participants may have already seen some of those photos...