Featural, configural: how to look
Should you trust your gaydar in everyday life? Probably not. In our experiments, average gaydar judgment accuracy was only in the 60 percent range. This demonstrates gaydar ability -- which is far from judgment proficiency.
Two such experiments in PLoS ONE, both of which yielded novel findings. In one experiment, we found above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up.
What can we make of this peculiar discovery? It's widely accepted in cognitive science that when viewing faces right side up, we process them in two different ways: we engage in featural face processing (registering individual facial features like an eye or lip) as well as configural face processing (registering spatial relationships among facial features, like the distance between the eyes or the facial width-to-height ratio). When we view faces upside down, however, we engage primarily in featural face processing; configural face processing is strongly disrupted.
Thus our finding clarifies how people distinguish between gay and straight faces. Research by Professor Rule and his colleagues has implicated certain areas of the face (like the mouth area) in gaydar judgments. Our discovery -- that accuracy was substantially greater for right side up faces than for upside-down faces -- indicates that configural face processing contributes to gaydar accuracy. Specific facial features will not tell the whole story. Differences in spatial relationships among facial features matter, too.
Consider, for example, facial width-to-height ratio. This is a configural physical feature that differs between men and women (men have a larger ratio) and reflects testosterone release during adolescence in males. Given that stereotypes of gender atypicality -- gay men as relatively feminine and gay women as relatively masculine -- play a role in how people judge others' sexual orientation, our finding suggests that cues like facial width-to-height ratio may contribute to gaydar judgments.
Another novel finding: in both experiments, participants were more accurate at judging women's sexual orientation (64 percent) than at judging men's (57 percent). Lower gaydar accuracy for men's faces was explained by a difference in "false alarms": participants were more likely to incorrectly categorize a straight man as gay than to incorrectly categorize a straight woman as gay.