Seinfeld’s comedic commentary on the use of social stereotypes to infer orientation is perceptive. They normally don’t think of gay people as fat, sloppy, and married.” Sometimes when someone is thin, single, and neat, people assume they are gay because that is a stereotype. Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Role of Stereotypes, Faces, and The Gaydar Myth Discussion focuses on the implications of the gaydar myth and why, contrary to some prior claims, stereotyping is highly unlikely to result in accurate judgments about orientation.
Furthermore, the folk concept of gaydar serves as a legitimizing myth: Compared to a control group, people stereotyped more when led to believe in gaydar, whereas people stereotyped less when told gaydar is an alternate label for stereotyping. People do, however, readily infer orientation from stereotypic attributes (e.g., fashion, career). These studies revealed that orientation is not visible from the face-purportedly “face-based” gaydar arises from a third-variable confound.
Participants made gay-or-straight judgments about fictional targets that were constructed using experimentally-manipulated stereotypic cues and real gay/straight people’s face cues. We report five experiments testing these accounts. Another account, however, argues that people possess a facial perception process that enables them to identify sexual orientation from facial structure ( Rule et al., 2008). We propose that “gaydar” is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay). In the present work, we investigate the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called “gaydar,” to detect who is gay.