Women like to believe they're good at knowing or guessing men's sexual orientation--but research says there's times "gaydar" gets better. A study in Psychological Science says females better identify gay men when they've got good reason, like when they're most likely to get pregnant.
Psychologists at two colleges -- the University of Toronto and Tufts University -- performed a rather unusual study: Researchers provided 40 female college students with 80 pics, each a face of a sexually "straight" heterosexual or gay man. While gay men are often considered more attractive -- or taking better care of their physical appearance -- the study used men considered to be equally attractive and showing the same facial expressions, to avoid bias. The heterosexual females had to give their take: Were the guys "straight" or gay? The results are surprising.
Women were more on the mark in correctly identifying sexual orientation of men when the womens' menstrual cycle was near peak ovulation.
Next up was a test to see how accurate heterosexual women are in correctly identifying whether other women are "straight" or gay. 34 women were asked to view a similar pattern of photos -- this time using all-female faces. The researchers used 2.5 times the amount of pictures that had been used for identifying males. Female study participants were shown 100 photos featuring gay women, and another 100 pictures of "straight" females.
Study results found that women proved no better in knowing or guessing women's sexual orientation regardless of ovulation cycle or peak.
Researchers claim the stats reflect a relationship between women's fertility and correct identification of sexual orientation in the opposite gender: Nicholas Rule, a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and the study's lead author, claims findings suggest "fertility influences a heterosexual woman's attention to potential mates rather than merely increasing sensitivity to sexual orientation or nonverbal cues more generally."
In other words: Women get better "gaydar" when the reason for identification is more urgent. When they need to mate, that "gaydar" improves as females are quicker to rule out the men who don't match their needs -- the gay ones -- in a reproductive goal of becoming pregnant.
That's the theory anyway, though there are a couple oddities:
It's not clear why the study uses different amounts of women and photos for each part of the research: 40 women are used to judge 80 photos of men, while just 36 women are used to judge 200 photos of other women. While the number of study participants involved is a fairly close match, the number of photos of females shown to females numbers two and one-half times the number of photos of males.
It's also unclear why the women involved in the study were shown pictures of other women, to determine whether those females are gay or straight -- since women don't need other women in order to reproduce, making it a mute point.
Interesting, however, is that heterosexual women simply don't prove very adept at correctly judging other womens' sexual orientation at any point in time -- even despite being the same gender. Perhaps somebody should consider performing a study on that bizarre fact.