Do any of these faces look gay to you? Do any look especially straight?
If so, there's a reason. And its not that you are homophobic. New research from the University of Toronto suggests that some gay men might have gay faces.
Dr. Nicholas Rule and his colleagues recently published a study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin investigating the accuracy of judgments of sexual orientation of American, Japanese, and Spanish males.
A body of research shows that people are fairly adept at categorizing faces in terms of race, gender, and age. More recently, Rule and Amabady (2010) extended these findings to judgments of sexual orientation, demonstrating that that Americans are fairly accurate in their judgments of sexual orientation based only on the faces of the targets. In their study, American males and females categorized the faces of American gay and straight males and showed accuracy rates well above chance. But one explanation the researchers could not rule out was that differences in facial expressions between gay and straight American males reflects differences between different social norms or cultural differences between gay and straight America.
In their most recent study, Rule and his team recruited subjects from three countries with divergent attitudes toward sexual minorities--Japan, Spain and the United States. Attitudes toward homosexuality are relative accepting in Spain and relatively intolerant in Japan, with the US falling in the middle. The research team downloaded images of faces from dating websites in each of the three countries and cropped the images so that only face and hair appeared. For example,
If it is absolutely impossible for people to accurately categorize gay and straight male faces, you would expect an overall accuracy rate of approximately 50%. For each face, one has a 50% chance of being correct. For researchers to conclude that the results are not a result of chance guessing, the accuracy rate has to be much greater than 50%. And that is exactly what Rule and his colleagues found.
Research participants from Spain, Japan, and the US categorized the images from each of the countries and overall, their correct responses exceeded chance (50%). American participants were better at categorizing faces than Spanish and Japan participants. The research team speculates that this is because Americans responded more quickly than the Spanish and Japanese participants, and a quicker response rate was associated with greater accuracy. Another difference that emerged was the error rate. Japanese participants were more likely to false categorize a gay man as straight than were Americans, who were more likely to make such errors than the Spanish participants. The researcher suggest that this might be related to the degree to which homosexuality is accepted in each culture. Participants from the least tolerant culture, Japan, showed the greatest reluctance to ascribe to men an undesirable social trait.
These findings beg two questions. First, why? How is this skill adaptive? That is, what evolutionary purpose does this need serve? For heterosexual males, the ability to discriminate between homosexual and heterosexual males might allow men to more accurately identify potential competitors for female mates. Presumably, men who were better at identifying potential competitors were more likely to procreate. For heterosexual females, this skill would allow them to accurately identify potential mates. Consistent with this hypothesis, Rule and his colleagues (2011) recently found that the accuracy of categorizing gay and straight male faces was related to the menstrual cycle. Accuracy in categorizing male faces increased the closer women were to peak ovulation. Conversely, the menstrual cycle was unrelated to their accuracy in categorizing gay and straight female faces.
The other question is, "Who cares?" Why should we care if we are able to identify gay and straight people by their facial features? If gay men share, across different cultures, common facial features that distinguish themselves from straight men, an underlying biological mechanism is the most likely explanation. This isn't necessarily evidence for the "gay gene", but a common biological component is a more likely explanation, than say, the devil infecting people with both homosexuality and a universal gay smirk.
One final caveat: Scientific findings should be replicated before they are commonly accepted. Dr. Rule and his team have replicated this effect across situations and cultures, but it is important for other researchers to do the same. Still, this is promising work which suggests that Lady Gaga might just be right.