Gay men navigate like straight women
Mon May 09, 2005 at 04:47:15 PM PDT
Behavioral Neuroscience reports that gay men tend to navigate like heterosexual women, using landmarks instead of spatial directions. This boosts the evidence that sexual orientation is partly biological in nature. The evidence against the Right-Wing self-righteous Theocratic Mantra "homosexuality is an evil sin" is mounting. (Not that evidence, scientific or otherwise, will ever make a difference to that crowd, alas...)
Some extracts from a New Scientist summary:
Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women - using landmarks to find their way around - a new study suggests.
But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women.
There is an important caveat there: trite generalisations such as "gay men have women's brains" are not appropriate.
"Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic," explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK. "It's not simply that lesbians have men's brains and gay men have women's brains."
So, it sounds like gay men are superior, having access to both navigation methods.
Women tend to navigate using landmarks. For example: "Turn left at the church and carry on past the corner shop." Rahman told New Scientist that "men rely more on the points of the compass; they have a better sense of north, south, east and west". They are also more likely to describe distances.
This sounds dangerously close to a sweeping generalisation about women
versus men. However, according to the article there are volumes of experiments confirming this.
Here are some more paragraphs from the article:
Rahman and his colleagues designed the study to test a theory that gay men and lesbian women might show "cross-sex shifts" in some cognitive abilities as well as in their sexual preferences.
The hypothesis is that homosexual people shift in the direction of the opposite sex in other aspects of their psychology other than sexual preference. That is, gay men may take on aspects of female psychology, and lesbians acquire aspects of male psychology.
Gay men did indeed show a "robust cross-sex shift" in the study, says Rahman. Volunteers were asked to look at a pictorial map and memorise four different routes for about a minute. They then had to recall the information as though they were giving a friend directions from one place to another.
"As we expected, straight men used more compass directions than gay men or women, and used distances as well. Women recalled significantly more landmarks," says Rahman. But gay men recalled more landmarks than straight men, as well as using typically male orientation strategies.
The sample size was only 80, so (in my view) we can't really draw robust conclusions. Nonetheless, I still think it's one in the eye for the "being gay is a sin" crowd.
PS: although it mentions gay women navigating more like straight men at the beginning of the article, the later parts of the article focus on gay men navigating like straight women. I couldn't figure out whether that is bias, or whether there's more experimental evidence for the latter.
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