Nowadays, everyone believes that their “gaydar” is always on point. Well, a new study has just released its results and the findings are quite interesting.

The University of Washington performed a study in which a group of 129 student volunteers were presented pictures of both men and women, straight and gay, that were void of anything “telling” – hair, jewelry or anything else that might lend to indicating a person’s orientation – for 50 milliseconds each.  Based on looking at the eyes and noses of those in the pictures and how they may fit together on one’s face, the group was able to correctly guess the person’s sexual orientation about 50-60 percent of the time.  Some were even able to guess correctly when the pictures were shown upside down although the percentage did lower.

If you thought the group did better at identifying the gay men in the pictures versus the lesbians, you’d be wrong. According to Joshua Tadak who was heavily involved in the research, he said the group was able to correctly identify the lesbians more than the gay men and he attributes that to the concept of gay men in media:

“We can only speculate that…maybe we’re more liberal with labeling a man gay.”

Tadak also went on to say that the research team will now take this a step further and monitor brain activity as they show the pictures of both straight and gay people.  The goal is to see if people just make automatic judgments similar to knowing automatically if someone is a man or a woman.

The full findings are posted on Huffington Post.

So what about you? How accurate has your “gaydar” been over the years? Do you think you’d be able to quickly identify a person’s sexual orientation solely based on their eyes, nose and how they might fit on their face?

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