Sexual Orientation Perception Involves Gendered Facial Cues

TLDR

Perceivers can accurately judge a face’s sexual orientation, yet the mechanisms behind this ability remain unclear. The study tests whether long‑standing stereotypes of gays and lesbians as gender inverts cause perceivers to rely on gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation. The experiments show that greater gender inversion in facial shape and texture increases gay/lesbian judgments, that gendered cues improve overall accuracy but also lead to systematic errors when stereotypes are contradicted, confirming that perceivers use gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation.

Abstract

Perceivers can accurately judge a face’s sexual orientation, but the perceptual mechanisms mediating this remain obscure. The authors hypothesized that stereotypes casting gays and lesbians as gender “inverts,” in cultural circulation for a century and a half, lead perceivers to use gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation. Using computer-generated faces, Study 1 showed that as two facial dimensions (shape and texture) became more gender inverted, targets were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Study 2 showed that real faces appearing more gender inverted were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the stereotypic use of gendered cues influenced the accurate judgment of sexual orientation. Although using gendered cues increased the accuracy of sexual orientation judgments overall, Study 3 showed that judgments were reliably mistaken for targets that countered stereotypes. Together, the findings demonstrate that perceivers utilize gendered facial cues to glean another’s sexual orientation, and this influences the accuracy or error of judgments.