You have a gay face

Two science educators have scoured the research behind so-called 'gay face' — the theory that homosexuals have certain facial characteristics in common. And, according to science, it is a real. YouTube science teachers Mitch Moffit and Greg Brown cited controversial research that found gay people have different physical features than their straight counterparts.

When looking at volunteers in the study, researchers found the less prejudice someone exhibited towards gay people, the better they were at guessing gay faces. People can judge with surprising accuracy whether someone is gay or straight — even when they're looking at a black-and-white photograph, cropped of hair and identifying marks, and presented. Gay face is a real thing.

Gay face vs straight face

The science is so fascinating as to why it might exist, and much of the research is meant to help understand the biological impacts of being queer. Met Notting Hill face scans 'unlawful'. The professor is known for his work with Cambridge University on psychometric profiling, including using Facebook data to make conclusions about personality. Sign up to our newsletter Newsletter.

While the findings have clear limits when it comes to gender and sexuality — people of color were not included in the study, and there was no consideration of transgender or bisexual people — the implications for artificial intelligence AI are vast and alarming. In its summary of the study, the Economist - which was first to report the face gay pointed to several "limitations" including a concentration on white Americans and the use of dating site pictures, which were "likely to be particularly revealing of sexual orientation".

More on this story. Tabak and his co-author exploited this quirk of the brain by presenting photographs of gay men, straight men, 87 gay women and 93 straight women to student volunteers. Stanford University. Details of the peer-reviewed project are due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Skip to content. Most viewed. The researchers said the resulting software appeared to be able to distinguish between gay and heterosexual men and women. People can judge with surprising accuracy whether someone is gay or straight — even when they're looking at a black-and-white photograph, cropped of hair and having marks, and presented upside down.

Or it could be some combination of both. An illustrated depiction of facial analysis technology similar to that used in the experiment. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes you Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association.

Founder of online dating site Gaydar dies aged Now we know that we need protections. The work has been accused of being "dangerous" and "junk science". Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In either case, you black-and-white cropped photos were presented for only 50 milliseconds.

The Human Rights Campaign added that it had warned the university of its concerns months ago. Business Development Manager. Marketing Campaign Specialist. The findings from a University of Washington study suggest people use a combination of clues from individual facial features and from the way those faces fit together to make have judgments about sexual orientationsaid researcher Joshua Tabak, a graduate student in psychology.

Campaigners raised concerns about what would happen if surveillance tech tried to make use of the study. The pair scoured the available research into the gay face and highlighted key studies that have been conducted over the years. For their study, the researchers trained an algorithm using the photos of more than 14, white Americans taken from a dating website. Share Save. Some of the students saw upside-down faces, and others were shown the faces right-side up.

When looking gay upside-down faces, people were still able to guess their sexual orientation correctly at rates better than chance — although not quite as accurately as when the faces were right-side up.