Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation." "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. "Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," Johnson said. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time. The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not exceeded chance. The observers were able to determine the volunteers' sexual orientation with an overall rate of accuracy that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers' faces or the details of their clothing. In addition, 112 undergraduate observers were shown videos of the backsides of the volunteers as they walked at various speeds on the treadmill.
The volunteers then walked on a treadmill for two minutes as a three-dimensional motion-capture system similar to those used by the movie industry to create animated figures from living models made measurements of their motions, allowing researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gaits.īased on these measurements, the researchers determined that the gay subjects tended to have more gender-incongruent body types than their straight counterparts (hourglass figures for men, tubular bodies for women) and body motions (hip-swaying for men, shoulder-swaggering for women) than their straight counterparts. Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. "Now we've found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy." "We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies.