Psychologists: Sexual orientation can be determined by facial features
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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Psychologists found that representatives of the sex minority can be distinguished from people of traditional orientation in the face: in "straight" person more symmetrical than gay and lesbian.
Psychologists from Albright College (USA) decided to find out whether it is possible to determine a person's sexual orientation by his appearance. Of course, it's not about anecdotally effeminate men and equally masculine women. The goal was to correlate sexual orientation with the features of a person and the perception of others.
The experiment involved 40 people (15 men and 25 women), who were shown a series of 60 photographs, half of whose participants were strict "straight", and the other half - homosexuals or lesbians. Each photo subjects had to evaluate on a five-point scale, where the unit corresponded to "prefers only men", the deuce "looks at women", the trio - "bisexual / bisexual", the fourth - "mostly women, but occasionally men", finally, the five "Only women."
In their work, the researchers relied on the results according to which sexual self-esteem correlates with the symmetry of the face: in heterosexual men, facial features turned out to be more symmetrical than those of homosexuals. In the course of the experiment, it turned out that symmetrical men's faces were associated with heterosexual-oriented appraisers. Women had a similar dependence, but the results were statistically much less reliable.
Naturally, psychologists in their physiognomic exercises took into account the influence of feminine appearance: after all, certain ("female") facial features of a man can suggest that their owner is characterized by non-standard sexual predilections. And, of course, this factor played a role: a man with a manly appearance was more likely to get a heterosexual evaluation. However, as the authors emphasize in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, masculinity or femininity of appearance still played a much smaller role than the symmetry or asymmetry of the features.
It should be emphasized that the authors do not discuss the reasons why sex minorities have less symmetrical faces (or why someone seems to have asymmetrical faces). Psychologists speak only of some evolutionary adaptation, which allows not to make a catastrophic mistake when choosing a partner. Cases of homosexuality are also found in the wild, so there is nothing surprising in the fact that evolution had enough time to teach a person to distinguish between "his" and "strangers" in this sense.
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