Abstract
Studies of North Americans suggest that laypeople can judge the sexual orientation of others with greater than chance accuracy based on brief observations of their behavior (i.e., “gaydar” exists). One factor that appears to contribute to these judgments is targets’ degree of masculinity–femininity. However, behaviors related to sexual orientation and to masculinity–femininity might vary across cultures. Thus, cross-cultural work is needed to test whether judgments of sexual orientation are more accurate when targets and raters are from the same culture. American and Czech male targets, 38 homosexual and 41 heterosexual, were videotaped and brief segments of the videotapes were presented to American and Czech raters. Overall, raters’ judgments of targets’ sexual orientation were related to targets’ self-reported sexual orientation. However, the relationship was stronger when targets were judged by raters from their own country. In general, results suggest that there are both cross-cultural similarities and differences in gaydar and in cues related to sexual orientation.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to the study participants. The study was supported by grants from the Charles University in Prague (GAUK 366/2006), the Czech Science Foundation (GACR 406/09/0647), and the Czech Ministry of Education (MSM 0021620843).
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Valentova, J., Rieger, G., Havlicek, J. et al. Judgments of Sexual Orientation and Masculinity–Femininity Based on Thin Slices of Behavior: A Cross-Cultural Comparison. Arch Sex Behav 40, 1145–1152 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-011-9818-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-011-9818-1