Romantic moods, fertility help women guess men's sexual orientation: Study
New scientific research suggests women have an uncanny ability to tell whether men are gay or straight, using very few visual cues — and that ability appears to be linked to their own hormonal cycles.
Photograph by: Agence France-Presse, Agence France-Presse
It's been clear since the dawn of time that women have ways of knowing things for which the evidence isn't always obvious — to men, anyway.
New scientific research suggests women have an uncanny ability to tell whether men are gay or straight, using very few visual cues — and that ability appears to be linked to their own hormonal cycles.
A study, published in the journal Psychological Science and led by a University of Toronto professor, outlines how women are more accurate at guessing whether men are straight or gay — based only on pictures of their faces — when they are at the peak of their fertility cycles or have just read a story about a romantic encounter.
In two experiments, heterosexual women were asked to view images of males' faces. The researchers required that the men pictured had no facial hair or jewelry, and they were selected to be similar in attractiveness and emotional expressions.
One test looked at where the women in the study were in their fertility cycles, and found that those who were ovulating were most accurate in determining the sexual orientation of the men.
Another experiment split the female subjects into two groups, one of which read a story of a romantic encounter as a way to induce affectionate feelings before examining the men's pictures. These women who were "primed with a mating goal" proved to be more accurate at picking the men's sexual orientations.
Both these tests were replicated with a mix of heterosexual and lesbian females in the pictures. In these experiments, fertility and romantic priming did not help the subject women — who were heterosexual, as in the other tests — pick the sexual orientation of the females in the pictures.
"The logic goes that, evolutionarily, when women are more likely to be successful in getting pregnant, they would be more attentive to cues that would facilitate that in the environment," said the study's lead author, Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.
He said there appears to be a similar effect at work for women who are predisposed to mating after reading a love story.
"It really seems to be about where their thoughts are at both consciously and unconsciously," Rule said.
He said the study raises questions of what else women might be better at perceiving when they are in heightened state of arousal or at peak fertility.
Rule said it's unclear what practical implications there are for such findings, but the study provides one of many possible examples of how people perceive things subconsciously.
"The research my lab does is basically just that — the things that we realize without realizing it, the judgments we make, the things that influence us without our even knowing it."
dabma@postmedia.com
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