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In 2012, psychologists Joshua Tabak and Vivian Zayas, performed a gaydar experiment involving the identification of faces. People were able to tell if someone was gay only about 60 percent of the time. (It's worth noting that in experiments, gay people appear to have better gaydar than straight people, but those numbers are scant, and it looks like an area that could use further study.)In other areas, studies show that people's gaydar was actually under 60 percent in terms of accuracy. I found one that suggested 73 percent accuracy in one experiment, but nothing higher than that.Scientific results just barely better than chance might feel wrong to anyone who claims to have a powerful gaydar, particularly those who enjoy outing celebrities. Rumors about Jim Parsons or Neil Patrick Harris dragged them out of their respective closets, seeming to vindicate the rumor mills that put them in that position. Those confirmations shouldn't be mistaken for a sign that society's collective "We already know!" comes from a mechanism accurate enough to demand that people make public declarations about their personal lives. After all, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been subject to gay rumors since he was a kid, and they persisted well into adulthood, but unless he's playing a very long game, Arnie is probably not gay.Gaydar appears to involve the detection of ordinary gendered traits, by and large—traits that distinguish men and women and that are important to anyone's life as a social animal. What turns "gendar" into gaydar, for the most part, is simply the mismatch between some of these discernible gendered traits and a person's physical sex.
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