In the early 1960s, the Canadian government tried to purge gays and lesbians from government service. At a time when far fewer people were openly gay, the task of outing civil servants fell to a special unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a contraption developed by psychologists at Carleton University in Ottawa that was known in top-secret Canadian code as, “The Special Pro-ject.” The Mounties had a less cryptic name for the device. They called it “the fruit machine.”
(Below is a 2005 short documentary on it by the CBC):
The "fruit machine" could supposedly detected homosexuality by measuring patterns of pupil dilation when people looked at pictures of naked men and women. The fruit machine was never actually used, mainly because it didn’t work.
However, more recent “gaydar” studies led by psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady show that people are quite good at guessing sexual orientation based solely on a face. Even when a still photo of the face flashes by for just 33 milliseconds, these judgments are significantly more accurate than chance, and accuracy doesn’t diminish when the hair is cropped out, or when the photos shown nothing but the eyes (not even any eyebrows).
“People don’t think they’ll be able to do this,” says Rule. “They have no idea how they’re making these judgments, but we go and look at their data, and they’re doing great.”
The "fruit machine" could supposedly detected homosexuality by measuring patterns of pupil dilation when people looked at pictures of naked men and women. The fruit machine was never actually used, mainly because it didn’t work.
However, more recent “gaydar” studies led by psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady show that people are quite good at guessing sexual orientation based solely on a face. Even when a still photo of the face flashes by for just 33 milliseconds, these judgments are significantly more accurate than chance, and accuracy doesn’t diminish when the hair is cropped out, or when the photos shown nothing but the eyes (not even any eyebrows).
“People don’t think they’ll be able to do this,” says Rule. “They have no idea how they’re making these judgments, but we go and look at their data, and they’re doing great.”
The latest gaydar study, which gets into what exactly it is about a face that leads to these judgments, was published in PLoS ONE in May, 2012, and was described briefly last week in the New York Times by the study's co-authors.
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