Ecological Invalidity of Existing Gaydar Research: In-Lab Accuracy Translates to Real-World Inaccuracy: Response to Rule, Johnson, & Freeman (2016).

In recent years, several empirical studies have claimed to provide evidence in support of the popular folk notion that people possess "gaydar" that enables them to accurately identify who is gay or lesbian (Rule, Johnson, & Freeman, 2016). This conclusion is limited to artificial lab settings, however, and when translated to real-world settings this work itself provides evidence that people's judgments about who is gay/lesbian are not pragmatically accurate. We also briefly review evidence related to the consequences of perpetuating the idea of gaydar (i.

Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes, Faces, and The Gaydar Myth.

In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called "gaydar," to detect who is gay. We propose that "gaydar" is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g.