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It takes just one twentieth of a second to decide if someone is gay or straight, scientists have discovered.

Pyschologists at Tufts University, Massachussetts, showed male and female volunteers photos of 90 gay or straight men for between 33 milliseconds and 10 seconds.

33 milliseconds was too quick for the volunteers to consciously ’see’ the faces, and their ability to determine the men’s sexuality was no better than if they were simply guessing.

However, at 50 milliseconds, which is approximately one twentieth of a second, the volunteers’ accuracy grew to 57%, a better than chance performance. At this speed, the photos were shown just long enough for the faces to be consciously seen.

Accuracy didn’t increase with the longer exposure times, suggesting that all the relevant information for making the judgment had already been extracted by 50 milliseconds.

In the first test, the anonymous photos were taken from an internet dating site where the men had stated their sexual orientation. Any photos featuring facial hair, glasses or jewellery were not used.

In order to avoid the possibility of the men deliberately accentuating their sexuality, in the second study the photos were taken from the social website Facebook, where they had been posted by people other than the subjects of the photos, and hairstyles were removed from the images.

“What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results,” said researcher Nalini Ambady. “Although previous work has shown that ‘thin slices’ of behaviour are remarkably rich in providing information about people, none have sliced as thin as 50ms.”

The study is scheduled for a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The abstract is currently available on ScienceDirect.

[via the British Psychological Society]

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