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Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement

Andrew Gelman, Greggor Mattson, Daniel Simpson

Sociological Science, May 24, 2018
10.15195/v5.a12


Recent media coverage of studies about “gaydar,” the supposed ability to detect another’s sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the context from intrinsically social phenomena. This fallacy of objective measurement, as we term it, leads to nonsensical claims based on the predictive accuracy of statistical significance. We interrogate these gaydar studies’ assumption that there is some sort of pure biological measure of perception of sexual orientation. Instead, we argue that the concept of gaydar inherently exists within a social context and that this should be recognized when studying it. We use this case as an example of a more general concern about illusory precision in the measurement of social phenomena and suggest statistical strategies to address common problems.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrew Gelman: Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York
E-mail: gelman@stat.columbia.edu

Greggor Mattson: Department of Sociology and Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Oberlin College, Ohio
E-mail: gmattson@oberlin.edu

Daniel Simpson: Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada
E-mail: dp.simpson@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: We thank Michal Kosinski and Martin Plöderl for helpful comments.


  • Citation: Gelman, Andrew, Greggor Mattson, and Daniel Simpson. 2018. “Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement.” Sociological Science 5: 270-280.
  • Received: March 6, 2018
  • Accepted: April 1, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a12

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