Thursday, May 26, 2011

People can pick up on male sexual orientation based solely on how men pronounce the letters a, e, i, o, and u

Researchers conducted a study to see whether strangers could tell if males were gay or straight just by hearing them pronounce single-syllable words such as "food" and "sell." Participants got it right 75% of the time once they heard a vowel. The researchers asked seven homosexual and seven heterosexual males to speak for the experiment, and although respondents couldn't guess sexuality from the first consonant in words, vowels were a dead giveaway. "This is a phenomenon that occurs every day," says the study lead. "We are constantly speaking with people we don't know on our phones, and just from this conversation, we might be able to identify personal characteristics about that person, such as their gender, age, race, or sexual orientation."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Another example of some OCD experimental social scientist hoping to validate as data his or her implicit intuitions by recording reports of implicit perceptions from a sample of people in order to state that 'our' - every human's perceptions - can be made to seem 'scientifically' explicit.... Sensible advise: do a few more cross-cultural, cross-linguistic studies dears, before you universalize....