In less than the blink of an eye, your subconscious “gaydar” makes a judgment about someone’s sexual orientation based entirely on facial traits — and it’s usually right.

So says the research of Nicholas Rule, a University of Toronto psychologist giving a talk on the subject this week as part of WorldPride. “The gist of it is that people can accurately judge someone’s sexual orientation from very minimal information about them,” Rule said in an interview.

“You only need to see a face for less than 40 milliseconds to judge sexual orientation with the same level of accuracy that you get if you take all the time in the world.

“To put that in perspective, it takes 400 milliseconds to blink your eye.”

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Facial “gaydar” is 65-per-cent accurate on average, according to Rule and his co-researchers at U of T’s Social Perception & Cognition Laboratory. These judgments can be reliably made based on the eyes alone, though facial shape and texture are also big factors.

“Conservatives are more accurate than liberals in making these judgments when they study a face, because conservatives are more likely to use stereotypes,” Rule said. “Of course, stereotypes are often wrong, but they do have what we call kernels of truth. Liberals tend to not want to use stereotypes in making judgments, and it impairs their accuracy.”

Rule’s aim is to examine how these judgments can unconsciously affect our decisions. For example, the research shows gay men are disadvantaged in applying for a stereotypically masculine job, such as an engineer.

“That’s not terribly surprising, but what’s interesting is that people are doing this without any idea that sexual orientation is involved,” Rule said. “With something like race, well, we know race is obvious and it’s hard to avoid stereotyping. It turns out sexual orientation is a lot more obvious than people think.”

The research, which Rule has been working on for a decade, is deceptively simple given the complexity of the issues. Rule uses photos of people, both men and women, who self-identify as either gay or straight (while recognizing these are only two of many sexual identities), and uses only faces without “adornments” — facial hair, glasses, piercings and other factors that could skew the results. In a typical experiment, the images are shown in various forms to participants along with a series of questions tailored to the research goal.

Not everyone is receptive to this line of inquiry, Rule said. “Some people think it’s bad to say that sexual orientation is perceptible. They feel like it’s providing justification to use stereotyping. What I would say in response to that is it’s better to know about this than to not know … because the judgment is still going on. Failing to acknowledge that is avoiding the issue.”

Rule said there’s much work to be done in looking at the social consequences of these unintentional first impressions. He’s also looking to drill down further into the causes.

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“We know that people can judge sexual orientation by the eyes, but we don’t actually know what specific characteristic about the eyes makes it possible,” he said. Other research programs are working on including the diverse spectrum of identities outside the gay/straight paradigm.

Most of the discussion about his research has taken place in an academic context, Rule said, so it will be a new experience when he presents it to the general public Wednesday evening at the Bloor/Gladstone Library. “I’m not really sure what to expect about the reaction,” he said with a laugh. “It will definitely be interesting.”