Report: Feds Spent $30K on 'Gaydar' Research

According to Sen. Tom Coburn’s Wastebook 2012, released this morning, the federal government spent $30,000 on a grant to University of Washington and Cornell University researchers. Their task: to determine whether “gaydar” – the ability to instantly tell whether someone is homosexual – is accurate. As the researchers described it, “Gaydar colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation.”

The research project involved men and women identifying faces from Facebook as gay or straight after seeing them for 50 milliseconds. And the research found that “gaydar” is accurate 64 percent of the time when identifying lesbians, and 57 percent of the time when identifying gay men.

The more you know.