Posted on 05/27/2010 11:34:51 AM PDT by Stoat
Gay people really do have an inbuilt radar that helps them seek out like-minded souls, scientists have shown.
This sixth sense, or 'gaydar', ensures they pay more attention to detail, allowing them to pluck potential partners out of a crowd.
The Dutch researchers looked at whether straight and gay people focus their attention differently when faced with a problem.
A total of 42 men and women were shown pictures of outlines of large squares and rectangles, each of which was packed with smaller shapes.
Our brains are wired to take in the bigger picture, meaning that if we are shown a square filled with rectangles and asked what is inside, we can easily be fooled into saying 'squares'.
When the men and women were asked similar questions, the heterosexuals replied more quickly but were less accurate, the journal Frontiers in Cognition reports.
The homosexuals took longer but got more answers right, particularly when asked about the smaller shapes, suggesting they were able to see the small details as well as the bigger picture.
Or they were able to see the trees as well as the wood. Differences in attention to detail have previously been shown among religious groups, with Italian Roman Catholics looking at the bigger picture more than those with secular views and Israeli Orthodox Jews paying less attention to detail than Israeli non-believers. Dr Colzato said: 'This fits with the strong emphasis on social solidarity in both Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism.' In contrast, Dutch Calvinists, who are counselled on 'minding their own business', focus on detail rather than the bigger picture.
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(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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Original research article which the Daily Mail story is based upon:
Sexual orientation biases attentional control- a possible gaydar mechanism
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From a more general perspective, our findings add to previous observations that being a member of a particular social group seems to shape cognitive-control operations in specific ways whether this group is defined by shared culture (Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Nisbett and Miyamoto, 2005; Boduroglu et al., 2009), religious practice (Colzato et al., 2008; olzato et al., 2010 under revision) or, as the present study suggests, shared sexual orientation. Even though more research is necessary on the establishing conditions and processes, it makes sense to assume that social groups provide selective reward for particular types of behavior, which again imply, suggest, or require the adoption of particular control strategies or cognitive sets (Colzato et al., 2010 under revision;Hommel and Colzato, in press). Once a strategy or set is sufficiently strengthened, it may generalize to other, actually unrelated situations and bias information processing accordingly. There is no reason to assume that this scenario is restricted to culture, religion, and sexual orientation, suggesting that our observations reflect a very general mechanism. As implied by Nisbett and Miyamoto (2005), any kind of socially guided practice may have the same potential of inducing systematic cognitive biases.
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I hadn't heard of different religious groups as having different levels of attention to detail before, but then again I don't study such things.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes before various homosexual pressure groups take umbrage at having homosexuality compared with religion in this study.
All you have to do is go up to a guy and say “clang, clang.” If he answers, “where’s the trolley?,” you likely have a homosexual on your hands.
IOW, the behavior and values we learn are those we exhibit. This says nothing about inherent homosexuality, only about learned behavior.
Colonel, USAFR
"The study, carried out at over six hundred municipal public parks in large US and UK metropolitan areas..."
So if gaydar is proven then I wonder why homos such as democrat Jim McGreedy and others have to lurk around the public bathrooms, parks and rest stops in order to find each other.
Of course. Even when gay men are attracted to straight men, it’s only because those straight men are in denial about their homosexuality, see?
"Or they were able to see the trees as well as the wood."
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I don’t see how attention to detail translates to “gaydar”. Or at least I wouldn’t restrict the findings to just being able to tell if somebody is gay. The conclusion seems to be that gay people pay more attention to detail, which may include noticing whether somebody even slightly manifests stereotypically gay behavior, but it could include countless other details, such as rectangles within squares, etc.
Or, less likely, someone who just watched "Meet Me in St. Louis" (which sounds a little like bathroom-stall graffiti, now that I think about it).
Even non-gays can spot gays. Odd that the author doesn’t know this.
PBPBPBBPFFFFT!!! There went the coffee thru the nose. LMAO. You’ve been saving that all these years for this thread?
Or like the Drill Sgt. used to say: “This is my rifle; THIS is my gun...”
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