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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.
Some items I learned from living in Washington DC and Austin:
1) Any man who says they ‘understand’ women is probably gay.
2) Gay men are the best hair dressers.
3) Want to dress well to impress women, let a gay man pick out your suit at Nordstroms.
4) Many ‘gay’ men believe Madonna is a kitchen witch who used the homosexual community to further her own career.
5) Gay’s love Tammy Faye Baker!
Hey.
What’re you dudes lookin’ at.
The proved that gay people have a tendency to see things differently. That does not translate into “gays can pick out other gay people”.
On the other hand, I find I am very good at distinguishing between women and men.
OMG, it IS called a Gaydar!
http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-can-instantly-tell-whether-someone-is-africaname,11117/
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Hetero males also have gaydar as a rear defensive mechanism!
