'Gaydar' Facebook Experiment Reveals Sexual Orientation
Your Facebook profile may be more impenetrable than Fort Knox, your personal information more elusive than the Gingerbread Man. But just how much of your behavior -- even your most intimate behavior -- could still fall through the cracks and into the jaws of statistical inference?According to an unpublished 2007 MIT experiment (dubbed "Gaydar"), determining the sexuality of strangers may be as simple as browsing through their lists of friends. Using software to analyze the gender and sexuality of the Facebook friends of a sample of students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree were able to accurately predict the sexual orientation of sample users; users with a higher percentage of homosexual friends were more likely to be gay themselves.
Or at least that's what two researchers pair claim, despite admitting to Boston.com that they have no way of checking every single prediction for accuracy. Also, there is no specific information detailing what percentage of your friends have to be gay for the study to determine that you're gay. Without any truly solid data, this study sounds a bit half-baked.
Regardless, what began as a school ethics project may give new insight to the ways we divulge information online. The experiment does raise some issues about the company we keep, which, until now, hasn't really been used (much less made available) as a way for anyone to extract personal information.
Unsettling as it may be to the individualist, these new methods of social networking analysis may well have the potential to render major components of our personas and behavior remarkably quantifiable. We're all leaving breadcrumbs. We just need to decide how big we want them to be. [From: The Boston Globe]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
EricC said 7:35PM on 9-21-2009
Considering that there's a 50/50 chance that you'll guess someone's sexual orientation correctly (assuming just straight/gay, and not bisexual, etc.), I find the results of this "study" to be highly dubious at best.
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enigmaPOJ said 8:22PM on 9-21-2009
Another issue is that my wife and I are kinky and because of that, many cookie and advertising sites and so forth assume we are gay. Also in the kink community we tend to have more gay and lesbian friends then in the vanilla world. So I think that the basis is very flawed on this.
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TVGenius said 10:16PM on 9-21-2009
And 'gaydar' is more of a sixth sense anyway. This is just looking at who you hang out with.
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Jordan said 11:06PM on 9-21-2009
"users with a higher percentage of homosexual friends were more likely to be gay themselves"
Well damn, what smart person came to that conclusion?
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