An interesting study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is trying to take a more precise look at the way we perceive sexual content in the world around us, even the content we cannot see. Unfortunately the study has enormous potential to mislead in ways that could be equally unconscious and much more problematic.
The study authors were inspired in part by previous research which has demonstrated that our brains (and other parts of our body) respond to stimuli that we aren’t consciously aware of. In other studies this effect has been tied to a simple evolutionary argument, that to survive we have to be aware of our environment and “sense” things like predators, or potential mates, lurking around the corner (that’s more the predators than the mates, potential mates shouldn’t be lurking if they’re doing it properly).
In order to measure how well people attend to things they can’t consciously see, the researchers used a technique called interocular suppression, which allows them to make images invisible to the eye, yet presumably perceptible nonetheless. Participants were given a visual attention test, and during the test the researchers flashed both neutral and erotic subliminal images. They then gave participants a visual task to assess where their attention was drawn to.
They report that their results show a gender and sexual orientation effect on attention. Essentially the researchers claim that heterosexuals were more likely to attend to the area where an erotic image of someone of the opposite sex was presented to them, and that homosexual men were more likely to attend to the area where an erotic image of someone of the same sex was presented to them. Not surprisingly, they claim that bisexual women are somewhere in the middle.
The researchers make a point of saying in the paper that this research could not be used to determine a person’s sexual orientation, which of course has led the media to ask if it actually could be put to this use. The question is fair since the paper gives a mixed message. On the one hand they claim strong findings, and results that confirm the most simplistic gender and sexual orientation stereotypes. They don’t highlight the ambiguity in the results or the vast individual differences, and they fail to address the many limitations of the study. But they chose to comment on this one limitation, which seems strange.
Either way, since the paper could result in a string of queries about the newest visual test to tell if you’re straight or gay, it’s worth taking a closer look at the methodology and reporting in the paper.
For starters, the researchers only did the experiment on ten subjects per group (10 straight men, 10 straight women, 10 gay men, 10 gay/bisexual women). While they determined the sexual orientation of the last two groups using the Kinsey scale, they don’t seem to have used any scale to insure that their heterosexual participants were actually straight (but I guess that’s fine, no one lies about being straight, do they?) There’s also no explanation of why they choose gay men, but bisexual/gay women. I think they have lesbians in Minnesota, but I should check with an expert. These problems with their sample make the kinds of claims they are making very problematic.
Then there is the problem of the actual data. It’s hard to be specific because the researchers don’t post the numbers, but if you look at the figures the offer, it actually doesn’t appear as if people’s attention is so clear cut:
- 4 of the 10 “heterosexual” male participants actually paid more attention when they saw male and female erotic images, not just the female ones.
- 6 of the 10 “heterosexual” women participants paid more attention when they saw male and female erotic images, not just male erotic images.
But in their reporting they claim a strong effect. It’s true that statistically they found one, but looking at the data shows more than anything that individual differences will be great.
Another strange result in the study was that when they ran the same experiment but let participants actually see the images, there was no difference in participants’ attention. They were no more likely to look at the area where they saw erotic images than where they saw neutral images. The researcher’s don’t really address this and suggest it might be because participants were looking at visible erotic images for too long? But the length of time was less than one second, which hardly seems long enough to bore your average undergraduate student.
