At close range and in person, perhaps. But it’s going to be very difficult to determine in a photo on a clean shaven male.
You asked me a specific question about the study I linked to, not the quote, so that’s what I described. The quote is in reference to an entire book, In the eye of the beholder: the science of face perception. I have not read it, but I imagine that it draws on many studies for its conclusions. While I don’t know the details of the individual studies, as far as I know it is not controversial that humans have an extremely good ability for facial gender recognition even when superficial cues are removed.
The OP says: “even with the hair and facial accessories removed”
I disagree, for most men.
No, I asked you about your quote, which was from a study quoting another study. The quoting study itself is not particularly relevant in its own right to the specific point you were making at that time.
“As far as I know it is not controversial …” is not the same thing as “Research has shown …”. [Again, to be clear, I’m not questioning whether research has shown this, but whether research has shown this under the specific conditions laid out in the OP, i.e. “with the hair and facial accessories removed”.]
The OP specifically referred to the ability to make the distinction even in the absence of facial hair and other superficial cues. At any rate, in comparative psychology, it may be interesting to determine what are the minimal cues needed to make a distinction. I think it’s interesting that humans are so good at differentiating between male and female faces that they don’t even need the most glaring difference under natural conditions. (Incidentally, while facial hair may make males easier to differentiate from females, it may make individual males harder to tell from one another by obscuring details of facial shape.)
This is nothing more than your personal opinion. How about providing a cite to research demonstrating that people can’t make this distinction?
[QUOTE=Fotheringay-Phipps]
No, I asked you about your quote, which was from a study quoting another study. The quoting study itself is not particularly relevant in its own right to the specific point you were making at that time.
[/QUOTE]
It was unclear what you were referring to. You included the link to the study in your quote, and then asked about what “they” did. I took this to mean the authors of the study.
Yes it has, specifically in the article I linked to. You should read it completely through. Males and females can distinguish the gender of faces well, even when the images are of clean shaven males and the face shape is removed.
Even when the images were pixillated, which would remove cues such as stubble and the fine detail of eyebrow shape, the ability was still pretty good.
The authors were looking for differences between males and females in categorizing faces, but a basic result of the study is that most people could do this regardless of gender. But this is a pretty well established fact - they cited a bunch of references in the introduction establishing that facial dimorphism exists and people can easily recognize it.
> Could someone give a link
> to a something with evidence
> that there is sexual dimorphism
> in faces in humans? I’ve never
> heard this before. It very well
> might be true, but I’d like to
> see the evidence.
Love Signals: A Practical Field Guide to the Body Language of Courtship, David Givens. Page 37.
> As for our species, we are modestly
> dimorphic from head to toe, with
> many slight and a few dramatic
> sexual differences to display. From
> the shape of our forehead, rounder
> in women …
…
> Note that a woman’s eyebrows ride
> significantly higher over her eyes than
> a man’s do. Male Eyebrows hug the
> top of the bony eye orbits, ridges of
> bone surrounding the eye sockets,
> which are squarer in men and rounder
> in women, and closely follow the bone
> ridges’ contours. Female eyebrows –
> and you can run your fingertip over
> them to feel the difference — start
> out on the same bony ridge close
> to the nose. Then they flare up,
> lift off the ridge, and are
> backward towards the
> ears. A man’s brows
> lay heavily and horizontally
> across his nose like
> a “T”. A woman’s
> rise upwards in
> a curvilinear flare
> above the bridge
> of her nose
> like an
> “S”.
I know that was the intent of the original test, but I did not mean to use it for that purpose. I just meant to ask if you could tell the males and females apart in those pictures.
Now that you’re aware of the phenomenon, do you still find it difficult to tell males and females apart?
I’m saying that I never thought about the issue before seeing this thread. I have no idea if I can tell male and female faces apart if I were to look at just the faces with no other clues. One of the reasons that I was skeptical at the beginning of this thread was that I have heard of dozens, perhaps of hundreds, of supposed differences between men and women (or between different races or between different ethnic groups). A few of those differences are real, some of them strongly correlated to a person’s sex (or their race or their ethnicity) and some of them only weakly correlated. Some of them are just nonsense made up to bolster people’s discrimination against other’s sex (or race or ethnicity). When I hear something new, my first reaction is to ask if there are any scientific studies confirming it.
Would you be willing to try that quiz I linked to on the first page, not to test you for prosopagnosia, but to see if it’s easy for you to tell the sexes apart? (they show you a lot of faces cropped to eliminate distractions)
I can certainly respect the desire for citations. I think what you’re seeing here is just the surprise of folks who, like me, assume that the ability to tell male and female faces apart is so commonplace to our species that it needed no verification.
I think it’s just a morbid curiosity on our parts, wondering “Can this person really not tell apart male and female faces? If so, what’s life like for them?”
And on a side note, just so you don’t feel singled out, I was very surprised that people could identify faces at all – regardless of sex. When I took that prosopagnosia test, I scored in the 30th percentile on normal faces, then in the 85th percentile when they were upside down. Apparently whatever mechanism humans normally use to identify each other is lost on me, and I have to rely on other cues to try to tell humans apart.
This thread, and your response, has led me to wonder if there’s a parallel condition to prosopagnosia where certain people can’t easily sex faces. It’s one thing to have never thought about it, but now that you aware of the biological differences in features, aren’t you at all curious whether you’ve been seeing them all along, even unconsciously?
Computers are learning how to do it as well – to a 99% accuracy – but in their case, they look at eyes and eyebrows more than other features. I’m not sure if humans do the same.
>Wendell Wagner
>Could someone give a link to a something with evidence that
>there is sexual
>dimorphism in faces in humans? I’ve never heard this before.
>It very well might be true, but I’d like to see
>the evidence.
The Hudsons Bay Company archives relate the story of a trader who was sent home in disgrace when it was discovered he was a she and gave birth. There were several other cases in past history where “men” were found to be women. Disguisinga s a man and joining the army is a common old tale.
SO if you are asking can we tell 100% all the time - no.
If you are asking "better that 50-50 outright guessing - I’ll suggest yes.
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time.
