That aside, the comments others have made about sexual interest not being the only reason people spend time looking at stimuli are very sound, and present a serious confound to your work.
Another consideration is cultural: what and whom certain groups find sexually attractive. As a lesbian, I may well not be attracted to the same “most attractive” woman a straight male is. I, myself, prefer a k.d. lang type, and would find, say, Cameron Diaz relatively uninteresting. In other words, sex typing comes into the sexual attraction issue as well.
You could always pilot this and see what you get. I did a social psych-type experiment myself for my dissertation, and it involved extensive piloting.
Also, if you’re looking for data on “unconscious” processes, your subjects can still be fairly active. In other words, you could let them click through slides themselves and measure latency times for how long they look at certain images. However, the issues discussed above still pertain.
That’s essentially what the suggested research is designed to test.
You don’t know, in other words, whether or not “there is no necessary correlation between” which picture your eye goes to first and sexual orientation. That is what Shagnasty is trying to establish. This is why it is called “research”. Notice that it is research, not “help me find a way to figure out who needs a pink triangle tattooed on their forehead before we have them executed”.
Shagnasty - at least be aware that, if you pick this for your dissertation, you are going to get a shitload of this kind of thing - before, during, and after your research, writing and defending your dissertation, and for the rest of your academic career. Some people genuinely would rather stay ignorant.
And you are also going to get asinine bullshit like what Backwater Under_Duck posted.
Just be aware of it. And if you decide to proceed, be prepared to deal with it.
Shodan, WADR I think the problem most of the naysayers in this thread have is not so much with the political and social ramifications that accurate tests of this type might portend, it’s simply that the methodology being proposed is common sensically, slap you in the face with a squawking multi-variate chicken, retarded. Insisting on the potentially viability of gauging eye movements toward attractive male and female photos as an accurate measure of sexual orientation is a waste of time and resources, especially when reasonably intelligent heterosexuals and homosexuals are telling you, point blank and in perfect honesty, that this is not going to work because it’s not how they are wired re focusing on objects of interest.
If all he were trying to establish was some sort of correlation between the sexual orientation and involuntary eye movements, then you might have a point. But he’s implied–and even stated outright-- that his aim is to show that sexual orientation is biologically determined. Well, it may be, or it may not, but this experiment won’t tell us either way.
What i’m saying is that the only thing we might be able to get from this experiment is some very basic data correlating certain sexual dispositions with certain physical movements. This correlation, if it even exists, cannot tell us the cause of either the sexual orientation or the physical movements displayed by the subjects. The OP has shown a willingness to completely overlook the variables associated with the experimental model being proposed, and is making the unwarranted assumption that involuntary movements of the eye are the result of sexual orientation rather than any one of myraid other possible biological, social or cultural factors.
Your stupid suggestion that i would prefer ignorance is completely unfounded. If an experiment like this can produce knowledge, then great., Of course, there’s always a possibliy that the knowledge will be used irresponsibly, but that’s not ShagNasty’s problem. I say to ShagNasty: “Go ahead and do the experiment. I might well provide you with some evidence correlating physiological responses to stimuli with sexual orientation. But, as currently proposed, it is completely inadequate as a measure of whether or not sexuality is biologically determined. Correlation does not equal causation.”
It’s not his project, but his methodology that sucks.
The Gay-O-meter experiement has been beautifully criticized here on many valid levels, which illustrates the best nature of academic arguement, a signpost of good GQ threads. However, I for one, DO question Shagnasty’s academic “credentials,” partly on the nature of the decidedly NON-academic responses he has provided. And, I find it almost impossible to believe that someone could be in a doctoral program at Dartmouth and be so out of touch with the basics of research. It’s almost unheard of for someone to propose an experiment with the goal of “proving” a point. While all good scientists acknowledge any biases ahead of time, they don’t point their research questions in a direction that says they have a point to make. He says he just couldn’t find a question he was interested in. After spending all that time in one of the most enriched academic environments, nothing interested him? I’m guessing that if it’s true he was at Dartmouth, the parting of the ways was mutual. This may make for interesting musings on the nature of sexuality, sexual orientation, etc. but we’re really not talking doctoral material here. Not with Gyro Gearloose and his Gay-o-meter. oh, and one other thing, ABD is an appelation that is occasionally used by someone whose research is in progress but who needs to report his status, say, on a resume. It’s not a partial degree, and is only used in place of a degree by those who pathetically have to put something after their names or they don’t feel complete. xo C :dubious:
Speaking from experience: If you think somebody has to have a good scientific mind to be a life-science grad student at an Ivy League school, guess again. Post-hole-digger candidates the world over are generally used as virtual slave labor by PI’s of all stripes, and it’s not so tough to get into a good lab if you have good grades and test scores. Whether you get out of that lab and go on to do great things is entirely another matter. By the end of their first post-doc is when you really get an idea of the person’s mettle (at least in the softie life sciences where I work…in the harder and more rigorous sciences like Physics, I hear if that person hasn’t done something ground-breaking while writing their thesis, there’s slim chance they will later on…you’re getting over the hill by 30 in math and physics, so they say).