The ‘gay’ voice stereotype and its consequences
Overview
Many people believe that it is possible to guess others’ sexual orientation from voice, the so-called auditory gaydar. Such gaydar judgments are likely to elicit stereotyping and stigmatisation in a variety of contexts (e.g., workplace, adoption decisions, teaching, health). In this line of research, we examine what are the beliefs that people have about voice as a cue of sexual orientation, what are the consequences of auditory gaydar judgments, and what are the experiences and coping strategies of those who are targets of such judgments.
We have also recently started to examine the use of agentic language as a ‘tool’ to buffer voice-based discrimination.
These last studies were funded by the European Association of Social Psychology Collaborative grant.
Researchers
Research conducted by members of the Psychology of Gender and Sexuality Lab.
Principal Investigator
Dr Fabio Fasoli
Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology
Biography
I received my PhD in 2011 at University of Trento (Italy). From 2012 to 2013, I was a post-doc fellow first at CITEC (University of Bielefeld, Germany) and then at the University of Padua (Italy). In 2014-2015 I was a post-doc at ISCTE-IUL (Portugal), and a postdoc at the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2015-2016. I moved to Surrey in October 2016 as a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow under the supervision of Prof Peter Hegarty. Since 2021 I have been the Programme Leader for the Social Psychology MSc and, from December 2023, I am the Chair of the Raninbow Network.
Research themes
Find out more about our research at Surrey: