

Identifying Gender by Handwriting: You’re Probably Not as Good as You Think - ckelly
http://survata.com/blog/identifying-gender-by-handwriting-youre-probably-not-as-good-at-it-as-you-think/

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lawnchair_larry
> " _We were surprised that respondents weren’t better at identifying the
> gender behind the writings, and that so many were wrong on several of the
> questions. The participants who submitted handwriting samples were blind to
> the purpose of the survey, and the samples therefore weren’t intentionally
> misleading. Perhaps the average person simply isn’t as good a judge as
> expected._ "

Perhaps being spammed with a survey wall blocking the content that the user
seeks, until they complete a survey (which is what survata does), causes many
people to not try very hard. And perhaps the more technically sophisticated
users who view survey walls as a signal for low quality, spammy content,
simply hit the back button.

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iclelland
The first and last female samples are identical (except for size, they appear
to be exactly the same image). Hard to believe that one was identified
correctly almost 80% of the time, and the other only 30%.

~~~
ckelly
Hi - I'm a Survata co-founder. Thanks for catching that - it was an error we
made in producing the chart, not a problem with the underlying study. The
image has been updated. Sorry for the confusion!

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BoldBoldness
If the test was given as a list, then I suspect a large number of the results
are skewed just by the nature of people's desire to think in terms of pattern-
breaking (e.g. Would the results be the same if it was the five male samples
followed by the five female samples, or if only one sample was provided per
person). Of course, talking about people's "nature" is itself conjecture and
probably warrants it's own study.

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GeneralMayhem
So, men always guess it's a man, and women always guess it's a woman?

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gamegoblin
I wonder how a deep-belief network would perform at this, or even just an SVM.

