The results confirmed what the investigators suspected they'd find: the gay men and straight women scored about equally well in the test, and both did better than the straight men.

The critical manipulation in this study was that half of the participants thought they were competing against a gay male, whereas the other half thought they were competing against a straight male.

An earlier study by the same team found gay men and straight women outperformed lesbians and straight men at tasks designed to test verbal fluency.