People who have homophobic
attitudes, who are more prejudice or
discriminatory against gay people,
are themselves more likely to have
a discrepancy between their unconscious
attractions to same sex partners than
what they are consciously aware of.
Those people who have such discrepancies,
who have really a split between their
unconscious attraction and what they
consciously say about themselves,
are more likely to come from
authoritarian homes.
If you are a parent who really strongly believes
your child should be heterosexual
and then you use whatever means
you can to convince them that
they are only good and worthy if they are,
this would be very controlling and this
creates a lot of conflict in the child.
What we see in this study is one
way this gets resolved is by
them being discriminating or hateful
toward gay and lesbian others.
It may be that you yourself are divided
between your homosexual and
your heterosexual attractions and
therefore homosexual people feel
more threatening to you and then
you express more negative attitudes
toward them.
We can ask people what their conscious
attitude is toward sexual orientation.
We can say are you gay or
are you straight?
But to get at their unconscious
sexual attraction we use a
different kind of task.
We use a reaction time measure.
So we use this pretty split second task.
When you have to classify
homosexual and heterosexual
words and just before you are
doing that classification, we are
flashing the word “me” or “other”
for some millisecond just before
they do that.
And if they are non-consciously
more homosexually oriented
they will have a quicker reaction time
when the words "me" and
"homosexual" come together.
Another way that we get at non-conscious
attitudes toward sexual orientation
is to use a task where people get to
browse pictures of attractive men
and attractive women and we look to
see whether they gravitate toward
same sex pictures or they gravitate
toward other sex pictures.
We’ve had a lot of anti-gay public
figures who have been caught in
same-sex encounters.
And this study speaks to some of
those kinds of cases that we’ve
seen before.
And in some of these public cases
that we've had, it’s really been
someone who themselves have been
homosexual, who has been publicly
campaigning against homosexuality
and here you can see that one part
of them is really fighting another
part of themselves.
Whenever somebody has a really
intense feeling toward any out group
– but in this case gays and
lesbians -we ought to ask ourselves,
“Why am I so concerned about that?
Why is it so threatening to me?”
And one suggestion here is maybe
one’s own sexual orientation is a
bit in question.
And I think that we should raise
doubts, whenever we have those
strong feelings of hatred and
discrimination towards other groups,
we should wonder why.