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.