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.