Is Some Homophobia Self-phobia?

Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, co-authored a study that looks at the roots of homophobia and how this attitude is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires. The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. The study was conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara.

To read more about the study, please visit http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=4040

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.