So you're not a "10" in every which way. But you're probably pretty spectacular in some way, and definitely good enough in most areas of life. If ever there were a time to stop beating yourself up for being human, it is now.
A series of studies recently published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found higher levels of homophobia in individuals with unacknowledged attractions to the same sex, particularly when they grew up with authoritarian parents who also held homophobic attitudes. In the University of Rochester's press release, Netta Weinstein, the study's lead author, said, "Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves." In the same release, study co-author Richard Ryan added, "In many cases, these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward."
Attitudes towards gay and lesbian people are an important part of current political issues like the legality of same-sex marriage and employment nondiscrimination. Yet little scientific research has been done on what drives such anti-gay attitudes.
According to the team of researchers, this study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of anti-gay attitudes, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. One prior study used genital measures of sexual attractions and found that homophobic men showed an increase in penile erections to male homosexual male erotica.
What was the study design?
As typical of papers in this journal, the article includes multiple separate experiments. The experiments were conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students.
The study focused on measuring participants' explicit and implicit sexual attractions. Explicit attractions are those we are consciously aware of and can provide in a questionnaire. Implicit attractions are those that are more subconscious and may not be detected in a questionnaire and instead are measured using psychological tasks. To explore participants' explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the differences between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in "gay" or "straight" categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word "me" or "others" flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds, which is too quick to even be consciously perceptible to the participants. They were then shown the words "gay," "straight," "homosexual," and "heterosexual" as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" was taken to indicate an implicit gay orientation.
Finally, the researcher measured participants' level of homophobia—both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. For the implicit measure, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt "k i _ _". The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after showing participants the word "gay" for 35 milliseconds.
In these experiments, participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility towards gay people. In other words, if a participant identified as heterosexual, but showed a reaction pattern consistent with homosexuality, they were more likely to express homophobic attitudes. This incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals.
As with all studies, this one had several limitations. As the authors pointed out, all participants were college students, so it may be helpful in future research to test these effects in younger adolescents still living at home and in older adults who have had more time to establish lives independent of their parents and to look at attitudes as they change over time. Additionally, given the correlational nature of many of the present findings, causal and developmental inferences cannot be reliably made. Finally, it is important to point out that implicit measures are not a perfect window into an individual’s psyche or “true” sexual orientation.
Despite these limitations, this series of studies helps us understand the roots of homophobia, specifically that in some cases it may represent repressed same-sex attractions.
Below is a video produced by the authors describing the findings:
Submitted by robertdmoores on April 26, 2012 - 4:29pm
I know this is a brief summary of a (presumably) well-controlled study, but one thing that I can't help questioning is the method by which "implicit" sexual attraction was measured.
You say:
A faster association of "me" with "gay" and a slower association of "me" with "straight" was taken to indicated an implicit gay orientation.
There's no mention here that this is proven to reveal truly homosexual attraction. Has this been demonstrated to hold true with known homosexuals, or is it just "taken to indicate implicit gay orientation" without empirical evidence?
I question this method mainly because I know a fair number of moderately homophobic people who don't strike me as in any way repressing actual homosexual tendencies. At any rate, if there are any such tendencies in them, there's nothing saying that these are true leanings in that direction - maybe it's precisely because these "implicit attractions" are not natural to homophobic individuals that they compensate with anti-gay attitudes? A reinforcement tactic, if you will, of their true heterosexuality.
On the plus side, though, it is good to know that studies of anti-gay attitudes are being conducted. Any effort to identify and eliminate attitudes of hatred is a positive step.
These researchers appear to be using either the Project Implicit (r) or some similar program. These programs are at best controversial even in research fields. For more information on these tests you can visit the Project Implicit (r) site. For an overview of critiques to the system the most complete version I have come across is the Wikipedia article.
Your question fails to follow the context of the study, it's also worded poorly. The word ~can~ is a trap question when it comes to social sciences. To answer the question directly, I would assume that yes they can, because most things are possible given the human mind.
However, the question asked and answered by the study was whether or not people who were straight had latent gay feelings, it was whether people who were homophobic had latent gay associations.
If you review the literature, it's very unscientific to use terms like "straight, gay, homosexual, and heterosexual" in concrete terms, because in practice it exists on a continuum with almost no people in the "entirely" straight or "entirely" gay categories. In reality, if you want to go with concrete terms of sexuality, most people fit into the bisexual category, whether they act on their feelings or not.
Your article fails to give me credit for the picture you're using at the top. So, Associate Professor at Northwestern University and the founding Director of the IMPACT LGBT Health and Development Program, in the future- give credit.
Hi Vincent,
I always try and include credits for images whenever they are available and there is a credit to your website on the last line of the post. Did you see it there? If you would like me to take down the image I can do so.
Brian
Submitted by Bill the Cat on October 11, 2013 - 3:06pm
I was not aware that the DSM had labeled "homophobia" as a legitimate diagnosis. If it is listed under an anxiety disorder (which phobias are), can those who self-identify as having homophobia claim disability? Or is it merely being used in this article as a club to silence otherwise reasonable consciencious objection to acts they consider immoral?
No, just because someone chooses to be homophobic because of their religion or because they just don't want to support the lgbtq community it does not make them gay. I one hundred percent support gay marriage and equal rights among your chosen sexuality but I don't support self identifying your self as straight and homophobic only to be objectified and told "because you don't agree with me being gay means you are secretly gay." Of cpource people put up fronts regarding sexuality but that does mean that everyone who doesn't agree is GAY! If we equality among everyone we need to accept everyones choices. that doesn't mean we have to agree with it but just accept it. If I was gay I would personally be a fended with this oipserd statement. The trouble some people go through to accept who they are you would think that they would want everyone to be accepted.
I always get a good laugh when gay people like the writer for this article, claims that people who disagree with homosexuality, is themselves gay!
Everything he has written is pure nonsense! And they're nothing more than gay talking points! Let me set the record straight: no truly heterosexual man is remotely interested in putting his penis inside the nasty rectum and feces of another man! Not ever! That is why gay men lives have a less life expectancy than their heterosexual counterparts. Homosexuality, especially between two men is a killer!
(((Dr. Weinstein))) is right. For example, is well documented that arachnophobic people secretly want to fuck spiders. This is real science, you bigoted, closeted homos
You claim you're anti-gay and then say you're not homophobic. That's what homophobic means. You hate gay people. I'm assuming what you meant to say is that you yourself are not gay just because you hate people who are. You definitely have trouble with comprehension.
Phobia; fear. After having been raped at a young age by a male babysitter and having had my mouth covered so I could not scream you better believe I am anti-gay. At least with a straight guy there's no fear of him randomly anal reaming a little boy when nobody is watching. Would I let a gay man babysit my son? Oh hell no. Sometimes phobias are well founded - and when presented with a person whose main thread in life based on his sexual preferences; it's time to cut the string. You all place too much emphasis on accepting it and not enough pointing out the dangers thereof.
You are confusing "gay" with pedophilia. Do yourself a favor and research it. They are not the same thing and you owe it to yourself to gain an understanding of your childhood abuse. You can not heal properly if you don't understand what you need to heal.