The following is an excerpt of the intervention methodology. For more information, please see the full text of the article on the publisher's website or through your institution's library.

Study 1

Materials and Procedure

 […]participants were presented with a fictitious Facebook profile providing the picture and some personal information about the first social target, James. Specifically, the page reported the target’s sexual orientation (i.e., straight vs. heterosexual), his relationship status (i.e., married), employment (i.e., accountant), age (i.e., 41), education (i.e., undergraduate degree), and his hobbies (i.e., football, films, documentaries). Information on the target’s sexual orientation was experimentally manipulated: Half of the sample read that James was straight, the other half read that James was heterosexual. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions. In the subsequent page, participants were asked to recall James’ occupation, hobbies, and sexual orientation. […]

Then another fictitious Facebook profile was presented, reporting the picture and some personal information about a second social target, Chris. Specifically, the page described the target’s sexual orientation (i.e., gay), his relationship status (i.e., married), employment (i.e., engineer), age (i.e., 35), education (i.e., undergraduate degree), and his hobbies (i.e., TV series, reading). The target description was the same for all participants. The pictures of the two targets did not differ on attractiveness. […]

Study 2

Study 1 provided a first empirical support of our initial hypothesis. Thus, when the heterosexual target was named with the label straight and the social perceiver’s religiosity was high, the impression about the gay target became worse. Starting from this result, Study 2 was designed to replicate the findings and extend them in two different ways: (i) adding a control condition (i.e., no label) to investigate if the effect was driven by the straight label worsening the evaluation of gay men as hypothesized rather than by the heterosexual one improving such an evaluation; (ii) using more elaborated measures of social judgment and individual religiosity. […]

Materials and Procedure

As in the prior experiment, in the first screen, participants were presented with a fictitious Facebook profile providing the photo and some personal information about the first social target, James. Information on the first target’s sexual orientation was experimentally manipulated: a first group of participants read that James was straight, a second group read that James was heterosexual, a third group (control) was not provided with any information on James’ sexual orientation. […]

Study 3

Study 3 aimed at testing our hypothesis using a different paradigm and exploring whether the reported pattern of results might emerge using another language. To do so, Study 3 was conducted in Italy. Since Italians do not use the label straight to identify heterosexual people, the association between the labels straight and heterosexuality was experimentally and artificially induced. […]

Materials and Procedure

In the first part of the survey, participants were presented with 20 pictures to be classified. Ten pictures represented heterosexual couples; 10 pictures depicted non-romantic partners (e.g., two police officers; two schoolmates). In the experimental condition, participants were required to categorize the people portrayed in the picture as “straight” (“retti” in Italian) when they were in a romantic relationship or as “other” when they were not in a romantic relationship. In the control condition, participants were required to categorize the people portrayed in the picture as “yellow” (“gialli” in Italian) when they were in a romantic relationship or as “other” when they were not in a romantic relationship. The word “gialli” was selected because this is a common, neutral adjective, related to a visual feature (in this case, color instead of shape) and unrelated to sexual orientation. […]

The order of the pictures was randomized, and participants were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions. […]

In the subsequent section, the same fictitious Facebook profile used in prior studies was presented, presenting the picture and personal information, including sexual orientation (i.e., gay) of the social target, Giorgio. The target description was the same for all participants. After that, participants were asked to recall Giorgio’s occupation and sexual orientation (i.e., check question). […]