Reducing heterosexuals prejudice toward gay men and lesbian women via an induced cross-orientation friendship.

Publication Year
2015

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

There is limited correlational research on whether cross-orientation friendships reduce heterosexuals' sexual prejudice, and no existing experimental studies on the impact of simulated cross-orientation friendships on attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women. The current study involved a novel and experimental examination of whether simulated cross-orientation friendships would reduce sexual prejudice. College student participants (White heterosexual) completed an experimental-manipulated closeness exercise (the fast friends procedure; Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone, & Bator, 1997) with a confederate (matched to participants' gender). Participants were randomly assigned to undergo the fast friends procedure with a confederate who either did not reveal his or her sexual orientation (control condition) or revealed being gay or lesbian at the beginning (reveal-beginning condition) or end of the interaction (reveal-end condition). As predicted, participants in both experimental conditions relative to those in a control condition reported significantly improved attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women (pre- to postexperiment), greater feelings of interpersonal closeness, and more positive behavior (longer and friendlier responses following disclosure of sexual orientation). The experimental conditions did not differ from each other. Implications of these findings are discussed. © 2015 American Psychological Association.

Journal
Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity
Volume
2
Pages
447–455
Type of Article
Journal Article
Full text

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Participants A total of 173 (119 females, mean age = 19.55. SD = 3.42) White, heterosexual, and native English speaking undergraduates from a large public university in the Northeastern United States [...] Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: control (n = 54), reveal-beginning (n = 61), and reveal-end (n = 58). [...]

Procedure [...] On arrival, the participants were told that the study concerned the way people develop and maintain relationships online and that they would have a Skype instant messenger conversation (that did not include video or sound) with another student of the same gender from their university who was located in a separate room within the laboratory. In reality, the ‘participant’ in the other room was a confederate who typed answers to the questions following a detailed script. [...] Participants were randomly assigned to one of three of conditions; sexual orientation mentioned at the beginning of the conversation (reveal-beginning), toward the end of the conversation (reveal-end), or sexual orientation was not mentioned (control condition). [...] The only difference between the experimental conditions (reveal-beginning and reveal-end) and the control condition was the disclosure of sexual orientation. [...] Afterward, the experimenter directed the participant to an online survey, which contained the poststudy dependent measures. [...] Sexual prejudice was measured using the 10-item Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men scale [...] Participants answered 10-items on a 1(strongly agree), 2 (agree), 3 (somewhat agree), 4 (neither agree nor disagree) . . . to 7 (strongly disagree) scale. [...]

Perceived closeness to conversation partner. The participant’s perceived closeness to the confederate was measured using an adapted version of the Inclusion of Other in the Self scale [...] Participants rated their closeness to their Skype partner from 1 (not at all close) to 7 (extremely close) [...]

Length of responses. We examined the length of the responses immediately following the disclosure of sexual orientation as an initial reaction following disclosure. We also examined the overall length of the entire transcript. [...]

Type of Prejudice/Bias
Country
Method