The authors examined the hypothesis that many individuals define monogamy based on emotional rather than sexual fidelity. Participants, 373 heterosexual college students and 282 gay men, read three vignettes of decreasing mitigation in which they imagined committing an act of infidelity against a hypothetical partner and where half the participants were cued to their emotional attachment toward the partner. Despite the infidelity, relationships in the emotional attachment-cued vignettes were rated as monogamous to a greater degree than relationships in the vignettes where emotional attachment was not cued. In addition, over one-third of the participants in our study reported infidelity in their current self-defined monogamous relationships yet also reported feeling more protected from sexual health risks and reported less condom use than individuals who defined their relationship as nonmonogamous. The implications for monogamy as a protective fallacy are discussed.

This study examined the use of sexual orientation as a meaningful social category and the consequences of using this category. The sample consisted of 260 U.S. college students who viewed a video and completed a 29-item scale (L. L. Thompson & J. Crocker, 1990) and the 7-item Homophobia Scale (R. A. Bouton et al., 1987). Results showed that participants' adjective ratings of targets favored gay men. Participants did not exhibit greater bias toward gay men when provided with justification. However, there was a pattern of bias in which participants showed favoritism toward heterosexual male targets when provided with no justification for bias.

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This book was inadvertently published with the incorrect author name for chapters 2 and 3. This has now been amended throughout the book.

In this article we examine the use of narrative strategies in the construction of a self. We focus on the function one woman’s (alias Rachel) narrative serves in terms of constructing a coherent self through her account, via a magazine interview, of “How I became a lesbian escort”. We highlight the relational nature of narrative self construction, i.e., the ongoing dialogue between the use of cultural narratives in a story and the individual’s positioning in relation to such elements to create a unique and coherent self in that setting. (Narrative, Positioning, Construction of Self, Identity, Lesbian Escorting)

We investigated the social implications of signing an informed consent form (ICF) on participant behavior. ICF research fails to consider that the decision to participate in research is a process that occurs in a social and cultural context. Understanding the meaning of giving consent in this social context is critical. In separate experiments, we found significantly greater agreement to return to complete a study and persistence at a task in participants who signed the ICF versus those who did not. Signing the ICF may be putting participants at risk of induced compliance with study protocols, rather than empowering them to withhold consent or withdraw. Future research should investigate the psychosocial factors affecting participants' decision making in the informed consent process.

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