Most public service motivation (PSM) research compares government and business employees. This article fits into an emerging body of research that links PSM to volunteer activity. PSM is a needs-based approach to motivation. People may sate this need in ways other than direct government service. In this article, the authors investigate the relationship between PSM and charitable decisions. They surveyed undergraduate students at North Carolina State University using Perry's PSM instrument and antecedent questions. To further investigate students' motivations toward public service, they asked an additional series of questions focused on volunteering and donating choices. The authors find that students with higher levels of PSM are more likely to choose to engage in charitable activity. Individual characteristics such as family income, political identity, sex, religiosity, family socialization, and high school volunteering experiences are also significantly related to the choices students make about engaging in charitable activities.

Social categorization processes may be initiated by physical appearance, which have the potential to influence how people evaluate others. Categorizations ground what stereotypes and prejudices, if any, become activated. Gender is one of the first features people notice about others. Much less is known about individuals who may transgress gender expectations, including people who are transgender. Using an experiment, this study investigates whether the attitudes that people have about transgender people and rights are influenced by information and facial images. We hypothesize that mere exposure to transgender people, via information and images of faces, should be a source of prejudice reduction. We randomly provide participants with vignettes defining transgender and also randomize whether these vignettes come with facial images, varying the physical features of gendered individuals. We find our treatments have lower levels of discomfort and transphobia but have little effect on transgender rights attitudes. We further find that the impacts are stronger among Democrats than among Republicans. Our findings support the argument that people are in general unfamiliar with transgender people, and the mere exposure to outgroups can be a source of prejudice reduction.KEY WORDS: survey experiment, impression formation processes, expectation violation theory, mere exposure effect,LGBT, transgender 197 0162-895X

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community includes a diverse set of groups, including distinct groups based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity, but it is not clear whether the public makes distinctions in their attitudes toward these subgroups. If they do, what factors motivate individuals to evaluate gays and lesbians differently from transgender people? This study analyzes Americans’ attitudes toward these communities, and it evaluates their support for nondiscrimination protections. We find that public attitudes are significantly more negative toward transgender people and policies pertaining to them than they are toward gay men and lesbians and related policies. The analyses reveal that differences in these attitudes are associated with social contact effects, variation in cognitive consistency, elite cues, and the varying magnitudes of key political factors, such as religiosity and partisanship.

Political advertisements can shift attitudes and behaviors to become more exclusionary toward social out-groups. However, people who engage in an antidiscrimination exercise in the context of an experiment may respond differently to such ads. What interventions might foster inclusive attitudes in the presence of political communications about social policy issues like transgender rights? We examined two scalable antidiscrimination exercises commonly used in applied settings: describing a personal narrative of discrimination and perspective-taking. We then showed people political ads that are favorable or opposed to transgender rights to determine whether those interventions moderate how receptive people are to the messages. Relying on two demographically representative survey experiments of adults in the United States (study 1 N = 1,291; study 2 N = 1,587), we found that personal recollections of discriminatory experiences did not reduce exclusionary attitudes, but perspective-taking had some effects, particularly among those who fully complied with the exercise. However, both studies revealed potential backfire effects; recalling a discriminatory experience induced negative attitudes among a subset of the participants, and participants who refused to perspective-take when prompted also held more negative attitudes. Importantly, political ads favorable toward transgender rights consistently resulted in more positive attitudes toward transgender people. Future work needs to carefully examine heterogeneous responses and resistance to antidiscrimination interventions and examine what particular aspects of the political ads induced the attitude change.

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