Implicit Preferences for Straight People over Lesbian Women and Gay Men Weakened from 2006 to 2013

Abstract

Legal rights and cultural attitudes towards lesbian women and gay men have shifted rapidly in the early 21 st century. Using 683,976 visitors to Project Implicit from February 2006 to August 2013, we investigated whether shifts were also observable in implicit evaluations that occur outside of conscious awareness or control. Similar to public opinion polling, the estimated explicit preference for straight people over lesbian women and gay men was 26% weaker on the last day compared to the first. The estimated implicit preference for straight people declined by 13.4% over the same period. The largest shifts in implicit evaluations occurred among Hispanic, White, female, liberal, and young adult participants; the smallest shifts occurred among Black, Asian, male, conservative, and older adult participants. Societal change in evaluation of lesbian and gay people is not limited to what people are willing and able to report. However, change in implicit evaluation appears to be slower.

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward African Americans and Barack Obama Did not Substantively Change During Obama's Presidency

“…Implicit and explicit changes in racial attitudes can be found consistently in previous research (see Lai, Hoffman, & Nosek, 2013 for a review). Our findings are particularly interesting in light of recent work showing reductions in implicit and explicit anti-gay attitudes over time (Westgate, Riskind, & Nosek, 2015). Participants from a large, cross-sectional convenience sample (N = 683,976) showed a 13% reduction in implicit and 26% reduction in explicit anti-gay attitudes between February 2006 and August 2013.…”

“…While technically a categorical measure, education was recoded to reflect increasing educational attainment and added to regression models as a continuous variable. This treatment has been used in other analyses of Project Implicit data (e.g., Westgate, Riskind, & Nosek, 2015).…”

Needs satisfaction in intergroup contact: A multi-national study of pathways toward social change

“…An analogous rationale guided our decision to test the hypotheses pertaining to advantaged groups (Hypotheses 1b-5b) among members of advantaged ethnic, racial, or religious majority groups in the countries in which data were collected in Study 3 (e.g., Serbs in Serbia; White people in the United States; non-indigenous people in Chile; Christians in the Netherlands; we refer to these groups as "ethnic majorities"), and among cis-heterosexual individuals (heterosexual individuals whose gender identity corresponds to their assigned sex) in Study 4. In addition to using a large and heterogeneous data set, we also followed guidelines for best practices for open research to increase the credibility and transparency of our results (Nosek et al, 2015). We preregistered the postulated regression model underlying our hypotheses and our analytic strategy which relies on specification curve analysis (Simonsohn et al, 2019)-a novel approach to data analysis, designed to mitigate the problem that empirical results in social psychological research often hinge on decisions regarding the inclusion or exclusion of measures and datapoints that are defensible but also arbitrary and motivated.…”

Can They and Will They? Exploring Proxy Response of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Current Population Survey

“…Some of these issues stemmed from question wording; respondents were still generally able to answer whether a person should be considered a sexual or gender minority. As attitudes towards LGBT individuals have changed rapidly over recent years (Westgate et al 2015), ongoing research on SOGI measurement is needed, since people's attitudes and perceived sensitivity of these items is unlikely to be static.…”