Perception of Gay Men as Defectors and Commitment to Group Defense Predict Aggressive Homophobia

Abstract

Homophobia encompasses a variety of attitudes and behaviors with distinct causal paths. We focus on aggressive homophobia, a propensity to feel anger and express aggression toward gay men. We investigated the conjecture that homosexual males might be seen, in recent Western cultures, as defectors from collective group defense. We predicted that consistent with a functional motive to punish and deter free riding, the perception of gay men as defectors would motivate aggression toward gay men. We also predicted that individuals with greater commitment to group defense might show more aggressive homophobia (as these individuals have more to lose from the defection than individuals who are not committed to group defense). Study 1 showed that aggressive homophobia correlated positively with the tendency to implicitly associate gay men with defection from group defense. Study 2 showed that a tendency to punish homosexual males for a theft correlated positively with commitment to group defense. The findings suggest that coalitional psychology might contribute to explaining the existence and quality of certain kinds of social stigma.

Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations

“…The survey did not include items measuring sexual or moral disgust sensitivity and was not able to control for these variables. To address this issue, we performed a reanalysis of data of an unpublished study by van Leeuwen et al (2016) with participants from the USA ( n = 462), Brazil ( n = 485), South Africa ( n = 481), and China ( n = 450). These data included items for pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust sensitivity, and items for antigay attitudes.…”

Coalitional Value Theory: an Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Culture

“…The idea that antigay bias is solely driven by the threat of unwanted sexual advances does not account for this, as perceived femininity appears to be driving homophobia more than perceived sexual orientation. Similarly, van Leeuwen et al (2016) found that participants who scored high on Anger at Gays Scale associated "gay" with terms associated with coalitional defection such as "surrender" and "flee" and "coward" more than those who scored low on the scale; they also found that other participants who scored high on a Coalitional Defense Scale wanted gay transgressors punished more harshly than heterosexual transgressors relative to those who scored low on it.…”

“…), should also (or even primarily) refer to men who do not provide coalitional value (Pascoe 2005;Plummer 2001). Winegard et al (2016) and van Leeuwen et al (2016) found preliminary support for these hypotheses, suggesting that a coalitional value approach to antigay bias may prove fruitful. For example, Winegard and colleagues found that gay men were rated as less strong, less dominant, less masculine, and less good at being a soldier or a football player than were straight men.…”

“…However, gay bias is not uniform. Different people exhibit different levels of antigay bias across different contexts and toward different targets (Van Leeuwen et al 2016). Primarily, (1) men exhibit more antigay bias than do women (Cardenas and Barrientos 2008;LaMar and Kite 1998);…”