Protesting Too Much

It's always good for a laugh. Some prominent homophobe, usually from the fields of government or religion, is caught soliciting or having sex with another man. Homophobia is serious, however, sometimes leading to murder and other hate crimes. A new series of four studies by Netta Weistein and five colleagues, conducted in the U. S. and Germany, appears to confirm what gay rights advocates have long suspected—that homophobes and anti-gay activists are secretly attracted to the same sex. This study is gated, but you can get a lot of information about it here.

To present this study, I need to talk about subliminal priming. First of all, priming refers to the process by which a recent experience increases the availability of a concept. For example, if you had recently seen or heard the word “eat” and I asked you to fill in the blank in “S O _ P,” you'd be likely to say the word “soup.” But if you had recently seen the word “wash,” you'd fill in “soap.” Subliminal means below the level of conscious awareness. Priming can occur subliminally as well as consciously. For example, if I showed you a picture on a computer screen for 4/1000 of a second, you'd see a flash of light and be unable to identify the object in the photo. But it might influence your behavior. In one study, researchers subliminally primed photos of smiling or angry faces, followed by a picture of a Chinese ideograph (or letter). Participants were asked how much they liked each ideograph. Those ideographs primed with happy faces were liked more than those with no prime, and those primed with angry faces were liked less.

Priming can have socially important consequences. Priming the concept of money causes people to work harder on difficult tasks, but to be less helpful to other people and donate less to charity. In 2008, when white students from Florida were shown a subliminal prime of a confederate flag, they indicated they were less likely to vote for Barack Obama (but not any other candidates).

The studies by Weinstein and her colleagues attempted to measure whether people experienced conflict between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The measure of implicit sexual orientation—the tricky part—involved subliminal priming. Subjects were shown slides of four words (“gay,” “straight,” “homosexual” and “heterosexual”) and of same-sexed or opposite-sexed couples. They were asked to classify each word or image as either gay or straight as quickly as possible. Before each trial, they were subliminally primed with either the word “me” or “others.” Those participants who showed more rapid identification of gay stimuli when they were preceded by the word “me” than by “others” (and a slower identification of straight stimuli when preceded by “me” than by “others”) were assumed to have an implicit attraction to the same sex. Participants were also asked their sexual orientation, and the measure of interest was the discrepancy between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation.

If you're troubled by this measure of implicit sexual orientation, one of the studies used a more face valid measure of implicit attraction and obtained the same results. In this measure, subjects were left alone and free to browse same-sex and opposite-sex photos. It was assumed that differences in exposure time would indicate their implicit sexual orientation.

The study looked at both the causes and effects of a conflict between one's implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The effect was predicted to be homophobia. Overt homophobia was measured by questionnaires that looked at such things as participants' self-reported attitudes toward gays, their attitudes toward social policies affecting gay people, and the discriminatory bias of assigning harsher punishments to gay people than straight people for the same offense. Their measure of implicit hostility toward gays also involved subliminal priming. Participants were either primed with the word “gay” or not, and were asked to complete blanks such as “K I _ _.” Filling in more aggressive words such as “kick” after the gay prime was taken as an indicator of covert hostility to gays. Both the overt and covert measures showed greater homophobia among the sexually conflicted participants.

This finding supports one of Sigmund Freud's unconscious defense mechanisms against anxiety, reaction formation. In reaction formation, people experience anxiety caused by an unconscious desire to engage in some behavior that is unacceptable to them, such as having gay sex. They defend against this anxiety by engaging in exaggerated behaviors that imply just the opposite of their unconscious feelings, such as becoming an anti-gay crusader.

These researchers were interested in the child rearing practicies that produced conflicts between implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The studies tested a proposition from Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory which asserts that controlling parents will produce children who are less in touch with their feelings than than parents who encourage autonomy. This is similar to the distinction between authoritarian vs. democratic child-rearing. Participants were asked questions about their family such as “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” or “I felt free to be who I am.” Those participants who reported coming from authoritarian families were more likely to experience conflict in their sexual orientation.

The researchers also asked participants about their parents' homophobia. Homophobic fathers (but not mothers) were most likely to produce young adults with this discrepancy in their sexual orientation. Here's a video explaining the studies by one of the authors, Richard Ryan.

What are we to make of these studies? They are heavily dependent on questionnaire measures, which are subject to distortion when dealing with sensitive subjects. I'm particularly skeptical of college students' reports of their parents' child-rearing practices. I'm more impressed with the subliminal priming measures, both of implicit same-sex attraction and covert hostility to gay people. If subsequent studies find a consistent association between these two measures, we may have to acknowledge that Freud got something right.

There is another study by Henry Adams and others that supports the association of male same-sex attraction with homophobia. The participants were college men who were previously classified as high or low in homophobia by their answers to questions such as “I would feel nervous being in a group of homosexuals.” Subjects then watched three types of hard core pornography: heterosexual, gay male and gay female. Sexual arousal was measured using a plethysmograph, a rubber strain guage which fits tightly around the penis and measures its circumference. (Isn't research fun?) Both the groups high and low in homophobia showed increases in arousal to the heterosexual and lesbian videos, but only the homophobes were also aroused by the gay male videos.

Maybe these folks are on to something.