- Straight people rate photos of straight couples more highly than gay or lesbian couples
- Researchers found neural markers that probably influenced the ratings
- The ratings were strongly connected to the raters' general Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men
- Spending time with gay and lesbian people seemed to positively influence the ratings they have the gay and lesbian photos
- What does it mean?
"Social categorization" is the term social psychologists use to describe humans percieving each other as members of social groups rather than as individuals. It's a very natural and human thing to do. Without some kind of social categorization, we would know a lot less about anyone we haven't met and got to know personally and it would be much more difficult to interact with strangers! But it's clear that this process also underpins prejudices and therefore discrimination against disadvantaged minority groups.
Cheryl Dictker, Catherine Forestell, and Blakely Mulder at the College of William and Mary took at look at how heterosexuals responded differently to pictures of gay and lesbian couples, compared to pictures of straight couples. This would give them a way to measure biases that heterosexuals might have against gay and lesbian couples.
The researchers found some pretty definitive differences (Figure 1) in the way their heterosexual research participants behaved. They asked their participants to rate each picture they saw, and dismiss each photo to move on to the next when they'd made a judgment. You might expect that in today's society, people would want to avoid appearing prejudiced by giving a lower rating to gay and lesbian couples than straight couples. On the other hand, because participants were rating each individual couple photo independently, they mightn't have been able to make the right adjustments to compensate from automatic prejudice even if they were trying. In any event, participants rated gay couples as well as lesbian couples significantly lower than straight couples, and they also dismissed photos of gay couples faster than straight couples. Incidentally, women may have rated the gay couples even lower than men did. These ratings didn't seem to be just accidents related to the photos either. Participants took an Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men survey, and the lower their attitude was, the more negatively they rated the gay and lesbian couple photos.
 |
| Figure 1, from the article: "Reaction times to dismiss (top panel) and explicit ratings of (bottom panel) pictures of gay, lesbian, and straight couples. Error bars represent standard error of the mean." |
 |
| Figure 2, from the article: "ERP amplitudes in response to pictures of straight, gay, and lesbian couples." The top image shows the "Fz" location with the N1 and N2 measurements highlighted, and the bottom image shows the "Pz" location with the P2 and LPP measurements highlighted. |
The good news is that the more social contact with gay people participants said they had, and the more genuinely personal contact they had, the smaller the differences between ratings for straight couples and ratings for gay/lesbian couples were. There were some relationships between the electrical signals the researchers were tracking (N1 and P2 signals) and the proportion of GLBT friends and experiences with GLBT friends subjects had, although they weren't strong relationships and their statistical significance is questionable given the number of non-significant relationships. All might mean that as gay and lesbian couples become more visible in society, the bias against them will disappear, or at least decline. It's hard to know this for sure, though: do people with more positive attitudes towards gay and lesbian couples spend more time around them, or does spending more time around gay and lesbian people lead to the more positive attitudes?
It's notable that the clearest results from this study weren't from measuring electrical activity in the brain; they were from the ratings participants gave themselves, and from their reaction times. In particular, although there were some statistically significant correlations between electrical signals and the amount of social interaction with gay and lesbian people, they were weak and we probably couldn't draw any conclusions from them if the photo ratings hadn't indicated the same things so clearly. Additionally, of all the neural signals the researchers examined, only the LPP signal is clearly associated with negative judgments. The others tell us that participants thought the gay and lesbian couples were out of the ordinary, but not necessarily in a bad way. That's a good reminder that although neuroscience tools can be useful, the hype in the media might be out of proportion to their usefulness.
If this all sounds a bit depressing, we might also consider that people are capable of adjusting their implicit biases during overt actions. These tests are designed to see past those actions. For a society without prejudice, ideally no-one would have any unfair biases, implicit or explicit. But it also seems natural that straight people might relate better to photos of straight couples than gay or lesbian couples. As far as prejudice goes, we might get a long way simply asking people to be aware of their own biases and be willing to adjust for them. Studies like this remind us that, at least at present, the biases exist, and so it's important we consider how that might affect how people are treated.
1 The difference between lesbian couples and straight couples was in the same direction, but not statistically significant (p=0.10). Taken with the difference between gay couples and straight couples, it's probably reasonable to infer that with more participants, the researchers would have seen a result with lesbian couples, too.↩
