Sex Differences in How Heterosexuals Think About Lesbians and Gay Men: Evidence From Survey Context Effects

Two experiments were embedded in a 1997 telephone survey of US households to assess possible differences in how heterosexuals think about lesbians versus gay men. In each experiment, one half of the sample first responded to one or more attitude items about lesbians, followed by comparable items about gay men. The other half received the gay male item(s) first. Results are reported separately for White (N = 976) and Black (N = 479) heterosexuals. For White and Black men alike, self-reported attitudes toward lesbians tended to be more favorable when they were assessed without reference to gay men (i.e., lesbian items presented first). White men’s reactions to gay men tended to be less negative when assessed after the questions about lesbians were presented, but Black men’s responses did not consistently show this pattern. For some items, women gave more favorable ratings of lesbians and less favorable ratings of gay men when the lesbian items were presented first. The findings suggest possible gender differences in the cognitive organization of heterosexuals’ attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. Meta-analyses of the research literature on heterosexuals’ attitudes toward homosexuality indicate that heterosexual men and women react differently to homosexuality. Heterosexual men generally manifest higher levels of sexual prejudice (i.e., negative attitudes toward homosexual persons) than do heterosexual women. This difference results mainly from heterosexual men’s attitudes toward homosexual men, which are consistently more negative than both their attitudes toward lesbians and heterosexual women’s attitudes toward either lesbians or gay men (Kite, 1984; Kite & Whitley, 1996). Although much of the research upon which this conclusion is based was conducted with convenience samples of college students, the finding has been replicated in at least one national probability sample (Herek & Capitanio, 1996) for White (but not Black) respondents (Herek & Capitanio, 1995). Various explanations have been offered for this pattern, including differential demands on Pr e-P ub lic ati on D raf t 2 men and women created by gender roles (Herek, 1986; Kite & Whitley, 1998), sex differences in levels of defensiveness and threat associated with homosexuality (Herek, 1986, 1988), unequal opportunities for interpersonal contact with lesbians and gay men (Herek & Capitanio, 1996), and the eroticizing of lesbians by heterosexual men (Louderback & Whitley, 1997). These explanations all imply that heterosexual men and women think differently about homosexuality, and that their thinking is nuanced according to whether the attitude object is gay men or lesbians (for a general discussion, see Kite & Whitley, 1998). Previous empirical research has been limited in its ability to identify and explain these gender differences for at least two reasons. First, many studies have used measurement methods that are incapable of detecting differences in heterosexuals’ reactions to lesbians and gay men. Although numerous survey and questionnaire studies have measured heterosexuals’ attitudes and opinions related to homosexuality (for reviews, see Herek, 1984, 1991, 1994, 1997; Kite, 1984; Kite & Whitley, 1996; Yang, 1997), most have framed their target in ostensibly gender-neutral terms, typically using words such as homosexual (or, in some cases, gay) to encompass both gay men and lesbians. Not only does this approach preclude separate analysis of attitudes toward lesbians versus gay men, but many heterosexuals may interpret homosexual as referring exclusively to gay males (Black & Stevenson, 1983; Kite & Whitley, 1998). Some researchers have phrased their questions to refer to “gays and lesbians” or “gay men and lesbians,” a practice that explicitly includes attitudes toward lesbians but still does not permit their separate analysis. Relatively few studies have assessed attitudes toward lesbians separately from attitudes toward gay men, and such distinctions have been particularly rare in studies utilizing probability samples. In Yang’s (1997) review of 77 different questions about homosexuality used in public opinion polls, for example, only two items distinguished reactions to lesbians from reactions to gay men. Thus, most research methodology has been based on the premise that heterosexuals’ attitudes toward gay men and toward lesbians are psychologically equivalent and can be subsumed in the general category of “attitudes toward homosexuals.” A second limitation of past research is that studies that have examined sex differences in heterosexuals’ attitudes have focused mainly on the structure of attitudes. They have assessed correlations between men’s and women’s attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, on the one hand, and various attitudes and personality traits, on the other (e.g., Herek, 1988; Kite, 1994; Louderback & Whitley, 1997). This approach has been useful for identifying consistent attitude-attitude and attitude-trait relationships, for example, between sexual prejudice and support for traditional gender roles or authoritarianism. It is limited, however, because it treats attitude structure as a relatively static phenomenon (Judd, Drake, Downing, & Krosnick, 1991). An alternative approach is to focus instead on dynamic processes occurring while a heterosexual person thinks about homosexuality. One way to observe such processes is to examine context effects in survey responses to items about lesbians and gay men. By context effects, we refer here to differences in response patterns that occur as a result of the order in which questions are asked in a structured interview (see generally Schwarz & Sudman, 1992). Although context effects in survey research were once regarded mainly as methodological artifacts, more recent studies have used them to understand the nature of attitudes in specific domains and the cognitive processes underlying them (Schwarz & Sudman, 1992). Much of this research has been based on a conceptualization of attitudes as long-term memory structures which are activated when an attitude object is encountered or when a person is questioned about her or his opinions (Judd et al., 1991; Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988). Within this framework, accurately reporting one’s own attitudes (e.g., in response to a survey question) requires successfully activating the relevant Pr e-P ub lic ati on D raf t 3 attitude, retrieving its contents, synthesizing this information, and reporting an answer (Strack & Martin, 1987; Tourangeau & Rasinski, 1988). A variety of factors can hinder or facilitate this process (Krosnick, 1991). One implication of this approach is that attitudes can be understood as parts of cognitive associative networks. When an attitude is activated, the activation spreads to other, linked attitudes within the network. Consequently, simply asking a question about one attitude object can affect self-reports of attitudes toward related objects and issues. Context effects, therefore, can reveal information about dynamic aspects of attitudes — including ongoing processes such as judgment, activation, and information retrieval — in contrast to the more static information about attitude structure that results from measuring intercorrelations among different attitudes (Judd et al., 1991). In the present study, we examined context effects in survey responses in an attempt to shed new light on how heterosexual men and women think about gay men and lesbians. In brief, we randomized the order in which respondents were asked identically-structured questions about lesbians and about gay men, so that one half of respondents received the lesbian items first whereas the other half received the gay male items first. This procedure allowed us to compare heterosexuals’ attitudes toward lesbians in their own right (i.e., when the lesbian items were presented first) with attitudes toward lesbians in a situation that implicitly associated them with gay men (i.e., when the lesbian items were presented after comparable questions about gay men). It also allowed a similar comparison for attitudes toward gay men. The data were collected in a 1997 national telephone survey about AIDS-related attitudes and beliefs, which included items about attitudes toward homosexuality. We selected two techniques for assessing heterosexuals’ attitudes that have been used in previous survey research — feeling thermometers (Experiment 1) and a series of statements about lesbians and gay men presented in agree-disagree format (Experiment 2) — and created two split-ballot experiments within a survey protocol. This multi-measure approach allowed us to assess not only whether context effects occurred, but also whether they were obtained with different assessment techniques. If significant effects were observed only with one measurement strategy, it would suggest that the effect is specific to that technique. If context effects were observed across measurement methods, it would indicate a more general pattern of differences in how heterosexuals think about lesbians or gay men. We operationally defined a context effect as a statistically significant difference in responses to an item according to its order of administration, for example, significantly different feeling thermometer ratings for lesbians by heterosexual male respondents according to whether the lesbian thermometer was administered first or after the gay male thermometer. We did not make predictions about the direction of context effects, except that we were alerted by previous research (e.g., Herek & Capitanio, 1995; Kite & Whitley, 1996, 1998) to construct our analyses to explicitly compare responses according to the sex of the respondent and the sex of the attitude object, and to consider the possibility that Blacks and Whites would show different response patterns.