Myths and Reality About Confronting Anti-Gay Prejudice: Who Confronts and Why (Not)?

ABSTRACT

There are lay theories about who would confront heterosexist prejudice, with people often citing women, educated, and liberals as being more likely to speak up. However, prior work is inconclusive about such predictors of confrontation. We tested which individual-level characteristics predict bystander confrontation, and what motivates or prevents straight individuals from confronting—focusing on socio-political ideology and gender. We conducted our study among Eastern-Southeastern Europeans (N = 132), and we employed a behavioral paradigm, where participants believed they witnessed and had an opportunity to confront anti-gay discrimination. We found 24% confrontation rate, which was not predicted by age, socioeconomic status, education level, or heterosexism. Moreover, we found that women or liberals were as likely to confront as men or conservatives were, respectively, however, their motivations and obstacles differed. Opposed to our prediction, men were not discouraged from confronting because of fear of being misidentified as gay, while as predicted, women were discouraged due to concerns about their assertiveness and efficacy. We also found that as predicted, liberals were encouraged to confront for equality/intergroup-oriented reasons, and conservatives were encouraged by individual/merit-oriented reasons. We suggest that intervention programs relying on personalized messages can be utilized to motivate confronting heterosexist prejudice along ideological lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterosexism
• sexual prejudice
• prejudice confrontation
• bystanders
• political ideology
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. At the end of the study survey to collect contact details for the winner of the raffle, participants were redirected to an independent survey link to protect anonymity of their responses.

2. This was the only indication of the target’s sexual orientation, and we did not test whether participants understood that he is gay. This is because what we tested is how participants react to the prejudiced player’s anti-gay comment—who reasonably or not, thought that the player is gay.

3. We also included left-wing–right-wing dimension, but we did not have prediction for this scale. Note: it also did not predict confronting prejudice, p = .18.

4. Due to ethical concerns, we do not provide identifiable statements for non-confronters.

5. While we did not test our main predictions on participants who identified as bisexual, we analyzed their responses to the perpetrator, and we found 29% (n = 5) confrontation rate, similar to heterosexuals’.

6. When analyzed as 2 (gender) x 2 (confronting) multivariate ANOVA, the interaction is not significant on meta-perception (p > .25) nor on fear of stigma (p = .12).

7. Other responses referred to denial of responsibility or trivialization like “It’s not important for me”, “It’s none of my business”, or “It wasn’t even that insulting”, or neither.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.