Heroes against homophobia: does elevation uniquely block homophobia by inhibiting disgust?

ABSTRACT

Homophobia has decreased in past decades, but gut-level disgust towards gay men lingers. It has been suggested that disgust can be reduced by inducing its proposed opposite emotion, elevation. Research suggests elevation might reduce homophobia, but only general elevation (not elevation evoked by gay people) and general attitudes (rather than disgust) have been studied. Nor has elevation’s effect on homophobia been differentiated from effects of related emotions, such as admiration or surprise. We pretested a series of news stories featuring either a gay man or a man of unspecified sexuality that were intended to distinctly elicit elevation, admiration, or surprise. We pre-registered the prediction that an elevation-inducing story would reduce negative attitudes by reducing disgust. In Study 1 (N = 593), participants who read elevation-inducing stories did not express more positive attitudes or less disgust towards gay men than those who read stories inducing admiration or surprise. The admiration stories elicited similar or lower levels of disgust than the elevation stories. Study 2 (N = 588), replicated the findings of Study 1 with improved stimuli and measures. Both studies suggest that elevation may not uniquely reduce homophobia, as elevation and admiration have similar effects on this prejudice.

KEYWORDS:

• Elevation
• homophobia
• admiration
• kama muta
• prejudice
• moral emotions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Numerous alternatives to the term homophobia have been proposed: heterosexism (e.g., Neisen, 1990), homonegativity (e.g., Hudson & Ricketts, 1980), and sexual prejudice (e.g., Herek, 2004), to name just the most common ones. All of these concepts cover a wide range of phenomena, and they have shifting definitions (Bryant & Vidal-Ortiz, 2008). The use of a paramount term (or a small set of terms) inevitably masks the complex psychological and social roots of homophobia, and its historical shifts (Herek, 2004). Nevertheless, homophobia remains by far the most common term: as of August 4, 2019, it has been used in 1,721 articles in PsycINFO over the last 10 years, far more than heterosexism (564), homonegativity (337), or sexual prejudice (246). Therefore, we use the term “homophobia” here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant No. SG163460.