Essentialist beliefs and social distance towards gay men and lesbian women: a latent profile analysis

ABSTRACT

Psychological essentialism is the layperson’s belief that social categories are natural and entitative. Studies have shown that essentialist beliefs are strongly connected with different types of prejudice. Previous research into essentialist beliefs predominantly used a variable-centred approach to investigate the relationship between essentialist beliefs and prejudice. Extending this research, we used a person-centred approach to explore the relationship between different essentialist beliefs related to sexual orientation and gender (naturalness, homogeneity, discreteness and informativeness). The study involved 282 (sample 1) and 194 (sample 2) respondents from Russia with different sexual orientations. Using latent profile analysis, we identified three distinct essentialist belief profiles, which are the same for both our target groups, gay men and lesbian women. We examined the relationships between belonging to essentialist belief profiles and social distance towards gay men and lesbian women. We found individuals from various profiles differed in levels of gender identification and right-wing authoritarianism. Individuals with relatively low levels of naturalness beliefs and high levels of essentialist beliefs about the social and psychological differences between gender groups and between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals demonstrated greater social distance towards gay men and lesbian women compared to respondents with lower essentialist beliefs in the differences between groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Essentialism
• beliefs
• gender
• sexual orientation
• social distance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to Prentice and Miller (2006), essentialist beliefs about men and women differ, which is why our study asked participants to assess not a certain gender group (men or women) but gender as a social category, focusing on the essentialist beliefs related to gender (e.g. ‘Gender is a category with clear boundaries: a person is either a man or a woman’).