Social Contact, Social Distancing, and Attitudes Toward LGT Individuals: A Cross-Cultural Study of College Students in the United States, Italy, and Spain

ABSTRACT

More than any other time in modern history, today people are significantly more likely to know (or be) lesbian, gay, and transgender (LGT) people; however, prejudices directed toward these groups remain. In the current study, we explore how social contact and social distancing/desired social contact are related to LGT prejudices using Worthen’s (2012) Attitudes Toward LGT People Scales and data from four heterosexual college student samples in Oklahoma, Texas, Italy, and Spain (N = 1,217). In doing so, we provide the first-ever study to explore Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis as it relates to transgender prejudices in Italy and Spain and the first study to examine desired social contact/social distancing and transgender prejudice in the U.S., Italy, and Spain. Our findings demonstrate that measures of desired social contact are strongly related to cross-cultural LGT attitudes, while simple measures of contact (i.e., knowing an LGT person) are significantly less robust.

KEYWORDS:

• Lesbian
• gay
• transgender
• prejudice
• attitudes
• contact hypothesis
• social distancing
• United States
• Italy
• Spain
• Texas
• Oklahoma

Conflict of Interest

Meredith G. F. Worthen, Annalisa Tanzilli, Chiara Caristo, and Vittorio Lingiardi have no conflict of interest to declare.

Notes

¹ Allport’s (1954) theory purports that reduced prejudice will result when four features of the contact situation are present: equal status between the groups in the situation; common goals; intergroup cooperation; and the support or authorities, law, or custom.

² Worthen (e.g., 2016) included a measure of the desire to avoid transgender people in her U.S. studies, but it is aggregated with seven other items into an “Attitudes Toward Transgender People” scale; thus it is unknown how this particular measure of social distancing operates.

³ For example, the 24 pieces included in Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) meta-analysis that focus on sexual orientation were from the 1960s (n = 3), the 1970s (n = 4), the 1980s (n = 9), and the 1990s (n = 8).