Framing Effects, Social Norm Perception, and Tolerance of Lesbian and Gay Individuals: Experimental Evidence From Slovakia

ABSTRACT

Perceptions of social norms can have downstream consequences for attitudes and behaviors, especially when it comes to the acceptance of marginalized groups. While interventions focusing on social norms may boost tolerance, few studies test whether variations in norm communication affect individuals’ perceptions. Thus, in this paper, we test the effectiveness of three communicative aspects—valence framing (Experiments 1–3), point of view (Experiment 1), and group centrism (Experiment 3)—in shifting perceptions of social norms. Specifically, we investigate whether manipulating these aspects affects perceptions of tolerance of lesbian and gay individuals in Slovakia, where LGBTQ+ acceptance is among the lowest in Europe. We found that while positively valenced messages shifted perceptions toward tolerance, manipulating point of view and group-centrism did not. We believe that these findings can inform interventions intended to shift perceptions of social norms in hostile contexts, an important first step in changing prejudiced attitudes and behaviors.

KEYWORDS:

• Social norm perception
• persuasion
• valence framing
• point of view
• group centrism
• LGBTQ+

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-14-0531, by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues: Local- and State-Level Policy Work Award, and by the project Together for All Families funded by the Open Society Initiative for Europe. They were not involved in any stage of the research process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

All supplemental information, data sets, R code, materials used in this research and pre-registration protocol for Experiment 3 are available at: https://osf.io/2m9e8/

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. For full survey instruments, see https://osf.io/2m9e8/.

2. In addition, participants answered 12 questions regarding the quality, frequency, and valence of their direct, extended, and vicarious contact with gays and lesbians. We will report the findings about these variables in a different paper. All other measures, manipulations and exclusion in all three experiments are disclosed and reported.

3. We present results for all experiments with manipulation check failures excluded. However, all results presented are consistent to their inclusion. See output of an analysis (.html) included in the OSF directory available online at https://osf.io/2m9e8/.

4. See Tables 1 and 2 in Supplemental Information for manipulation check success rates within each condition and by question.

5. Pre-registration file is available online at https://osf.io/2m9e8/.

6. Full results are available in the Supplemental Information (Table 7).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract no. APVV-14-0531, by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues: Local- and State-Level Policy Work Award, and by the project Together for All Families funded by the Open Society Initiative for Europe. They were not involved in any stage of the research process.