In an era marked by increasing awareness of diversity, a tolerant and inclusive society can be fostered when we better understand implicit and explicit biases.
In our study, 101 homo-, bi- or heterosexual young adults (70 women, 31 men), participated in an Implicit Association Test (IAT) on homophobia and an IAT on sexual preference, and completed self-report questionnaires on homophobia and on sexual orientation (SO). The final sample will comprise 120 students, so the here reported results are preliminary.
While the explicit attitude towards gay and lesbian persons is very positive across participants, with no effects of SO, men compared to women have a less positive attitude towards gays and lesbians. Small correlations between explicit attitudes and homophobia-IAT-scores exist. However, contrary to the explicit measure, the homophobia-IAT shows an effect of SO, but no effect of gender. Homosexual persons show the strongest positive association of homo with good, heterosexual persons the lowest, with bisexual participants in between. On average, only small preference effects occur.
Explicit and implicit measures of sexual preference are not correlated. However, the IAT reveals an effect of gender, and an interaction of gender and SO. While homosexual and bisexual women, and heterosexual men show a moderate preference for women, heterosexual women and bisexual men show a small preference for women, homosexual men show no preference.
Our data reveal group and gender specific differences in experimental measures and build a basis to debate on the differences between explicit and implicit attitudes regarding homophobia and sexual preference.