Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

I try to collaborate with and learn from the local Industrial and Organizational Psychology Graduate team as much as I can…they are always involved in and have access to some very cool research that is valuable for the work that I do.  A couple of the people involved recently shared some info with me that they are going to be sharing at an upcoming conference and I love getting my hands on research, so I thought it would be a good thing to share here…for those of you that are research minded.  So enjoy!  (Thanks to Amy and Carey!)

Differing Effects from Confrontation of More vs. Less Offensive Statements of Prejudice

Amy L. Hillard | University of Nebraska – Lincoln

Carey S. Ryan | University of Nebraska – Omaha

Introduction

Subtle prejudice has negative effects for targets (e.g., anger and depression; Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001) and non-targets (e.g., activating negative, stereotypic associations; Carnaghi & Mass, 2007). One way to counter these effects is confronting prejudice, which occurs when individuals see bias and respond by letting their distaste for the bias be known (Shelton, Richardson, Salvatore, & Hill, 2006).

Confronting prejudice is effective in reducing stereotype activation/application and encouraging more positive attitudes toward the target’s group (Czopp, Monteith, & Mark, 2006).

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether attitudes toward gays would be influenced by hearing a confrontation of prejudiced statements. In addition, we examined whether the effectiveness of hearing the confrontation depends on the offensiveness of the prejudiced message.

Hypothesis: Confrontation was expected to be more effective than no confrontation for less versus more offensive statements.

Method

Participants. The sample included 177 college students. The majority were women (66%) and their mean age was 19.68 (SD = 2.20) years.

Procedure. Participants were randomly assigned to listen to one of four pre-recorded conversations in which they heard either “that’s so gay” or “homo;” pretests showed “that’s so gay” was less offensive than “homo.” The derogatory phrases were then either confronted or not.

Participants completed measures of attitudes relevant to sexual minorities, including:
– Feeling thermometer from 0 (very coolly) to 100 (very warmly)

– Heterosexual attitudes toward homosexuals(HATH; Larsen, Reed, & Hoffman, 1980)

– Attitudes toward gay men scale (ATG; Herek, 1998)

– Campus atmosphere (Monteith & Deneen, 1996)

– Gay rights attitudes (9 items; e.g., “I oppose laws to protect homosexuals against job discrimination.”)

Table 1 – Univariate statistics for DV measures by condition

Results

Means are reported in Table 1. Correlations among the measures ranged from .72 to .88. As predicted, the interactions between offensiveness (i.e., “gay” vs. “homo”) and confrontation was significant (p < .02) for all measures except gay rights attitudes, which approached significance (p = .067). Thus, confrontation (vs. no confrontation) of “that’s so gay” resulted in more positive attitudes, whereas confrontation of “homo” did not. LSD comparisons further indicated that:

1) In the no confrontation conditions, hearing “homo” led to more positive toward gays than did hearing “gay” across all five DVs.

2) In the “gay” conditions, the confrontation condition produced more positive attitudes towards gays than did the no confrontation condition. The effect was significant on the feeling thermometer and campus atmosphere measures (p < .05) and in the same direction on the others (HATH, p = .16; ATG, p = .48; gay rights attitudes, p = .10).

3) In the “homo” conditions, the confrontation condition produced less positive attitudes toward gays than did the no confrontation condition. The effect was significant on the HATH and campus atmosphere measures (p < .05) and in the same direction on the others (feeling thermometer, p = .22; ATG, p = .06; gay rights attitudes, p = .07).

Figure 1 – Interaction between offensiveness and confrontation:

Figure 2 – Interaction between offensiveness and confrontation:

Discussion

This study extends previous research by examining confrontations of derogatory terms against gays and by manipulating the offensiveness of statements. As predicted, confronting less offensive statements (i.e., “that’s so gay”) was effective in creating more positive attitudes, but confronting more offensive statements (i.e., “homo”) was not. Indeed, confronting more offensive statements had the opposite effect.

We believe that confrontation may draw attention to the prejudice inherent in less offensive statements—prejudice that might otherwise go unnoticed—causing guilt. As suggested by Czopp et al. (2006), guilt may lead confrontations to be more effective. For more offensive statements, prejudice is obvious; in this case, hearing a confrontation may alleviate guilt, causing confrontation to backfire and decreasing its effectiveness.

The effect of confronting prejudice thus appears to depend on the offensiveness of the message that is confronted. Other characteristics of the message that is confronted may also moderate the effectiveness of confrontation, such as the message’s target or whether the message is interpreted as a joke.