Ambiguity Tolerance Toward Nonbinary Sexuality Concepts: Evidence from British Newspapers

Abstract

Humans tend to construct their world view via binaries, i.e. two distinct, non-overlapping elements, such as the juxtapositions of human-animal, human-machine or male-female. Our research focuses on the binary categories of "heterosexuality-homosexuality" and explores how stable or malleable they are. For this, we analyse newspaper coverage of sexuality concepts in the UK from 1995-2010 and quantify if and how tolerance towards ambiguous concepts including "bisexuality" vary across time as well as with gender, political opinion and expertise. Our findings indicate a distinct "millennial effect" of intolerance towards sexual ambiguity, suggesting that resistance against ambiguity rears up during periods of instability. Conversely, we found higher levels of ambiguity tolerance in left-wing newspapers, broadsheet publications, female journalists and expert writers, as opposed to right-wing newspapers, tabloid publications, male journalists and novice writers. Our results can help to better understand to what degree concepts related to human sexuality are relatively hard-wired or rather fluid social categories.

Every action has a reaction: A model of coworker reactions to sexual minority employees' identity disclosure

“…Organizations should be aware that bisexual and pansexual employees may be at a greater risk for experiencing negative interpersonal treatment from others and devote efforts to addressing the unique prejudicial attitudes that people hold towards bisexual/pansexual employees. Previous work in the social sciences suggests that beliefs in traditional social categorizations and being uncomfortable with ambiguity undergird the particularly pronounced negative attitudes towards bisexual and pansexual people (Bryson et al., 2018; Burke et al., 2017). However, this work is still in its nascency and more evidence is needed to understand how attitudes towards bisexual and pansexual people are formulated.…”

“…This prediction is informed by work that demonstrates that attitudes towards bisexual and pansexual people are notably more negative than those towards gay and lesbian people (e.g., Herek, 2002; Israel & Mohr, 2004). Evidence suggests this is because bisexual and pansexual identities are viewed as more ambiguous (Bryson et al., 2018) and as opposing traditional social categorizations (Burke et al., 2017). These differences are also found in the workplace with previous research finding that bisexual employees report being less likely than their gay and lesbian coworkers to disclose their sexual identity at work and that participants rated bisexuals more negatively than gay men and lesbian women in a vignette depicting the workplace disclosure of their sexual identity (Arena & Jones, 2017).…”

Apes Unlike Us: Human-Ingroup Protection Against Encroaching Simianity in UK Newspapers

“…This study is part of a wider project that also investigated humananimal, human-machine, heterosexual-homosexual, and male-female dichotomization/essentialism (Bryson, 2017;Bryson et al, 2019Bryson et al, , 2020 via different quantitative analyses. It has substantial (though not entire) structural overlap with the other studies regarding the following methods section.…”