Essentialist beliefs and social distance towards gay men and lesbian women: a latent profile analysis

Abstract

Psychological essentialism is the layperson's belief that social categories are natural and entitative. Studies have shown that essentialist beliefs are strongly connected with different types of prejudice. Previous research into essentialist beliefs predominantly used a variable-centered approach to investigate the relationship between essentialist beliefs and prejudice. Extending this research, we used a person-centered approach to explore the relationship between different essentialist beliefs related to sexual orientation and gender (naturalness, homogeneity, discreteness and informativeness). The study involved 282 (sample 1) and 194 (sample 2) respondents from Russia with different sexual orientations. Using latent profile analysis, we identified three distinct essentialist belief profiles, which are the same for both our target groups, gay men and lesbian women. We examined the relationships between belonging to essentialist belief profiles and social distance towards gay men and lesbian women. We found individuals from various profiles differed in levels of gender identification and rightwing authoritarianism. Individuals with relatively low levels of naturalness beliefs and high levels of essentialist beliefs about the social and psychological differences between gender groups and between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals demonstrated greater social distance towards gay men and lesbian women compared to respondents with lower essentialist beliefs in the differences between groups.

Evaluations of Parenting by Same-Sex vs Different-Sex Couples among Heterosexual University Students: Experimental Between-Subjects Vignette Design Study

“…less desire and intention to participate in activities with individuals who belong to a certain out-group (Bogardus, 1925). Previous research showed that larger social distance towards gays/lesbians is related to higher levels of essentialist beliefs about the social and psychological differences between genders (Agadullina, Lovakov and Malysheva, 2018), which is further related to an increased tendency to discriminate (Huić, Jelić and Kamenov, 2018), as well as to support boundary-enhancing legislation, policies and social services (Roberts et al, 2017).…”

Internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice: a person-centered approach

“…While variable-centered analyses, which dominate the field, have been extremely useful in their own right, a person-centered approach can make an additional contribution to social psychological research (Osborne & Sibley, 2017), and has found to be useful in investigating prejudicial attitudes toward minority and stigmatized out-groups (e.g., Agadullina, Lovakov & Malysheva, 2018;Adelman & Verkuyten, 2020;Dangubic et al, 2021;Loch et al, 2013;Meeusen et al, 2018;Sibley & Becker, 2012;Sibley & Liu, 2013). Latent profile analysis is a person-centered approach that seeks to identify unobserved subgroups of individuals who qualitatively differ in the particular ways in which they combine, for example, their motivations to respond without prejudice.…”