Can Learning That a Person is Gay Change Your Conception of Their Racial Features?

When we meet someone for the first time, we notice a lot about them: we notice their gender, their race, how old they are, and often much more. And in general, what we notice about a person can be consequential. For example, learning that a person is Black rather than White, or a man rather than a woman, can influence our perceptions of that person’s competence.

Psychologists have recently pushed this topic even further, asking how perceptions of a person might depend on multiple aspects of who they are, for example, on their race and their gender. In some recent research, Galen Bodenhausen and I asked a question of similar flavor: Do the racial stereotypes we apply to a person depend on that person’s sexual orientation? According to our results, the answer is “yes.”

We conducted a series of experiments, all in the United States, where we asked people to list their beliefs about men from various racial groups. Some people told us what they thought Black men were like, other people told us what they thought Asian men were like, and still other people told us what they thought White or Hispanic men were like.

The people who participated in these experiments had pretty strong stereotypes in their heads. White men, according to their responses, were arrogant and nationalistic. Black men, also according to their responses, were athletic and aggressive. Asian men were quiet and hardworking, and Hispanic men were religious and uneducated. But here’s the thing: the participants who listed these stereotypes were very likely thinking of heterosexual men.

When participants were instructed to list their beliefs about men who were described as gay, their racial stereotypes changed in at least two big ways. First, participants tended to characterize gay men as possessing de-racialized attributes. Second, participants tended to characterize some gay men—in particular gay Black and Hispanic men—as possessing “Whiter” attributes as well.

By “de-racialized,” I mean that when men were described as gay (vs. not), they were characterized by traits that seemed less stereotypic of their own racial groups. How do we know these traits were less stereotypic? We gave a new group of participants the traits we’d collected earlier, and we had this new group of people rate these traits on how race-typical they seemed. Specifically, these new participants rated the traits on how stereotypically Black they seemed, how stereotypically White they seemed, how stereotypically Asian they seemed, and how stereotypically Hispanic they seemed.

As an illustration, here’s what we found regarding the “Hispanicness” and “Whiteness” of the traits people listed about Hispanic men (depicted in dark gray) and about gay Hispanic men (depicted in light gray).

 

Bar graph


On the left-hand side of the image, you can see that Hispanic men were de-racialized, or rendered less stereotypic of their ethnic group, when they were described as gay (vs. when they were not). We found this pattern for all racial groups: White men seemed “less White” when they were described as gay, Black men seemed “less Black” under these same conditions, and Asian men seemed “less Asian” (when described as gay) as well.

We think that de-racialization occurs because, by default, people tend to assume that the most typical member of a racial group is a heterosexual man. Thus, if you give people information that a man is not heterosexual, he deviates from this assumption—and in turn he seems less typical of the group to which he belongs.

In our article, we suggest that stereotypic Whitening—or the tendency to think of some men as “Whiter” when they’re described as gay—is driven, at least partly, by the fact that people stereotype gay men as privileged.

Despite the fact that gay men are actually more likely to face housing and food insecurity than their non-gay counterparts, our participants robustly characterized gay men as possessing upper-class attributes (for example, as being materialistic and sophisticated). Although we aren’t sure exactly where this stereotype comes from, a strong contender is the media, which often depicts gay men as privileged cosmopolitans who enjoy shopping and home makeovers (consider the gay men on Queer Eye, for example).  

A consequence of this stereotype is that when men from under-resourced groups are described as gay (vs. not), they seem more affluent than they would have seemed otherwise. And because affluence, at least in the United States, is associated with being White, people in turn stereotype these men as “Whiter.”

At this point, it’s too early to tell what implications these stereotypes have for discriminatory behavior. But it’s possible that racial biases manifest differently toward gay men than they do toward heterosexual men. This and other research questions—like whether these distortions also apply to sexual-minority women—are at the forefront of where we plan to take this research next. 


For Further Reading:

Petsko, C. D., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2019). Racial stereotyping of gay men: Can a minority sexual orientation erase race? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 37-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.03.002

Kang, S. K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2015). Multiple identities in social perception and interaction: Challenges and opportunities. Annual Review of Social Psychology, 66, 547-574.

Petsko, C. D., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2019). Race-crime congruency effects revisited: Do we take defendants’ sexual orientation into account? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10, 73-81.


Christopher D. Petsko is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at Northwestern University. He studies how stereotypes influence our perceptions of each other.

Galen V. Bodenhausen is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Psychology and a Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University. He studies the fundamental mental processes underlying social attitudes, impressions, judgments, and decisions.

Gay Asian Americans Seen as More “American”

The fastest-growing racial group in the United States — Asian Americans — is also one that is consistently perceived as “foreign.”

But for Asian Americans who are gay or lesbian, their sexual orientation may make them seem more “American” than those who are presumed straight. A new University of Washington study, the latest in research to examine stereotypes, identity, and ideas about who is “American,” focuses on how sexual orientation and race come together to influence others’ perceptions.

“Research on race is often separate from research on sexual orientation. Here we bring the two together to understand how they interact to influence judgments of how American someone is considered,” said Sapna Cheryan, a UW associate professor of psychology.

Cheryan in 2017 authored a related study, which showed how stereotypically American traits, such as being overweight, made Asian Americans seem more “American.” The new research by Cheryan and her students a collection of four studies, was published July 27th in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Research has shown that Asian Americans, and people of color in general, are seen as less American than white Americans, and face prejudice and discrimination throughout various aspects of life.  Regarding sexual orientation, studies have found that, relative to countries such as Japan and South Korea, the United States has implemented more civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation, and is seen as more LGBTQ-friendly.

The new UW research involved four separate, diverse groups of participants drawn from the UW student population, all of whom were asked to answer questions related to brief, written descriptions of hypothetical people or scenarios.

In the first study, participants were randomly assigned to read a brief descriptive phrase of a person named John, identified either as “an Asian American man” or “a gay Asian American man.” They were then asked to rate, using a seven-point scale, how American they considered him through questions such as “How fluently do you think this person speaks English?” and “How integrated is this person in American culture?”

Researchers found that the hypothetical “gay Asian American man” was perceived as significantly more American than the hypothetical “Asian American man,” whose sexual orientation wasn’t specified.

The second study used similar questions, but included a greater variety of hypothetical people: men, women, whites, and Asian Americans. Sexual orientation was noted as “gay” or wasn’t listed. Researchers assigned “American” names to the fictional people — names that were popular in the United States in the 1980s: Matt, Chris, Michael, Jessica, Jennifer, and Ashley. The same results emerged: Asian Americans identified as gay were perceived to be more American than Asian Americans whose sexual orientation was not identified.

Whites were perceived as American no matter their sexual orientation.

“These studies demonstrate once again the widely-held assumption that whites are the most American. Though being gay increased perceptions of Asian Americans’ Americanness, it was still not nearly enough to close the gap in perceptions between Asian Americans and whites,” said Linda Zou, a UW graduate student and study co-author.

The other two studies focused on perceived differences between “American culture” and “Asian culture,” and how LGBTQ-friendly the cultures appear to be. In one study, researchers wrote descriptions of fake countries that were either presented as less welcoming and accepting of gay people than the U.S. or equally welcoming and accepting. Participants rated Asian culture as less LGBTQ-friendly, and a gay person as more American if they were associated with a country of origin that was less LGBTQ-friendly. “American culture is perceived as more accepting of gay people compared to Asian culture. As a result, gay Asian Americans are perceived as more likely to be American than their straight counterparts,” the authors wrote.

But that doesn’t mean LGBTQ Asian Americans face less discrimination, Cheryan said. While sexual orientation may affect a person’s perceived “foreignness,” it doesn’t protect against other forms of discrimination and harassment, she added.

“One possible extension of this work is that gay Asian Americans may be less likely to have their American identities questioned than straight Asian Americans,” said Cheryan. “At the same time, being gay puts people more at risk for other forms of prejudice based on sexual orientation.”

The research lends itself to comparisons with other races, ethnicities, and countries, the authors wrote, such as exploring the intersection of sexual orientation and race in the context of cultures that are believed to be more or less LGBTQ-friendly.

Other co-authors on the study were Mika Semrow and Shuyang Liu of the UW.


Study: Semrow, M., Zou, L. X., Liu, S., & Cheryan, S. (2019). Gay Asian Americans Are Seen as More American Than Asian Americans Who Are Presumed Straight. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619849426

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Addtional media contact: Kim Eckart, University of Washington News, [email protected]

How Gender Interacts With Other Social Identities To Shape Bias

Actress Patricia Arquette’s comments at the 2015 Oscars award night drew criticism for implicitly framing gender equality as an issue for straight white women. She insisted that, “It’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

Among other concerns, critics argued she overlooked the unique challenges faced by queer women, women of color, and other women at the intersection of multiple minority groups. This sentiment reflects a growing movement within feminist circles to understand how people simultaneously face bias along multiple identity dimensions such as gender, race, and sexual orientation – an idea called intersectionality.

Social psychologists have recently joined this movement, but have also reframed the discussion. The politics of intersectionality can “resemble a score-keeping contest between battle-weary warriors,” argued social psychologists Valerie Purdie-Vaughns and Richard Eibach in an influential 2008 review article. “The warriors display ever deeper and more gruesome battle scars in a game of one-upmanship.”

Setting aside these “oppression Olympics,” intersectionality is a fertile area for scientific research, argued Rutgers University psychologist Diana Sanchez at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference last week. At this academic gathering, intersectionality was a major topic at a daylong session about gender.

Here are three lines of research illustrating how gender interacts with other social identities to shape bias in often surprising ways. People of multiple minority groups face both distinct advantages and disadvantages. Biases based on gender and race do not always simply pile up to create double disadvantages, for instance.

When stereotypes can both help and hurt black women leaders

Women are often viewed negatively for exhibiting traditionally masculine behavior. Assertive female leaders are disliked, while assertive male leaders gain respect, for instance. However, could this distaste for assertive female leaders vary by race?

Unlike white women, black women are often stereotyped as being assertive, confident, and not feminine. These masculine traits are not only expected for black women but also allowed, at least in leadership roles, according to research presented at the SPSP conference.

Robert Livingston, lecturer of public policy at Harvard University, presented an experiment about how 84 nonblack participants responded to a corporate executive described as either “tough, determined” or “caring, committed.” The race and gender of the fictitious leader also varied across conditions.

Both white female and black male leaders were rated more negatively when described as tough rather than caring. In contrast, black women faced no such penalty for behaving assertively and were instead rated similarly to white men. Livingston concluded black women “were able to show dominance, assertiveness, agency without the same penalty that either white women or black men suffered."

He suggested that white women get knocked for being “tough, determined” because they are expected to be warm and caring. Black men are penalized because they are feared by others and activate other stereotypes such as being dangerous. In contrast, black women are expected to be assertive and confident, unlike white women, and they’re not feared in the same way as black men, Livingston suggested.

Livingston, however, emphasized that these evaluations are complex and likely depend on context. In a follow-up experiment led by Duke University associate professor of management and organizations Ashleigh Rosette, black female leaders were evaluated especially harshly if their corporation had performed poorly during the past five months. Under those conditions, black women were rated more negatively than white women or black men for the exact same business scenario.

If you are a black woman, you can be an assertive leader as long as you don’t make any mistakes, Livingston argued. “But the first time you make a mistake, your competence is called into question well before the white woman or the black man.”

When multiple minority identities render groups invisible

Individuals of multiple minority groups may be overlooked and marginalized for not being prototypical of their respective groups, argued Rebecca Mohr, a doctoral psychology student at Columbia University. For instance, white women are seen as prototypical of “women.” Black men are seen as prototypical of “black people.” But black women are seen as neither prototypical of “black people” nor “women,” Mohr argued based on prior research.

Racial minority women can therefore be rendered metaphorically invisible. Along with Columbia Associate Professor of Psychology Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Mohr tested whether racial minority women are featured in mass media less frequently than more prototypical others.

In a currently unpublished study, the researchers analyzed covers of Time magazine published from 1980 to 2008. They chose Time because it’s one of the longest-running U.S. publications and is published weekly, offering a large archive of covers. It’s also a general interest magazine, meaning that people on the covers should presumably “appeal to a wide swath of Americans,” Mohr pointed out.

The study found that racial minority women were underrepresented when racial minorities were on the cover of Time. For instance, women were only 20 percent of the covers that featured racial minorities. Conversely, when women were on the cover, racial minority women were underrepresented relative to their share of the U.S. population.

Mohr suggested that these results reflect the broader invisibility of racial minority women in American society. For instance, even though three black queer women started the Black Lives Matter movement, most media attention has focused on black men killed by police. In contrast, black women killed by police such as Meagan Hockaday, Tanisha Anderson, and Rekia Boyd are invisible, critics argue.

How gender gaps in STEM participation vary by race

Gender gaps in pursuing natural science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields surprisingly sometimes vary by race, noted Laurie O’Brien, associate professor of psychology at Tulane University. Women of color in STEM may sometimes face “double jeopardy” because of both racial bias and gender bias in some contexts such as gaining influence over others in academic departments.

However, “double jeopardy” is not the full story, O’Brien argued in her SPSP talk. For instance, when entering college, black women are more likely than white women to intend to major in STEM. Her research shows that black women hold weaker gender-STEM stereotypes than white women, helping explain that difference.

O’Brien also pointed to research by psychologists Monica Biernat and Amanda Sesko about bias favoring male computer engineers. This bias was found only when undergraduates evaluated fictitious white, but not black, employees. Black women were instead evaluated similarly compared to white men.

In one large nationally representative experiment, gender bias in STEM was even reversed by race and ethnicity. STEM faculty responded less often to emails from white female than white male prospective graduate students. However, STEM faculty consistently responded more often to Hispanic women than Hispanic men.

O’Brien emphasized these data are complex. For instance, even though black women start out in college more interested in STEM than white women, black women may face unique barriers such as race-based stereotypes to completing college with a STEM degree. In her current research, O’Brien studies how the effects of interventions to bring girls into STEM may vary by race.

Thinking beyond ‘double jeopardy’

This research on intersectionality challenges the simple narrative that prejudices such as sexism and racism always combine to create “double jeopardy.” For instance, racial minority women can be rendered “invisible.” But this invisibility may also protect them in some cases by making them less prototypical targets of common forms of bias.

This research is still in its early stages. For instance, more studies are needed to test how evaluations of black female leaders found in small laboratory experiments generalize to real-world settings. Attendees at the SPSP conference also emphasized the need to develop theoretical frameworks that can help explain the nuanced results. The emerging data show that gender can interact with other social identities to shape perceptions and evaluations in complex and often surprising ways.


David Miller, Doctoral Student in Psychology, Northwestern University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.