Myths and Reality About Confronting Anti-Gay Prejudice: Who Confronts and Why (Not)?

There are lay theories about who would confront heterosexist prejudice, with people often citing women, educated, and liberals as being more likely to speak up. However, prior work is inconclusive about such predictors of confrontation. We tested which individual-level characteristics predict bystander confrontation, and what motivates or prevents straight individuals from confronting-focusing on socio-political ideology and gender. We conducted our study among Eastern-Southeastern Europeans (N = 132), and we employed a behavioral paradigm, where participants believed they witnessed and had an opportunity to confront anti-gay discrimination. We found 24% confrontation rate, which was not predicted by age, socioeconomic status, education level, or heterosexism. Moreover, we found that women or liberals were as likely to confront as men or conservatives were, respectively, however, their motivations and obstacles differed. Opposed to our prediction, men were not discouraged from confronting because of fear of being misidentified as gay, while as predicted, women were discouraged due to concerns about their assertiveness and efficacy. We also found that as predicted, liberals were encouraged to confront for equality/intergroup-oriented reasons, and conservatives were encouraged by individual/merit-oriented reasons. We suggest that intervention programs relying on personalized messages can be utilized to motivate confronting heterosexist prejudice along ideological lines.

The aversive bystander effect whereby egalitarian bystanders overestimate the confrontation of prejudice.

Everyday expression of prejudice continues to pose a social challenge across societies. We tend to assume that to the extent people are egalitarian, they are more likely to confront prejudice-but this might not necessarily be the case. We tested this assumption in two countries (US and Hungary) among majority members of society, using a behavioral paradigm for measuring confronting. Prejudice was directed at various outgroup minority individuals (African Americans, Muslims and Latinos in the US, and Roma in Hungary). Across four experiments (N = 1116), we predicted and found that egalitarian (anti-prejudiced) values were only associated with hypothetical confronting intentions, but not with actual confronting, and stronger egalitarians were more likely to overestimate their confronting than weaker egalitarians-to the point that while intentions differed, the actual confronting rate of stronger and weaker egalitarians were similar. We also predicted and found that such overestimation was associated with internal (and not external) motivation to respond without prejudice. We also identified behavioral uncertainty (being uncertain how to intervene) as a potential explanation for egalitarians' overestimation. The implications of these findings for egalitarians' self-reflection, intergroup interventions, and research are discussed.

The mother of violations: Motherhood as the primary expectation of women.

Recent conservative political rhetoric support women having careers but emphasize that this should not be an obstacle to having children. We propose that this sentiment reflects the hierarchy of gender norms in today's society whereby motherhood is the ultimate role that women are expected to fulfil and denying such role evokes social penalties, above and beyond other prescribed gender norms. Across five experiments (N = 738), we predicted and found that voluntarily childless women elicit more negative reactions than mothers, and importantly, also more than women violating other gender norms in the realm of occupation (Study 1), power (Study 2) or sexual orientation (Study 3). We demonstrate that these patterns cannot be explained merely by a perceived lack of communal qualities of the non-mothers (Study 4) and also show that involuntary childless women do not receive the same negativity (Study 5). We discuss this, often neglected, gender bias and its resistance to social change.