Research On The Explicit And Implicit Attitudes Of Heterosexual University Students Towards Homosexuality And The Interference Strategies

The traditional attitudes toward homosexuality mostly pay attention to their apparent cognition process. But only focus on apparent cognition process is insufficient. A series of research reveled that implicit social cognition process also plays important role in their attitudes'formation and changing. This dissertation has done several experiments on the explicit and implicit attitudes of heterosexual university students towards homosexuality and the subliminal interference strategy. This dissertation consists two studies.The purpose of study 1 is to investigate the explicit and implicit attitudes of heterosexual university students towards homosexuality and the relationship between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes. Study 1 use a Likert-type scale as a tool to measure their attitudes toward homosexuality, use an implicit association test as a tool to measure their implicit attitudes. The purpose of study 2 is to investigate the interference strategies of heterosexuality university students'explicit and implicit attitudes towards homosexuality. One software for Interference is composed following the principle of Evaluative Conditioning and Subliminal Persuasion, and another software for Interference is composed following the principle of Evaluative Conditioning and Consciousness Subliminal.The subjects of this study are 126 heterosexuality university students.The result of this dissertation shows:(1) For explicit attitudes heterosexual university students showed as expected positeve attitudes, and for implicit attitudes they showed neutral attitudes.(2) Heterosexuality university students'explicit attitudes towards homosexuality had greater individual differences. On the other side, heterosexual university students' implicit attitudes towards homosexuality had smaller individual differences.(3) Quite part of the heterosexual university student's explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes towards homosexuality is inconsistent. In regards to the attitudes of heterosexual university students towards homosexuality, explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes are not related. The research indicated that to obtain heterosexual university students'true attitudes to homosexuality must test explicit attitudes as well as implicit attitudes.(4) Intervention of Evaluative Conditioning and Consciousness Persuasion is not signifficant in decreasing the explicit attitudes towards homosexuality, but significant in decreasing the implicit attitudes towards homosexuality. Intervention of Evaluative conditioning and Subliminal Persuasion is signifficant in decreasing both the explicit and implicit attitudes towards homosexuality.