A Study On The Relationship Between High School Students’ Attitudes To Same-gender Intimacy And Their Implicit Gender Stereotypes

Both sexes, male and female, in different social contexts, have differentrules and requirements, so they have different interpersonal behaviors: peersbetween men are more concerned about the participation of the common tasks,and rarely show intimacy; peers between women, asking for moredependency and emotional care, makes it more intimated. Thus it leads to thedifference between same-sex intimacy: the intimacy between men, are morelikely to shake hands or walk shoulder to shoulder; while that between womenis more of holding hands. And these intimated behaviors, are also influencedby the stereotype of sex roles in the specific social background.For the high school students, being in the physically and mentallytransitional period, is very important to the idea of sex, which develops themale and female stereotypes relevant to the society’s sex idea.By experiment, this research aims at understanding the high schoolstudents’ attitudes to the same-sexed intimacy (from two levels of explicitnessand implicitness), how the sex roles are stereotyped, and at the same timestudying the possible relationships in between. The research is studied withtwo experiments: experiment one with2(test gender: male, female)×2(target gender: Male-Male, Female-Female)×3(intimated behaviors type:holding hands, shoulder to shoulder, kissing)–is a mixed paper experimentaldesign, studying the explicit attitude of same-sexed intimacy, and applyingLAT to study the implicit sex stereotype; and Experiment two, with IAT, itstudies the implicit attitude of homosexual intimacy, and with SEB (rigidinterpretation of deviation), it studies the internal and implicit gender rolestereotypes.With the results of the two experiments, the study indicates the followingconclusions: (1)The high school students’ explicit attitudes towards same-sexedintimacy are influenced by the participants’ gender, the targets’’ gender andthe types of intimated behaviors. As a result, intimated behaviors of the samesex are not accepted by the male participants; intimated behaviors betweenmales are not accepted by the high school students; shoulder to shoulder ismore accepted than holding hands or kissing, while kissing is not acceptableat all. And also, there are two exchanging interactions. One is between theparticipants’’ gender and the types of the intimated behaviors, say shoulder toshoulder between men and holding hands between women are moreacceptable, while the opposite is not. And the other exchanging interaction isbetween the participants’’ gender, the targets’’ gender and the types ofintimated behaviors. The female participants’ acceptance does not differ in theshoulder to shoulder between man to man or woman to woman, nor does itdiffer in the shoulder to shoulder or holding hands between women. While themale participants are more acceptable to shoulder to shoulder between menand holding hands between women.(2)High school students’ implicit attitude towards same-sexed intimacyis affected by the gender of the participants. Comparatively, male participantsare not willing to accept the intimated behaviors between the same gender.(3)The stereotype of the implicit sex role is obvious in high schoolstudents.(Based on the study of the stereotype of the Chinese universitystudents in1999by QIAN MING YI, etc). And for the stereotype of the man,to the male participants it is more fixed than that of the female participants.(4)The more fixed the high school students’ stereotype of implicit sexrole, the more unacceptable of the intimated behaviors between the samegender.