Attitudes Towards Homosexuals Among Heterosexual College Students: The Effect Of Imagined Contact

Many studies have found that people’s attitudes toward homosexuals being more and more positive. Using the self-report methods, these studies mainly focus on North America and European countries. But with the rise of implicit social cognition,the results of self-reports are questioned by the researchers, they think people being vulnerable by the impact of social-desirability bias, showing a tendency to cater to the investigators. However, at present, few studies use implicit methods to measure people’s attitudes towards homosexuals. A small amount of these studies almost all used IAT research paradigm. IAT paradigm has many advantages, but it is a kind of comparative measures of implicit attitudes, can not directly reflect what do people hold attitudes(negative, neutral or positive). Furthermore, because of different genders, homosexuals are divided into gay males and lesbians, and people may have different attitudes for them, but lack of measures to assess them separately in China.In order to solve the shortage of the above, in study 1 we aim to accurately measure heterosexual college students’ attitudes towards gays and lesbians by a single category implicit association test(SC-IAT) and explicit measures, and examined the difference in gender, origin and contact experience, also the relationship between explicit attitude and implicit attitude. Participants reported negative explicit attitude and implicit attitude towards homosexuals, no significant differences on implicit attitude towards gays and lesbians, but explicit attitude, for lesbian with a more positive. There being difference of explicit attitude towards homosexuals in gender,origin and contact experience, but implicit attitude did not different. Implicit attitude displayed a non-significant low correlation with explicit attitude.The purpose to measure attitudes is not only investigating the attitudes, but also intervene the possible negative attitudes, to reduce its adverse effects. Lately,researchers have turned their attention to indirect forms of imagine contact. While few studies have examined the impact of imagined contact on attitudes towards homosexuals, and the results were inconsistent. In study 2, we investigated the efficacy of imagined contact in improving attitudes towards male homosexuals on both explicit and implicit measures. 2(group: imagined interaction, imagined control)× 3(time: immediately, one day, one week) of the mix design of experiment,significant differences were found between the imagined conditions for explicitattitude, but not implicit attitude, the effect lasted one week.According to the results, we now say that in the context of Chinese culture,heterosexual college students’ attitudes towards homosexuals are negative. At least,the imaginary contact can be used as a kind of effective interventions on explicit attitude.