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Our president has brought us many first – events that have
nudged the collective social psychological typography of our nation. President
Obama’s race, grassroots campaign, and prolific use of social media have shaped subtle changes in how we interact with the political
system and each other.
Last week brought another first. Speaking in support of
same-sex marriage, Obama acknowledged and gave his voice to a divisive social
issue. Simultaneously, for the first time in our country’s history, despite North Carolina’s marriage amendment, the number of people favoring same-sex marriage has outnumbered those who oppose it. As a moral psychology researcher, I ask,
“Why?” “What has changed to pave the way for these shifts?” Maybe more
importantly, “Why is it that we are still so divided on this issue?”
While work on out-group prejudice is pertinent here, another
interesting and related line of research examines our basic responses to
homosexuality. I want to preface my summaries of these studies by noting that
most of their participants are heterosexual. We have to keep this in mind when
making any inferences to the population at large. Secondly, many researchers
use terms such as “taboo” and “unusual” to refer to homosexual acts. It is
difficult for these words not to hurt, but they are meant to be value-free and
purely descriptive terms. They refer not to the researcher’s opinion, but to
society’s unfortunate views and to the (perhaps underestimated) relative
frequency of homosexual acts in our culture.
Research
shows that our emotional reactions to acts that break society’s moral codes are
strong - we feel anger at injustice, contempt for those that break norms of
rank, and disgust towards acts seem impure or sexually deviant (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999).
Disgust has also been historically
associated with members of outgroups and may have served as a way for us
to maintain distance from those whose trustworthiness isn’t clear – those that
belong to a different group. This reaction, then, is often an outdated vestige from a time when we didn't travel far from small groups of people who looked and thought like us.
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One component may be our shift in values. While some
individuals may still feel uneasy towards homosexual acts, we are able to
reappraise or dampen this emotional response. We can take a step back and
realize that our initial reactions to situations are not informative or
reflective of our values. I propose this reappraisal hypothesis with colleagues
in a forthcoming paper.
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Another interesting question is why our values are shifting.
Here, I want to step out of my research slippers and propose one mechanism. Disgust towards
homosexuality wanes with increased exposure of physical acts between same-sex
partners, whether through media, brave friends who have come out about their
sexual orientation, or strangers on the street. I live in San Francisco, where
I often find myself walking behind a lesbian couple holding hands or see two
men share an affectionate peck in a restaurant. My daughter will grow up with
this as the norm. She will have a more representative view of people’s
sexuality. Perhaps her generation will have no explicit or implicit negative
association with homosexuality. In other words, with this shift, not only will
people be better able to reappraise their discomfort, they may stop feeling it
entirely.
These social shifts are truly thrilling to watch and I hope
you are now somewhat better armed to understand your own and others’ opinions
these social issues.
Inbar Y, Pizarro DA, Knobe J, & Bloom P (2009). Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays. Emotion, 9 (3), 435-9 PMID: 19485621
Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D., & Bloom, P. (2009). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals Cognition & Emotion, 23 (4), 714-725 DOI: 10.1080/02699930802110007
I think it often doesn't even take sight of a physical act between same-sex partners to reduce prejudice. I can think of plenty examples where someone dead-set against same-sex marriage has come round because they just *met* some gay people for the first time, spoke to them, and realised that they were normal human beings with quite domestic hopes and dreams.
ReplyDeleteProbably a shift in demographics. The hard core of opponents are Evangelicals, Mormons and such, and Mexicans and others immigrating to America just aren't that conservative.
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