Date of Award

5-14-2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

Advisor(s)

Sara Burke

Keywords

Christianity, gay/lesbian identity, intersectionality, prejudice

Abstract

Gay and lesbian people experience anti-queer bias from various social groups, including Christians (Whitley, 2009). Despite this work, no social psychologists to our knowledge have investigated how gay/lesbian Christians (a sexual minority and religious majority group with two intersecting, “conflicting” identities) are evaluated by non-religious gay/lesbian people and cisgender heterosexual Christians, two groups who each share one identity with gay/lesbian Christians. We recruited subsamples of non-religious gay/lesbian people (n = 175) and cisgender heterosexual Christians (n = 211) and found that, in addition to evaluating their own group (“complete ingroups”) more positively than outgroups (Hypotheses 1 and 2), these subsamples evaluated gay/lesbian Christians differently. Additionally, we examined three reasons (intergroup conflict, stereotypic inferences about political ideology, and identity incompatibility) that we believed were relevant to participants’ evaluation patterns. Our results showed that these variables were associated with participants’ evaluations of gay/lesbian Christians and their “complete outgroups.” Political ideology may help explain cases where participants evaluated gay/lesbian Christians differently from their complete outgroups. However, additional causal evidence is needed to further support this claim. Taken together, we believe that the present work is a novel first step in examining how two “opposing” groups evaluate a group at the intersection of their identities. We discuss practical implications and future directions for future research.

Access

Open Access

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