Disentangling Gender-Based Attitudes from Sexuality-Based Attitude: The Person-Based Approach to Measuring Implicit Attitudes Toward Gay Men and Lesbian Women

In this paper, we present the person-based approach to measuring implicit attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women-this approach uses face stimuli rather than traditionally used symbols, and creates salient social categories through contextual variation techniques. Across 5 experiments using the Go/No Go Association Task (n = 364), we present evidence that the person-based approach can disentangle implicit gender-based attitudes from implicit sexuality-based attitudes, that these attitudes vary as a function of participant gender and sexuality, and that they are different to attitudes elicited by typically used stimuli. We demonstrate that implicit person-based gender attitudes toward straight and gay people are similar and are consistent with the literature (i.e. attitudes toward [lesbian] women are more positive than attitudes toward [gay] men). However, we reveal a reversed pattern of findings for person-based implicit sexuality attitudes (i.e. attitudes toward gay men are more positive than attitudes toward lesbian women). These findings suggest that the person-based approach uniquely captures nuanced implicit attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, raising important questions regarding previous findings.