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Is Saying “No” to a Request a Subtle Form of Discrimination Against Lesbians and Gay Men? A Fresh Look at Old Findings

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Intergroup Helping

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Abstract

The chapter discusses previous field experiments using overt pro-social behaviour towards lesbians and gay men as an indication of (the absence of) prejudicial attitudes.

The review of previous research is restricted to studies in which actual helping behaviour has been observed (in contrast to self-reported behavioural intentions) and in which the participants are not aware of their behaviour being observed, such that self-presentation concerns are not relevant. The various research techniques differ considerably, for example, in terms of how experimental conditions are being established, or with regard to the degree to which the setting allows for anonymity (or publicity). Although the results of the studies support the notion of pro-social behaviour reflecting prejudiced attitudes, the experimental setup also allows for the results to be interpreted within the framework of social identity theory. Overall, the results suggest that the effect of sexual orientation on whether or not a request is being declined might have diminished over time, which corresponds to findings on sexual orientation attitudes obtained in survey studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Three further studies on rental discrimination were not included as they did not incorporate a straight condition (Page, 1998) or had a within-subject design (Ahmed, Andersson, & Hammarstedt, 2008; Ahmed & Hammarstedt, 2009) that resulted in a method of computing effect size that was different from all other studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institutt for Psykologi NTNU, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Ute Gabriel

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  1. Ute Gabriel
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Correspondence to Ute Gabriel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Organisational Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Esther van Leeuwen

  2. Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, United Kingdom

    Hanna Zagefka

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Gabriel, U. (2017). Is Saying “No” to a Request a Subtle Form of Discrimination Against Lesbians and Gay Men? A Fresh Look at Old Findings. In: van Leeuwen, E., Zagefka, H. (eds) Intergroup Helping. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53026-0_3

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