Facilitating and Inhibiting Factors for Self-Reports of Same-Gender Attraction in Cisgender Heterosexual-Identifying Women and Men

Abstract

We sought to identify psychosocial predictors of homoerotic motivations (viz., same-gender attraction) in heterosexual identifying cisgender women and men. We recruited participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to complete measures of (a) antipathy towards lesbians and gay men, (b) gender role beliefs, (c) felt-pressure to conform to gender stereotypes, and (d) openness to experience. In Study 1, we found that same-gender attraction was (a) negatively related to antipathy towards same-gender homosexual targets and (b) positively related to felt-pressure to conform to gender stereotypes for both women and men. In Study 2, both effects replicated for men at p < .05, but women only showed the antipathy effect at p < .05, even while the felt-pressure effect size was similar to that in Study 1. Additionally, men showed a significant negative relationship between openness and same-gender attraction. Thus, both anti-gay attitudes and felt-pressure to conform to gender stereotypes appear to be reliably associated with same-gender attraction.