Direct personal contact with gay people raises positive attitudes toward homosexuals generally

Evidence

I attribute this drop to many factors, such as a more sympathetic treatment of homosexuals in the media and more openness among homosexuals. (In Winnipeg, one of the best known city counsellors is openly gay, and he won his seat by an enormous majority in the last election.) To test the coming-out effect, I ran an experiment in 1985 with my own introductory students, in which I (falsely) told half of them I was gay and asked for their anonymous evaluations of me and homosexuals. Compared with those from the other half of my students, who got no such information, my personal ratings dropped some but ratings of homosexuals in general rose (EOF, pp. 226-230). — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3923

Categorization

• XREF: Pertinent to vault discussion of prejudice reduction and social-contact theory; also a methodological tie-in to Allport contact hypothesis claims wherever they appear.