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"Proof" that homophobia is associated with homosexual arousal.

Started by Kai, December 09, 2011, 05:35:08 PM

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Kai

http://www.politicususa.com/en/proof-that-homophobia-is-associated-with-homosexual-arousal

Proof in quotes of course because that only exists in maths. I'd say that this is strong evidence.

And it's strong evidence for something we here probably take for granted, that homophobia is mostly internalized homophobia linked to homosexual tendencies. I'm happy to have some numerical evidence to that general hypothesis, though. Increase in penis circumference is a nice, unbiased estimator of arousal. Of course, arousal can happen for many reasons, not just sexual ones, so it's interesting that none of the non-homophobic men had any response to the homosexual erotica. I'd like to see a larger replicated study with closer to 100 participants in both control and treatment groups, but I wonder if this is unnecessary. Plus, this study is over 10 years old; you would think that if the methods were to be called into question they would have been already. I'd also like to see it done with a control group of homosexual men, to see if their arousal difference is symmetrical to that of heterosexual men, but that's an entirely different thing.

Is there anyone who has experience with psychological experimentation and can access the full article?


ETA: Cock and repost.
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BabylonHoruv

I thought I remembered a study that found that homosexual men are more likely to be aroused by erotic images of females than heterosexual men are by images of males but I don't remember where. I'm pretty sure that has been trotted out by some of the "gay is a choice" fuckers though.
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The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: BabylonHoruv on December 09, 2011, 06:32:20 PM
I thought I remembered a study that found that homosexual men are more likely to be aroused by erotic images of females than heterosexual men are by images of males but I don't remember where. I'm pretty sure that has been trotted out by some of the "gay is a choice" fuckers though.


Shut the fuck up.
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BabylonHoruv

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 09, 2011, 09:39:41 PM
Quote from: BabylonHoruv on December 09, 2011, 06:32:20 PM
I thought I remembered a study that found that homosexual men are more likely to be aroused by erotic images of females than heterosexual men are by images of males but I don't remember where. I'm pretty sure that has been trotted out by some of the "gay is a choice" fuckers though.


Shut the fuck up.

:fap:
You're a special case, Babylon.  You are offensive even when you don't post.

Merely by being alive, you make everyone just a little more miserable

-Dok Howl

Kai

Quote from: BabylonHoruv on December 09, 2011, 06:32:20 PM
I thought I remembered a study that found that homosexual men are more likely to be aroused by erotic images of females than heterosexual men are by images of males but I don't remember where. I'm pretty sure that has been trotted out by some of the "gay is a choice" fuckers though.

Your bullshit antecdote is bullshit.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia Dissection
Grand Visser of the Six Legged Class
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Elder Iptuous

i haven't dug into the study at hand, but when i got to the point where they grouped their subjects into 'homophobic' v. 'nonhomophobic' i became interested because they used as their measure the "Index of Homophobia".
I eagerly took the quiz to see how they handled what i consider to be a .... tricky term.
i gotta say, i wasn't really impressed, and after that the study that relied on it as a ruler immediately became tl;dr.

Here's direct link to the quiz.
Am i alone in thinking this test to be seriously lacking?

BabylonHoruv

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on December 10, 2011, 02:33:06 AM
Quote from: BabylonHoruv on December 09, 2011, 06:32:20 PM
I thought I remembered a study that found that homosexual men are more likely to be aroused by erotic images of females than heterosexual men are by images of males but I don't remember where. I'm pretty sure that has been trotted out by some of the "gay is a choice" fuckers though.

Your bullshit antecdote is bullshit.

Found link to study.

Is not bullshit.

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/126/3/252.short

I suspect that the reason for the results is that heterosexuals are culturally conditioned to find homosexual material repellent while the reverse is not true of homosexuals.
You're a special case, Babylon.  You are offensive even when you don't post.

Merely by being alive, you make everyone just a little more miserable

-Dok Howl

Richter

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on December 09, 2011, 05:35:08 PM
http://www.politicususa.com/en/proof-that-homophobia-is-associated-with-homosexual-arousal

Proof in quotes of course because that only exists in maths. I'd say that this is strong evidence.

And it's strong evidence for something we here probably take for granted, that homophobia is mostly internalized homophobia linked to homosexual tendencies. I'm happy to have some numerical evidence to that general hypothesis, though. Increase in penis circumference is a nice, unbiased estimator of arousal. Of course, arousal can happen for many reasons, not just sexual ones, so it's interesting that none of the non-homophobic men had any response to the homosexual erotica. I'd like to see a larger replicated study with closer to 100 participants in both control and treatment groups, but I wonder if this is unnecessary. Plus, this study is over 10 years old; you would think that if the methods were to be called into question they would have been already. I'd also like to see it done with a control group of homosexual men, to see if their arousal difference is symmetrical to that of heterosexual men, but that's an entirely different thing.

Is there anyone who has experience with psychological experimentation and can access the full article?


ETA: Cock and repost.

Right off the bat with the second link, I'd wonder at their segregation of "Homophobic" or "non Homophobic" men in the study.  It's a solid bitch to quantify and opinion via scientific method, and self - report of that sort of thing is unreliable, since it's a socially loaded issue. 
Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 22, 2015, 03:00:53 AM
Anyone ever think about how Richter inhabits the same reality as you and just scream and scream and scream, but in a good way?   :lulz:

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Telarus

Ok, but lts see what happens when the error that may have been included swings results to the extreme.

We either have A) a bunch of men who pretended to be heterosexual homophobes (for their own reasons), this inflating that poolsize and interfering with results (some could have been legit homosexual   ??? I don't know why either)..... or B) the 'homophobes' pool was self-selecting in that only homophobic men who have sexual response to homosexual images are willing to claim that they are homophobes on a scientific survey... both of which are nonsense...
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Triple Zero

Quote from: Iptuous on December 10, 2011, 03:30:11 AM
i haven't dug into the study at hand, but when i got to the point where they grouped their subjects into 'homophobic' v. 'nonhomophobic' i became interested because they used as their measure the "Index of Homophobia".
I eagerly took the quiz to see how they handled what i consider to be a .... tricky term.
i gotta say, i wasn't really impressed, and after that the study that relied on it as a ruler immediately became tl;dr.

Here's direct link to the quiz.
Am i alone in thinking this test to be seriously lacking?

Doesn't seem that bad, IMO (actually in hindsight it looks like a pretty shitty test indeed, but read on!) Looks like your average standardized psychometric test? What do you consider lacking about it?

My criticisms, also after asking my dad-- who is a neuropsychologist, uses these types of tests a lot, but only responsibly as either a guide to further inquiry or therapeutic aid (it can help the patient find their problem points).

- They ask the subject to score themselves after filling in the test, this is going to cause all sorts of completely preventable errors in the results (bias from cheating and noise from counting erorrs), just because the researchers were too lazy to do it. I can't access the study, does it say in their methodology that this is actually how they did it? Because that's very sloppy, IMO.

- Interpretation of the total score (see below).

But I'm guessing that your problem with this test is more about the actual questions themselves? In the sense of "I'm not homophobic but I'm still scoring on some of these questions"? (apologies if I'm mistaken, and FYI I don't believe you're homophobic either ;-) ).

Because that doesn't really matter as much as you'd expect :) See, there's 25 questions with results 1-5, giving a total score between 25-125.

A proper psychometric test then compares these scores to several norm groups. Usually these are university students (for ease of data gathering), highschool students (another popular choice), random population samples (very important), but also specific groups (male/female, age, psychiatric disorders, etc).

This total score is the sum of many random variables. They're independent (w.r.t. a single subject), have finite mean and are even roughly identically distributed, so the Central Limit Theorem applies and you can model the total score as a Normal distribution (there's a few technical snags I won't go into, but it works really well).

With that you can calculate the normalized score of a subject w.r.t. each norm group by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation of each norm group.

And then you can say things like "the subject has mostly negative feelings about queers with respect to a norm group of random people from Boston", or something.

Now I see they don't do this. They interpret the score in classes of 25-50, 50-100 and 100-125 (introducing yet another small but unnecessary error by having a 1-point overlap ambiguity :roll:), which has the "neutral" group twice as large as the others, so that's kinda like a normal distribution, but only if their test questions are incredibly cunningly selected (w.r.t. an unknown norm group which we'll assume to be a large random US population sample) to have a mean of exactly 75 and a carefully tweaked standard deviation so that 25 points from the mean is a descriptive discrimination cut-off.

Yeah and I don't believe they did that. Not given the other errors they made.

And there's no reason at all to assume the mean for any reasonable norm group would lie exactly in the middle of the 25-100 point range. No idea whether it should be higher or lower, btw.

In a sense that could be solved by picking exactly the right questions, but saying "the questions aint right" is the wrong way to go about it because you're never going to get them exactly right because it's very subjective.

That's why it's better to make up a whole bunch of questions that try to neatly span the range and measure *something*, then normalize it with respect to some carefully chosen norm groups. Which takes hard work and effort, but it's deterministic, objective, methodical and scientific.

One thing I believe is that they should at least have divided groups into male and female, because I think there would be some significant differences, at least because of the way lesbian sex vs male-male sex is regarded socio-culturally. There are some other subgroups I'd like them to have considered (age, religion, self-described sexual preference, relationship status, might have been interesting), but male/female seems a pretty significant one to miss.
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Elder Iptuous

i think you hit the primary concerns i had.
i think the problems that i had with any specific questions were based on the lack of division into groups which leads to the situation where you're thinking, 'i know what they're getting at, but it doesn't really apply in this case... i guess i'll pick neutral.'

oh. also. the answer set they have i think is poor.  when they say 'neutral', does that imply that you're ambivalent?  like the first question where they say 'i'd be comfortable working closely with a gay coworker'... i'm completely ambivalent regarding this.  i'm really quite neutral on the subject.  so should i choose 'neutral'?  and then would that imply that if i were to choose 'strongly agree', that i would actually be excited about my new, gay work partner because of the fact that they're gay?
if you were completely ambivalent in all regards, you would put 3 on each answer giving yourself a score of 75, which according to the scoring, seems to indicate that you have some antipathy towards gays. so obviously this isn't what they intended.  would a simple binary answer choice ameliorate this ambiguity?

also. i was under the impression that these normalized tests usually had a much longer question set with many questions that seem to ask the same thing with slightly different wording to wipe out some error.  this thing seemed pretty quick to tell me that i secretly have some issues with gay people.

and, i know you say that you can't get upset by saying 'the questions ain't right!', but...... the questions ain't right.
for instance, it asks if i would be disappointed if my child turned out to be gay.  Yes. i would.  their life would be harder.  people would throw shit at them for it till the day they died.  there are legal hurdles.  it would make it less likely that i would pass on my Y.  So, yes. i would be disappointed.  I don't believe this indicates 'negative feelings towards gays', however. i wouldn't begrudge them being gay.  i wouldn't feel that i failed them (as asked in another question).  i wouldn't be angry at fate or god or whatever that this 'befell' them.
i believe that their inclusion of questions like this tells me more about the mindset of the test makers than my answer would tell them about me.  the implication that if i don't put 'strongly disagree' on disappointment with child being gay indicates negative feelings towards gays gives me the impression of someone willfully dismissive of realities in favor of an ideal

with a topic as charged, politicized, and personal as this, it seems that test like this would have to have so many asterisks as to render it pointless.
i guess that's my point.

Triple Zero

Quote from: Iptuous on December 10, 2011, 04:32:17 PMi think the problems that i had with any specific questions were based on the lack of division into groups which leads to the situation where you're thinking, 'i know what they're getting at, but it doesn't really apply in this case... i guess i'll pick neutral.'

oh. also. the answer set they have i think is poor.  when they say 'neutral', does that imply that you're ambivalent?  like the first question where they say 'i'd be comfortable working closely with a gay coworker'... i'm completely ambivalent regarding this.  i'm really quite neutral on the subject.  so should i choose 'neutral'?  and then would that imply that if i were to choose 'strongly agree', that i would actually be excited about my new, gay work partner because of the fact that they're gay?

No, that's not what the question means. But given the fact that you're reasonably intelligent and still got it wrong, means that they should have worded the question much, much clearer.

First step,what I've seen quite often in such tests is instead of "neutral", they call the middle option "don't agree/don't disagree".

They're asking about your agreement with the statement "I'd be comfortable working closely with a gay coworker."

So if you "strongly agree" with that statement, it means that you'd "strongly agree" with someone who'd describe your feelings about working closely with that coworker as "comfortable".

If you say "neutral", or rather "don't agree/don't disagree", you'd actually be saying "I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable with a gay coworker".

But the fact that this confused you means the question's not right.

Quoteif you were completely ambivalent in all regards, you would put 3 on each answer giving yourself a score of 75, which according to the scoring, seems to indicate that you have some antipathy towards gays. so obviously this isn't what they intended.  would a simple binary answer choice ameliorate this ambiguity?

Not necessarily. The only way to prevent ambiguity is to put in the work to try out the tests among testing groups and see if there's questions that consistently give fuzzy answers, and/or to ask random people to speak aloud and comment while making the test, etc etc, so you can find the "bugs".

Binary answers do make some of the statistics involved a bit simpler.

Quotealso. i was under the impression that these normalized tests usually had a much longer question set with many questions that seem to ask the same thing with slightly different wording to wipe out some error.  this thing seemed pretty quick to tell me that i secretly have some issues with gay people.

I agree that it's kind of short, but the type you describe with the different wordings usually scores character traits along several axes, like "cognitive", "physical", etc. This one just checks for one thing, so it doesn't need to be that big.

Especially since the score finally is only used to differentiate between three groups (negative, neutral and positive), I think they could have made a reasonably accurate test with only 25 questions, if they had designed it better. The advantage of a shorter test is of course also that it's easier and quicker to take. I mean, maybe you could go up to 50, but I can imagine people could feel a bit "are you for real", if they had to take a test with 100 questions just to determine their level of homophobia! :)

Quoteand, i know you say that you can't get upset by saying 'the questions ain't right!', but...... the questions ain't right.

Well, you can't get upset by that, if I said so.

Quotefor instance, it asks if i would be disappointed if my child turned out to be gay.  Yes. i would.  their life would be harder.  people would throw shit at them for it till the day they died.  there are legal hurdles.  it would make it less likely that i would pass on my Y.  So, yes. i would be disappointed.  I don't believe this indicates 'negative feelings towards gays', however. i wouldn't begrudge them being gay.  i wouldn't feel that i failed them (as asked in another question).  i wouldn't be angry at fate or god or whatever that this 'befell' them.
i believe that their inclusion of questions like this tells me more about the mindset of the test makers than my answer would tell them about me.  the implication that if i don't put 'strongly disagree' on disappointment with child being gay indicates negative feelings towards gays gives me the impression of someone willfully dismissive of realities in favor of an ideal

Mmyeah. I think this is because of two reasons:

1. The question statement could have been more accurately worded as "I would be disappointed in my child if they turned out to be gay." strongle agree/agree/don't agree don't disagree/disagree/strongly disagree.

2. You're overthinking this, IMO it's really kinda obvious they meant the above and not "I would be disappointed for my child's life which might be hard" or anything.

Quotewith a topic as charged, politicized, and personal as this, it seems that test like this would have to have so many asterisks as to render it pointless.
i guess that's my point.

Well, I believe it could be done right. But this particular test isn't.
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Elder Iptuous

Good points.

Quote from: Triple Zero on December 11, 2011, 02:34:01 PM
...IMO it's really kinda obvious they meant...
That, i think, is the crux of the matter.
this test if chock full of the above, and i'd be pretty darned impressed if a test were able to be constructed that wasn't, given the subject matter.
too vague, too charged, too politicized, too personal.
seems anathema to real science to me.

ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞

Quote from: Iptuous on December 11, 2011, 09:15:10 PM
Good points.

Quote from: Triple Zero on December 11, 2011, 02:34:01 PM
...IMO it's really kinda obvious they meant...
That, i think, is the crux of the matter.
this test if chock full of the above, and i'd be pretty darned impressed if a test were able to be constructed that wasn't, given the subject matter.
too vague, too charged, too politicized, too personal.
seems anathema to real science to me.

Nah, that seems more like your defense mechanisms are just trying to disregard any uncomfortable truths that this study is bringing up for you.

Even if it was designed to prove a political point, homophobes still had to supply an erection in response to gay sex.

There's no manufacturing that.
P E R   A S P E R A   A D   A S T R A

Elder Iptuous

:)  i expected this a bit sooner.
please spell out the uncomfortable truths for me?