Sexual Prejudice in Europe. Comparative Perspectives

This dissertation sets off to advance the understanding of the sources of sexual prejudice in Europe by taking a comparative perspective. By taking a country-comparative perspective, the first two studies of this dissertation aim at advancing the understanding of how individual-level and country-level sources interact in determining between-country differences of sexual prejudice in Europe. Therefore, we combine well-established research traditions on individual-level and contextual level antecedents of sexual prejudice and analyzed their joint effect on sexual prejudice cross-nationally. As a contextual antecedent of peoples’ sexual prejudice, we focus on the legal manifestations of sexual stigma which we found to predict between-country differences in sexual prejudice. In both studies, progressive policies on homosexuality resulted in lower average levels of sexual prejudice across large sets of countries. Moreover, we address in how far laws regulating homosexuality interact with intergroup friendship and values respectively in shaping sexual prejudice in Europe. We found intergroup friendship to buffer the effect of laws in explaining sexual prejudice. In addition, we found the legal regulation of homosexuality to be associated with weaker effects of universalism and conservation on sexual prejudice, whereas universalism and power values affected individuals’ sexual prejudice independent of the legal manifestations of sexual stigma. We learned from these studies that the legal context shapes sexual prejudice both directly as well as indirectly by interacting with individual-level characteristics. Thus, combining well-established research traditions on both the contextual and individual-level turned out to be a promising approach in advancing the knowledge on the antecedents of sexual prejudice. By taking an outgroup-comparative perspective, the third study of this dissertation aims at contributing to the knowledge about the sources and differences of sexual prejudice in the context of and in comparison to prejudices to other outgroups and their common and diverging value-based motivations in Germany. To add to the knowledge on the co-occurrence of prejudice to different outgroups, we set off to analyze common and target-group specific motivations of six different kinds of outgroup prejudice by focusing on its relation to basic human values. From this study we learned that being based in a larger syndrome called group focused enmity (GFE), prejudice to these six outgroups is indeed interrelated while the strength of the association differed. Additionally, given these diverging relations within the GFE syndrome, we found prejudice to these different outgroups to share rather similar motivations as reflected in basic human values. Yet, we also found target-specific deviations