Prejudice at the Intersection of Ambiguous and Obvious Groups: The Case of the Gay Black Man

We often think of stigmatized individuals as encountering only one stereotype set at a time. Yet, many individuals belong to multiple stigmatized groups, and stereotypes associated with these groups jointly influence how perceivers evaluate targets. Research suggests that perceivers integrate stereotypes about targets’ obvious identities during impression formation; however, no work has examined whether targets’ obvious (e.g., race) and ambiguous (e.g., sexual orientation) identities jointly influence impressions. Given that gay stereotypes are activated automatically, I expected the co-activation of contradictory Black (e.g., aggressive) and gay (e.g., warm) stereotypes to arouse conflict, weakening activation of negative stereotypes and improving evaluations of Black gay targets compared with Black straight targets. Participants in Study 1 rated faces of White straight men as more likable than White gay men, but rated Black gay men as more likable than Black straight men. Participants in Study 2 performed a race-categorization task designed to make race salient; nevertheless, sexual orientation still influenced impressions, producing a pattern similar to Study 1. Participants in Studies 3A (approach-avoidance task) and 3B (evaluative priming task) formed implicit impressions that converged with the explicit evaluations in Studies 1 and 2. In 3A, participants approaching Whites responded faster to straights than gays, whereas participants approaching Blacks responded faster to gays than straights. In 3B, participants recognized positive words somewhat (but not significantly) faster when primed with White straight (versus White gay) and Black gay (versus Black straight) faces. Studies 4A – C suggest that ambiguous categories modify the activation of obvious stereotypes, but do not make targets’ features look less prototypical of their obvious groups. In 4B, participants were slower to recognize Black-stereotypic words (piloted in 4A) when primed with Black gay (versus Black straight) faces. In 4C, participants rated Black straight and gay faces as similarly prototypical of Black phenotypes. Taken together, this work presents implications for stereotyping in the case of multiply-categorizable targets and for impression formation involving ambiguous categories.Ph