The effects of short-term heterosexual privilege awareness on the evaluations of minority people

Privilege, or automatic unearned benefits, create group inequities that cause and perpetuate systems of disadvantage, oppression, and discrimination for those that lack these benefits (Case et al., 2012a; McIntosh, 1998). A large challenge of privilege studies is the tendency for the sole focus and conversation to be on the discrimination component of these systems from the view of the underprivileged, rather than examining the systems from the privileged perspective (Case et al., 2012a). LGBT+ people have continued to openly fight for equal rights in the United States and though much progress has been made, members of this underprivileged group still face rampant prejudice, discrimination, and inequities (Korn, 2020). This project examined the effectiveness of short-term interventions to engage privilege self-awareness, reduce homophobia, and employ behavioral intentions towards challenging systemic oppression in cisgender heterosexual identifying individuals. We recruited 105 undergraduate cisgenders, heterosexual participants for this study. Our findings illustrate those short-term interventions to elicit self-awareness of personal privileges as a dominant heterosexual person can be successful in leading to behavioral intentions to collective action towards challenging the systemic oppression experienced by non-heterosexual people. We also found correlations between being aware of one’s own heterosexual privileges and favorable perceptions of other underprivileged, minority groups. Further research is needed on the effects of raising heterosexual privilege self-awareness on perceptions towards other minority identities.Psychology & SociologyCollege of Liberal Art