Platow, Michael J., Knight, Clinton G., Van Rooy, Dirk, Augoustinos, Martha, Bar-Tal, Daniel, and Spears, Russell (2023) “We’re tolerant and they’re prejudiced”: Same-sex marriage supporters’ and opponents’ perceptions of supportive and oppositional claims. PLOS ONE, 18 (8). e0286063.

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Abstract

The current research examined the proposition that debates over same-sex marriage are characterized, at least in part, by conflicting understandings about what is and is not prejudiced, normative and true. Toward this end, Australians’ (N = 415) prejudice judgements of supportive and oppositional statements toward same-sex marriage were measured and analysed with analyses of variance. Unsurprisingly, same-sex marriage supporters perceived a supportive statement as unprejudiced, tolerant, truthful, in pursuit of individual liberty, and normative; oppositional statements were seen in precisely the opposite manner. Same-sex marriage opponents, however, disagreed, instead judging an oppositional statement as unprejudiced, tolerant, truthful, in pursuit of individual liberty, and normative; it was a supportive statement that was seen as relatively prejudiced. These effects remained even after controlling for independent expressions of in-group favouritism. The current data align with a collective naïve realism perspective, in which group members see their own views as veridical and those of disagreeing others as biased. We argue that prejudice-reduction efforts must be instantiated to facilitate a common in-group identity between supporters and opponents to enable consensus over facts and, ultimately, what is and is not prejudice. Without this consensus, each side of the political debate may simply hurl the pejorative label of “prejudice” against the other, with likely little opportunity for social influence and social change.

Item ID:	80239
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1932-6203
Copyright Information:	Copyright: © 2023 Platow et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Date Deposited:	05 Sep 2023 23:02
FoR Codes:	52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5205 Social and personality psychology > 520505 Social psychology @ 100%
SEO Codes:	28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280121 Expanding knowledge in psychology @ 100%
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