Implicit attitudes in sexuality: gender differences

This study examined the role of gender in both implicit and explicit attitudes toward sexuality. Implicit attitudes are judgments or evaluations of social objects that are automatically activated, often without the individual's conscious awareness of the causation. In contrast, explicit attitudes are judgments or evaluations that are well established in awareness. As described in Oliver and Hyde's (1993) meta-analysis of self-report (explicit) data, women report greater negative attitudes toward sexuality than do men. In the current study, we used the Sexual Opinion Survey (SOS) developed by Fisher, Byrne, White, and Kelley (1988) to index explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) developed by Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998) to index implicit attitudes. Research has demonstrated that the IAT reveals attitudes that participants may be reluctant to express. Independent variables examined were participant gender, social acceptability of sexual words, and order of associated evaluations in the IAT (switching from positive to negative evaluations or the reverse). The IAT data revealed a significant Order x Gender interaction that showed that women had more negative implicit attitudes toward sexuality than did men. There was also a significant Order x Acceptability interaction, indicating that implicit attitudes were more strongly revealed when the sexual words used in the IAT were more socially unacceptable. As expected, on the SOS, women had more negative explicit attitudes toward sexuality. There was no significant correlation between explicit and implicit attitudes. These data suggest that at both automatic (implicit) and controlled (explicit) levels of attitudes, women harbor more negative feelings toward sex than do men.