It’s a rather old subject but nonetheless still a current issue, the discrimination against homosexuals persons has diminish quite a bit but it didn’t disappeared. It is clear for the expert on the subject that the discrimination has evolved, from blatant discrimination to a more subtle form, thereby now introduced as : “modern discrimination”.
First of all in this subject it is important to specify the differences between discrimination, prejudice and stereotype. whereas discrimination is the behavior, the action of doing something wrong to someone else because they are part of a group. The prejudice is the negative attitude towards the person because they are part of a group. Finally the stereotypes refers to negative characteristics we may attribute to someone because they are part of a group. Fortunately it is undebatable that it is rather inconvenient moraly to test the discrimination directly because we do not want anyone to cause any harm, even if it’s for the sake of science. Although the correlation between attitudes and actual discrimination is not the best it’s also the best candidate for the job so we took it.
My thesis objective was to reduce prejudice through knowledge and emotion and a bit of manipulation. The idea was to find out if a small experimentation could make a difference. Spoiler alert, it was but I couldn’t test for the long term effect. My experimental program was, first to test the prejudice of the participants against the homosexuals community, it was only a matter of 3 minutes since there’s only 10 questions which they should answer from 1 “I strongly disagree” to 5 “I strongly agree”. Once the first test done, they were ask to watch a 4 minutes interview of a psychiatrist who’s answering questions often asked about homosexuality from an expert view. This first short video was more a cognitive appreciation of the homosexual community while the second focused on an emotionnal side. the second video aforementioned was 3 minutes long and was a cheerful video where you could see a lot of homosexual people being happy to finally be able to marry like heterosexual in the USA. The third step was optional, they could if they wanted compose a short writing for an association who host homosexual people who are forced out of their home by their parents because of their sexual orientation. Half of the participants choose to write something and the productions are awe-inspiring. The last part of the experiment was again the questionnaire to test if the prejudice would have been diminished.
I’m especially glad that I’ve been able to reduce prejudice by my experiment. I feel that I have killed two birds with one stone with my master thesis. It’s a great exercise and a required one to become a psychologist and furthermore I may have made few people less homophobic or more sympathetic towards the homosexual community at least at some degrees. To conclude i’ll finish with the thought that moved me the most and came to me naturally while working on this thesis : “There’s no more glorious fight than the fight for the freedom to love” .