What's love got to do with it? Sexual prejudice predicts unitization of men in same-sex romantic relationships☆

Abstract We hypothesized that perceivers high in sexual prejudice would fail to unitize romantically involved men into a single mental representation, instead of perceiving the men as separate individuals. Two studies provided support for our hypothesis. In Study 1, sexual prejudice predicted perceptions of compatibility, intimacy, emotional satisfaction, and temporal stability for couples described as same-sex male but not for couples described as opposite sex. In Study 2, participants completed a modified who-said-what task in which men of two different same-sex couples presented facts about their relationships. Those low, versus high, in sexual prejudice committed significantly more within-couple relative to between-couple errors in their ascriptions, indicating that prejudice negatively predicted categorization along the dimension of couple. These results have important implications for how those high in sexual prejudice form impressions of same-sex couples and, ultimately, for how prejudiced attitudes affect mental representations of romantic couples.