When Ideology Contradicts Self-Interest: Conservative Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage Among Sexual Minorities—A Commentary on Pinsof and Haselton (2016)

In a clever move to explain the political divide over same-sex marriage, Pinsof and Haselton (2016) demonstrated that adopting a short-term mating strategy and endorsing stereotypes of sexual minorities as promiscuous (and therefore threatening to monogamous lifestyles) work in tandem to produce opposition to same-sex marriage. Although Pinsof and Haselton did not demonstrate that mating strategies and stereotype endorsement statistically mediate (or explain) the tendency for conservatives to oppose same-sex marriage more than liberals, they included political orientation as a covariate and suggested that conservatives are more likely than liberals to pursue short-term mating strategies and to endorse stereotypes of gay people as promiscuous. Pinsof and Haselton couched their findings in terms of Weeden and Kurzban’s (2014) evolutionarypsychology approach, which emphasizes the role of selfinterest in political ideology. Thus, they argued that heterosexuals who are eager to marry and start families early on would be threatened by the lifestyles they believe sexual minorities lead. Although it is not entirely clear why, from the standpoint of self-interest, heterosexuals’ relationships would be jeopardized by the choices made by same-sex couples (assuming that, in general, they are trading in different sexual marketplaces), this perspective has led to some interesting empirical observations. An important issue that was neglected by Pinsof and Haselton pertains to the political divide within the group of sexual minorities. Although most sexual minorities support same-sex marriage at this point, it is reasonable to expect variability in opinion. Previous research on aspects of system-justification theory has revealed that gays and lesbians who are relatively more conservative—much like heterosexuals who are conservative—hold less favorable attitudes about sexual minorities (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004) and are less enthusiastic about their participation in family life (Pacilli, Taurino, Jost, & van der Toorn, 2011). This finding is consistent with the notion that conservative attitudes reflect a defensive motivation to justify the societal status quo ( Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003); therefore, conservative attitudes may be congruent with self-interest for people who are advantaged by the status quo but incongruent with self-interest for those who are disadvantaged by it (Jost, Burgess, & Mosso, 2001). Because conservative sexual minorities (compared with liberal sexual minorities) exhibit greater out-group favoritism, sexual self-stigmatization, and opposition to same-sex parenting (e.g., Jost et al., 2004; Pacilli et al., 2011), we hypothesized that sexual minorities who are more conservative are more likely to stereotype sexual minorities as promiscuous and to oppose same-sex marriage. In this case, conservative ideology would have precisely the same attitudinal consequences as it does for heterosexual people, but it would conflict with objective self-interest, given that individuals with samesex attractions would be deprived of legal acceptance of these relationships. Pinsof and Haselton reported results from their full sample, which included 8.4% sexual minorities, and noted that their results were the same when sexual minorities were excluded. They did not discuss results 694866 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797617694866Hoffarth, JostWhen Ideology Contradicts Self-Interest research-article2017