Examining Personality Correlates of Relationship Between Political Ideology and LGBT Attitudes

In spite of great strides made in the past century towards the acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer (LGBT) individuals, the vilification of said individuals continues in the United States. This is largely perpetuated by individuals who are aligned with conservative political ideology. Past research indicates that conservative individuals have differential preferences for specific kinds of moral offenses and disgust elicitors. This study aimed to compare two models of the relationship between political ideology, LGBT attitudes, disgust sensitivity, and moral inclinations. The first model, dubbed the “Political Model”, proposes that subscales of disgust sensitivity and moral inclination that have empirical support as correlates with conservatism lead to distinct latent variables which contribute to the relationship between political ideology and LGBT attitudes. The second model, known as the “Sexual/Protection Model”, combines subscales from each measure to create latent variables based on themes shared between both measures and which reflect conservative sentiment – those themes being rejection of non-normative sexual experiences, and emphasis on protecting ingroups. Although initial results indicated that both models had mediocre but acceptable fit, they were re-calculated with the removal of the moral disgust variable due to its lack of significant correlation with multiple other key model variables. These analyses indicated that the updated “Sexual/Protection Model” has excellent fit.