New Study Finds More Americans May Be Gay — And Anti-Gay — And Fear Saying So

A new study may call into question what Americans have been recently told about how many gay people exist and how many people are anti-gay — and the numbers may be larger than thought — merely because many Americans fear telling the truth regarding social desirability issues.

“We find substantial under-reporting of LGBT identity and behaviors as well as underreporting of anti-gay sentiment …even under anonymous and very private conditions,” a team of researchers from Ohio State and Boston Universities wrote in a working paper just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, according to Rich Morin at the Pew Research Center.

The researchers developed a new testing method they call “Veiled Report,” which “makes it virtually impossible to connect individual respondents with their answers to sensitive questions,” Morin reports:

In the results using the experimental technique, self-reports of non-heterosexual identity amounted to 19% of those surveyed using the Veiled Report methods – 65% higher than the 11% in the control group. The share reporting same-sex sexual experiences also grew from 17% in the control group to 27% in the Veiled Report group, they reported.

The experimental method also increased the rates of anti-gay sentiment. For example, the share who disapproved of having an openly gay manager at work increased from 16% in the control group to 27% in the Veiled Report group. The proportion who thought it should be legal to discriminate when hiring on the basis of sexual orientation also rose from 14% to 25%.

However, those in the Veiled Report treatment were less likely than those in the Direct Report treatment to say that a homosexual person “can change their sexual orientation if they choose to do so” (22% vs. 15%). As the authors suggest, “This indicates that participants saw it more socially desirable to report that sexual orientation is changeable, which goes in the opposite direction of a general ‘pro-LGBT’ norm.”

And while Pew repeatedly notes that the study cannot be used to determine how many how many people are gay or lesbian as it did not use a random sampling, it can be used to find that respondents will be more honest when they are certain their answers cannot be traced back to them.

One year ago a Gallup study found 3.4 percent of Americans publicly identified as LGBT. And a 2011 study by Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at UCLA found that while 11 percent of the population, more than 25 million Americans, acknowledge some same-gender sexual attraction, 3.5 percent of Americans publicly identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.