Retrospective accounts of first exposure to minoritized sexual and gender identities

Although there has been considerable research about attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people, there has been little research into how people first come to be aware of minoritized sexual and gender minority (SGM) identities. This study sought to address this gap. A sample of sexual minority (n = 150) and heterosexual (n = 802) young adults (N = 952; M_age = 18.88 years, SD = 1.75; 949 were cisgender, three were transgender), primarily recruited from a large southern university, were asked retrospectively to recount their first exposure to or awareness of SGM identities. Responses between SGM and heterosexual participants were compared through a variety of analytical approaches, including analyzing themes about the source from which participants first recalled encountering these identities, and whether understanding about these identities came through a personal connection to someone with these identities. SGM participants reported encountering minoritized sexual identities a year earlier than did heterosexual participants, with both groups encountering these concepts in middle childhood, on average. SGM participants were more likely than heterosexual participants to report learning about minoritized gender identities from someone with a minoritized gender identity, while heterosexual participants more often reported learning about these identities from media or celebrities. Heterosexual (vs. SGM) participants were also more likely to imply that minoritized gender identities were adopted to be popular, rather than being authentic identities in themselves. Framed by developmental intergroup theory (DIT), we discuss implications of these findings, especially potential interrelationships with the development of prejudiced attitudes about SGM identities.     

Complexity as a Contract Design Factor: A Human‐to‐Human Experimental Study

Despite being theoretically suboptimal, simpler contracts (such as price‐only contracts and quantity discount contracts with limited number of price blocks) are commonly preferred in practice. Thus, exploring the tension between theory and practice regarding complexity and performance in contract design is especially relevant. Using human subject experiments, Kalkancı et al. (2011) showed that such simpler contracts perform effectively for a supplier interacting with a computerized buyer under asymmetric demand information. We use a similar set of experiments with the modification that a human supplier interacts with a human buyer. We show that human interactions strengthen the supplier's preference for simpler contracts. We find that suppliers have fairness concerns even when they interact with computerized buyers. These fairness concerns tend to be even stronger when suppliers interact with human buyers, particularly when the complexity of the contract is low. We also find that suppliers are more prone to random decision errors (i.e., bounded rationality) when interacting with human buyers. In the absence of social preferences, Kalkancı et al. identified reinforcement and bounded rationality as key biases that impact suppliers' decisions. In human‐to‐human experiments, we find evidence for social preference effects. However, these effects may be secondary to bounded rationality.