{"id":9528,"date":"2009-06-06T09:13:35","date_gmt":"2009-06-06T14:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=9528"},"modified":"2012-10-19T04:09:07","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T09:09:07","slug":"the-contact-hypothesis-and-spurious-relationships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/06\/06\/the-contact-hypothesis-and-spurious-relationships\/","title":{"rendered":"Gay Marriage And The Contact Hypothesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

The contact hypothesis postulates that being near people of a different social group (e.g., race, class, sexual orientation, etc) translates into greater tolerance for that type of person. In other words, it’s harder to hate all Latinos (for example) when your neighbor is Latino and, damn it, you kind of like him.\u00a0 Andrew Sullivan<\/a> posted this figure:<\/p>\n

\"6a00d83451c45669e2011570b1f019970b-800wi\"<\/p>\n

Jose at Thick Culture<\/a> suggests that this could be evidence for the contact hypothesis.\u00a0 But he also asks whether it might also be true that less homophobic people are more likely to come into contact with gays and lesbians because of a third variable that correlates with both (like choosing to live in a big city), making the relationship spurious.<\/p>\n

(What’s a spurious relationship?\u00a0 Here’s one:\u00a0 People who eat ice cream are more likely to drown.\u00a0 Both incidence of ice cream eating and rates of drowning are related to summertime.\u00a0 The relationship between ice cream and drowning is spurious.\u00a0 That is, there is no relationship.\u00a0 Yet they appear related because they are both related to a third variable.)<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Lisa Wade is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The contact hypothesis postulates that being near people of a different social group (e.g., race, class, sexual orientation, etc) translates into greater tolerance for that type of person. In other words, it’s harder to hate all Latinos (for example) when your neighbor is Latino and, damn it, you kind of like him.\u00a0 Andrew Sullivan posted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[272,274,54,37],"class_list":["post-9528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-marriagefamily","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-sexual-orientation","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9528"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9532,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9528\/revisions\/9532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}