UC Santa Barbara

To decide whether an act was discriminatory, perceivers often take the status of the victim’s group into account: the same act is more likely to be seen as discrimination when the perpetrator is from a high-status group and the victim is from a low-status group (Major et al., 2002). However, such models fail to account for the fact that many people belong to groups that do not occupy one clear position on the status hierarchy (herein referred to as intermediate identities). For example, biracial people, bicultural people, and bisexual people may share some characteristics with a prototypical minority group and other characteristics with a majority group. Where do these targets fall in reference to their prototypicality as a victim (and therefore, their likelihood of being seen as facing discrimination)? Across three experiments (Ntotal = 1765), we investigated situations in which perceivers did or did not see bisexual individuals as targets of discrimination. In Study 1, participants found it plausible for both gay/lesbian and bisexual targets to face discrimination based on their sexual orientation. However, when evaluating scenarios that directly compared a bisexual target to a lesbian target (Studies 2 & 3a), participants were more likely to say that the lesbian target had faced discrimination. Interestingly, even in cases with direct comparison, participants expected a bisexual man and a gay man to be equally likely to have faced discrimination (Study 3b). Overall, results indicate that whether a bisexual target is perceived as a victim of discrimination depends on context cues that may reflect the target’s relative status.