Ambivalence, the Intergroup Contact Hypothesis, and Attitudes about Gay Rights
This article examines the effect of contact with gays and lesbians on inducing or decreasing ambivalence among citizens’ attitudes toward gay rights. Contact may create cross-pressure or ambivalence among strong conservative-leaning citizens, causing internal conflict between their political values and their contact with gays and lesbians. Citizens torn between conflicting values will have less predictable attitudes than those not experiencing such conflict. Contact, however, is likely to have the opposite effect among liberal-leaning citizens, reducing ambivalence and making their attitudes more predictable and uniform. Results from heteroskedastic regression models indicate that contact increases the error variance among evangelical Christians, strong conservatives, and strong Republicans while decreasing it among their liberal-leaning counterparts. The results suggest that contact with gays and lesbians can impact the mean level of support for gay rights, as well as the clarity or certainty of those attitudes, although its effect differs across these two dimensions of public opinion.

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