As you can see in this table, attitudes toward male and female bisexuals appear to be fairly similar; however, there was a small but statistically significant difference in the overall average scores, with attitudes being more negative for bisexual men compared to bisexual women. The other thing that stands out in this table is that “neither agree nor disagree” was the single most common response option chosen for each item in both versions of the scale.

The researchers also found that attitudes toward bisexuality depended upon a lot of demographic characteristics, including age, race, gender, education, income, and sexual orientation:

-Participants under age 25 had more positive attitudes than those over 25.

-In terms of race, White participants had the most positive attitudes, while Black participants had the most negative attitudes.

-Male and female participants did not differ in terms of how they evaluated bisexual men; however, female participants had more positive attitudes toward bisexual women than did male participants.

-Participants who had more than a high school education as well as those who made more than $25,000/year in income had more positive attitudes toward bisexuals.

-People who were themselves sexual minorities had more positive attitudes toward bisexuality than did heterosexuals.

Generally speaking, these demographic findings are pretty consistent with previously published research looking at attitudes toward bisexuality, so there isn’t really anything surprising or unusual to note here.

So what can we conclude from all of this? Compared to the last national probability survey that looked at attitudes toward bisexuality (which was published in 2002 and only included heterosexual participants), it appears that Americans’ attitudes toward bisexuality have improved. Thus, at the same time as Americans have become more accepting of homosexuality, they also appear to have become more accepting of bisexuality.

However, there’s an important caveat to this: attitudes toward bisexuality haven’t really shifted to the positive side like they have in the case of homosexuality. Instead, they’ve just gone from negative to neutral. The authors point out that this shift to neutral can be interpreted in a lot of different ways (e.g., being unsure, not caring, feeling ambivalent, being unfamiliar). Thus, although there has definitely been a shift in attitudes toward bisexuals from negative to neutral, more research is needed to understand what this shift really signifies.

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To learn more about this research, see: Dodge, B., Herbenick, D., Friedman, M. R., Schick, V., Fu, T. C. J., Bostwick, W., ... & Sandfort, T. G. (2016). Attitudes toward Bisexual Men and Women among a Nationally Representative Probability Sample of Adults in the United States. PloS one, 11(10), e0164430.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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