Fear and cultural background drive sexual orientation prejudice in France

Sexual stereotyping and its negative consequences remain major issues in Western societies. Sexual prejudice is often nurtured by the socio-cultural background in which individuals grow up, making differences in sexual prejudice especially visible in multicultural societies. In France, one example of such a multicultural society with a high number of French citizens with recent migratory background from Maghreb, the socio-cultural basis of sexual prejudice has largely remained unexplored. Here, we report results from an experimental study investigating sexual stereotyping in France. We base our analyses on an elicited corpus of spontaneous speech samples. We consider in particular the effects of the participants’ cultural background (France vs. Maghreb), age and gender on the expression of prejudicial attitudes. Specifically, we tested in a context-sensitive sentiment analysis approach which attitudes (negative vs. positive) and emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) were voiced. We find strong effects of cultural background and gender both on the frequency of negative vs. positive attitudes expressed and on associated emotion categories, namely that male Maghrebian participants were more negative and conveyed more fear in their speech samples. The results are discussed in the context of current diversity approaches in France and their implications for potential prejudice regulation strategies.