Fine for Adam & Eve but not Adam & Steve? Homonegativity bias, parasocial contact, and public support for surrogacy

Abstract

The use of gestational surrogacy as a means of family construction is on the rise, and several legislatures and governments across the globe are currently considering repealing prohibitions on the process. Little is known about the public's attitudes towards this means of conception used by both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. In this paper, I present original experimental evidence from Britain to demonstrate the prevalent role of homonegativity in shaping preferences for surrogacy. Empirically, I leverage a pre-registered experiment to model the independent and combined effects of homonegativity and parasocial (celebrity) contact on support for commercial gestational surrogacy. On average, citizens are largely supportive of the practice. Experimental manipulations, however, provide robust causal evidence that homonegative discrimination exhibits a sizeable negative effect on support for the policy, while exposure to celebrity reliance on surrogacy provides mixed effects. Isolating the underlying causal mechanisms via which treatment assignment shapes outcomes, quantitative text analysis of open-ended survey responses establishes that assignment to different treatment conditions actively influences survey respondents’ explicit reasoning for their revealed preferences, providing additional purchase to causal interpretations of the experimental exposure.