Over the past 14 years, Americans have become less explicitly and implicitly biased against people of different races, skin tones, or sexual preferences

Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes: IV. Change and Stability From 2007 to 2020. Tessa E. S. Charlesworth, Mahzarin R. Banaji. Psychological Science, July 27, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221084257

Abstract: Using more than 7.1 million implicit and explicit attitude tests drawn from U.S. participants to the Project Implicit website, we examined long-term trends across 14 years (2007–2020). Despite tumultuous sociopolitical events, trends from 2017 to 2020 persisted largely as forecasted from past data (2007–2016). Since 2007, all explicit attitudes decreased in bias between 22% (age attitudes) and 98% (race attitudes). Implicit sexuality, race, and skin-tone attitudes also continued to decrease in bias, by 65%, 26%, and 25%, respectively. Implicit age, disability, and body-weight attitudes, however, continued to show little to no long-term change. Patterns of change and stability were generally consistent across demographic groups (e.g., men and women), indicating widespread, macrolevel change. Ultimately, the data magnify evidence that (some) implicit attitudes reveal persistent, long-term change toward neutrality. The data also newly reveal the potential for short-term influence from sociopolitical events that temporarily disrupt progress toward neutrality, although attitudes eventually return to long-term homeostasis in trends.

Keywords: implicit attitude change, explicit attitude change, Implicit Association Test (IAT), long-term change, time-series analysis, autoregressive-integrated-moving-average (ARIMA) model, open data, open materials, preregistered.

Small effect, yet significant: The intergenerational transmission of sexual frequency

The intergenerational transmission of sexual frequency. Scott T. Yabiku & Lauren Newmyer. Biodemography and Social Biology, Jul 27 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19485565.2022.2104691

Abstract: Intergenerational relationships are one of the most frequently studied topics in the social sciences. Within the area of family, researchers find intergenerational similarity in family behaviors such as marriage, divorce, and fertility. Yet less research has examined the intergenerational aspects of a key proximate determinant of fertility: sexual frequency. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the relationship between sexual frequency of parents and the sexual frequency of children when adults. We link parental sexual frequency in 1987/1988, when children were ages 5–18, to the sexual frequency of the children in 2001–2003 when these grown children were ages 18–34. We find a modest, yet significant association, between parental and adult children sexual frequency. A mechanism behind this association appears to be the higher likelihood of being in a union among children of parents with high sexual frequency.