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Just world belief, religiosity, and attitudes towards homosexuality: a study of indian engineering students

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Abstract

In 2018, decriminalizing consensual homosexuality through the scrapping of section 377 from the Indian Penal Code undoubtedly marked a milestone in India’s history of the LGBTQ movement. However, one may debate whether this legal change reflects a transformation at the societal level in terms of positive attitudes towards homosexuality. The current study examines the effects of multiple anteceding factors (parents’ education, acceptability of homosexuality among the friends, frequency of LGBTQ-related conversations within the family, having a friend from the LGBTQ community, having fandom to LGBTQ celebrity, religiosity, and just-world belief) in determining the attitudes towards homosexuality among engineering students. A survey-based quantitative study empirically tested the relationship between the variables. The result revealed a sex difference in attitude towards homosexuality, where female heterosexual engineering students have a significantly higher positive attitude towards homosexuality than male heterosexual students. Moreover, friends’ acceptability of homosexuality, just-world belief, mother’s education level, and having a fandom to LGBTQ celebrities significantly predict attitude towards homosexuality among the participants (p<.05). However, religiosity is not a significant predictor of students’ attitudes towards homosexuality. Attitudes towards homosexuality, in turn, predict a person’s reaction (positive/ negative/ neutral) to LGBTQ celebrities’ coming-out.

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  1. Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad, India

    Sucharita Maji, Mansha Anjum, Bhautik Agrawal, Shivangi Patel & Vishal Kumar

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SM conceptualized the work, analysed the data, wrote the preliminary draft of the article. MA and BA took lead in data collection and MA helped in editing the draft of the paper. SP and VK helped in data collection. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sucharita Maji.

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Maji, S., Anjum, M., Agrawal, B. et al. Just world belief, religiosity, and attitudes towards homosexuality: a study of indian engineering students. Curr Psychol 43, 5615–5625 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04745-4

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