“I agree with LGBT rights, but…”: Authoritarianism and social dominance orientation underlying hypocritical attitudes of Taiwan society

In the modern public sphere, ordinary people may display hypocrisy in political participation, showing contradictory attitudes across different social issues. But there still exists another type of hypocritical attitude within one single issue, such as agreeing with LGBT rights but refusing to amend the current Civil Code simultaneously in the case of Taiwan. In the same-sex marriage legalizing process, the hypocritical attitude could be observed in Taiwan’s conservative campus, together with the explicitly prejudiced attitude. In this article, we explored the existence of the hypocritical attitude on this issue and discovered its psychological foundations. We conducted an online questionnaire survey in 2018 (N = 544) to measure Taiwanese participants’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage and their psychological dispositions of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Our results showed that while attitudes toward LGBT rights and special-law were negatively correlated, several participants showed the hypocrisy of positive attitudes toward the two sets of questions simultaneously. The hypocritical people shared similar psychological dispositions with the explicitly prejudiced people as high in RWA and SDO while differentiated from the LGBT-friendly people. Attitudinal hypocrisy and explicit prejudice constitute two sides of the conservative camp in Taiwan, which is based on the Confucianism cultural value of interpersonal harmony. The cultural and societal implications were discussed.