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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sexual Preference (book) | 10/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Preference_(book) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:55:27.778790+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Scientific and academic journals, 1987–1996 === De Cecco wrote in the Journal of Sex Research that Sexual Preference had no independent theoretical basis because it was conceived as an attempt to disprove theories viewing homosexuality as a mental or social pathology, and that Bell et al. were mistaken to conclude that, because such theories are incorrect, sexual orientation must be innate. He accused them of being motivated by "a misguided compassion for homosexuals", arguing that such compassion is actually a form of arrogance. The philosopher Frederick Suppe described Sexual Preference as very important study in the Journal of Homosexuality. He wrote that it failed to duplicate the findings of Bieber et al. or the predictions of symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, and societal reaction theory approaches. He considered its sample of homosexuals, while highly biased, to nevertheless be the most representative ever made, and argued that biased samples can be adequate for the purposes of refuting theories propounded in other studies "so long as the types of subjects used in those other studies constitute a subsample of the replicative study′s sample and the latter's population does not go beyond the claimed scope of the replicated studies." He maintained that Bell et al.′s study meets these requirements, that their use of path analysis was appropriate, and that their procedures for developing a composite etiology model, which contained "virtually all paths advanced in the literature", are legitimate. He argued that the only plausible basis for disputing that the study definitively refutes "social learning theories of homosexual etiology" is to challenge the adequacy of its authors' models and the questions they employed. However, he criticized the questions asked. He wrote that while Bell et al. did not use the same specific questions that Bieber et al. had employed, they did use "questions directed at the same concerns." He noted that their data regarding subjects′ negative feelings toward and relationships with their fathers were based on open-ended interview questions, adding that it would have been preferable had they employed the same "structured-answer questions" used in Bieber et al.′s earlier study. He rejected their claim that their study supports a biological explanation of sexual orientation. He wrote that since their study, research into the "social causes of homosexuality" has become "moribund." The social psychologist Daryl Bem credited Bell et al. with providing the most important data concerning "experience-based theories" of the development of sexual orientation in Psychological Review. This included "the classical psychoanalytic account", as well as views that attribute the origins of sexual orientation to learning, conditioning, seduction, or labeling. According to Bem, their finding that "no family variables" are "strongly implicated in the development of sexual orientation for either men or women" is "consistent with accumulating evidence that family variables account for much less of the environmental variance in personality than previously thought". He proposed a hypothesis, which he referred to as "Exotic becomes erotic", according to which children feel different from either their same-sex peers or opposite-sex peers and therefore eroticize them, leading to homosexuality and heterosexuality respectively. He referred to Bell et al.′s finding that gay men and lesbians were significantly more likely to recall having felt different from same-sex children during the grade-school years, and to other studies that drew similar conclusions. He maintained that Bell's view that people become erotically attracted to those who are different from them out of a "quest for androgyny" does not accurately characterize or explain the data, and rejected Bell et al.′s conclusion that sexual orientation is innate.
=== Scientific and academic journals, 1997–present === Letitia Anne Peplau et al. wrote in a critique of Bem's "exotic becomes erotic" hypothesis published in Psychological Review that Bell et al. recruited heterosexuals and homosexuals through non-comparable methods, and that while it is unknown how this and the retrospective nature of their data affected their findings, "they may have exaggerated the extent of true differences between heterosexual and homosexual respondents." Peplau et al. argued that Bell et al.′s data does not support Bem's hypothesis. Bem, in a defense of his hypothesis published in the same issue of Psychological Review, wrote that in their path analysis Bell et al. engaged in "an unfortunate dichotomization of the dependent variable, sexual orientation ... grouping the bisexual and homosexual respondents into the same category." In his view, while this procedure "might have seemed reasonable on a priori grounds ... it should have been abandoned as soon as the researchers saw the results of their own subanalyses, which made it clear that the bisexual respondents were not only very different from their exclusively homosexual counterparts but actually were more like the heterosexual respondents in theoretically critical ways." He argued that by grouping together the bisexuals and homosexuals Bell et al. "reduced many of the correlations and increased the likelihood that important antecedent variables would be erroneously eliminated during the recursive process of discarding the weaker correlates from successive iterations of the path model." Peplau et al. wrote in the Annual Review of Sex Research that while Bell et al.′s suggestion that biological factors have a stronger influence on exclusive homosexuality than they have on bisexuality may seem plausible, it has not been directly tested and appears to conflict with available evidence, such as that concerning prenatal hormone exposure. The psychologist Bruce Rind credited Bell et al. with disproving psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality, along with the idea that childhood seduction causes homosexuality, in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The psychologist Mark Yarhouse wrote in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that Sexual Preference relies on retrospective memory recall, which can be unreliable. The psychologist J. Michael Bailey and his co-authors described Sexual Preference as a "landmark study" that "seemingly disposed of the idea that homosexuality resulted from the quality of parent-child relationships" in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.