Context Diversity Effects Can Generalize Across Social Domains: Relating Racial Diversity to Implicit Associations of Sexual Orientation

We examined whether contextual exposure to ethnoracial diversity relates to mental associations in other social domains. County-level metrics of racial diversity and segregation computed from restricted-use U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data were linked to a geolocated measure of sexual orientation implicit bias from over 825,000 respondents across the United States (2015-2021). Multilevel models detected a negative relationship between context racial diversity and stereotypic implicit associations to sexual orientation, with the greatest transfer observed at high segregation. Given the non-representative nature of the sample, we computed survey weights to account for state and national demographic distributions. Weighted models revealed a robust association with context racial diversity but did not detect an interaction with segregation. These results support the hypothesis that exposure to social diversity in one domain can generalize to less stereotypic mental associations in another, and they bolster the need for socially contextualized research on human cognition.