Sunday 21 August 2016

Guess Which UK City Is Twice As Homophobic As The Others...


Here's an interesting statistic, which may also prove to be an interesting test of your intuition. A recent-ish YouGov survey asked UK respondents whether they thought in general that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’. The results showed that in the majority of regions of the UK the people who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ hovered around the 15% mark. 

Before you click on the link to find the answer, what does your intuition tell you the results were in London? What percentage of good ol' diverse, highly populated, cosmopolitan London responded with the view that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’? Surely somewhere as diverse as London would return results of about 5-10%, wouldn't you think?

No! It turns out not to be the case: the people in London who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ turned out to be 29%, nearly double what it was in most other regions. Why might the figure be nearly double in London? My guess would be that the reason is the same reason that makes London so different from other regions in the UK - it's the diversity. Diversity, for all its qualities (and they are plentiful) probably also means more diversity of opinions that we don't share or like - including many ethnic, cultural and religious groups that don't share our tolerance, love and respect for homosexual men and women. That seems to me the most likely reason for what is a very interesting finding (see the link here). 
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