Overachieving and sexual orientation

Abstract

The Best Little Boy in the World hypothesis holds that homosexual males are overachievers because they seek to deflect attention away from their stigmatize sexual orientations and over-compensate for feelings of inferiority and shame. Implicit in this reasoning is the assumption that homosexual males experience apprehension during social situations in which their self-worth is under evaluation and, as such, they overachieve in an attempt obtain validation from others. However, results here suggest that homosexual males do not differ from their heterosexual male counterparts on psychological tendencies thought to underpin overachieving. These psychological tendencies include validation seeking, insecure striving, and fear of negative evaluation. Further, there is no evidence that male sexual orientation differences exist for measures of growth seeking behavior. Finally, homosexual females do not differ from their heterosexual female counterparts for these same measures, which limits the generalizability of the hypothesis to other groups with minority sexual orientation.