Variation in the Application of the “Promiscuous Female” Stereotype and the Nature of the Application Domain: Influences on Sexual Harassment Judgments after Exposure to the Jerry Springer Show

This study was designed to explore how the impact of exposure to a few stereotyped group members can be mediated by individual variation in stereotype application to other group members. When compared to participants exposed to nonpromiscuous women on an episode of the Jerry Springer Show, those exposed to promiscuous women perceived a victim of sexual harassment as less traumatized and more responsible for the event. In addition, exposure condition had no impact on judgments when the man physically touched the victim. Conversely, when he made a verbal comment or verbal request, those in the promiscuous condition reported perceptions of less victim trauma and made greater attributions of victim responsibility. The findings also indicate that the effects of exposure to the promiscuous woman depictions were mediated by individual variation in attributions of victim promiscuity. Finally, activation of the promiscuous female stereotype was also shown to have generalized to judgments of women in a nonsexual domain.     

Prior Allegations of Harassment Impact Mock Jurors’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment in a Criminal Trial

The current study examined factors that may influence jurors’ judgments in a criminal sexual harassment case with Canadian undergraduate students. Undergraduate students (n?=?268) examined whether defendant’s gender, victim’s gender, and whether the victim had made similar accusations in the past were influential in mock jurors’ judgments. Participants read a case summary describing an alleged sexual harassment and answered questions concerning defendant’s guilt, defendant’s culpability, and perceptions of the victim. Additionally, attitudes concerning sexual harassment and sexism were measured. The presence of prior allegations was a driving force in mock juror decisions, with mock jurors providing more guilty verdicts, more favorable perceptions of the victim, and less favorable perceptions of the defendant when no prior allegations of harassment had been made by the victim. The results of the current study suggest that the presence of prior allegations have a large impact on mock jurors’ decisions, suggesting that prior allegations may need to be considered more closely in court before they can be used as evidence.

     

Mock Jurors’ Perception of Stalking: The Impact of Gender and Expressed Fear

Two experiments investigated mock-juror perceptions of intimate stalking using Kentucky’s (United States) anti-stalking legislation. Experiment 1 used a mock-juror methodology in which 177 undergraduates (87 men and 90 women) from a large southeastern US university read a stalking trial summary and rendered individual judgments as mock jurors. The main research question of Experiment 1 was how participant gender impacted trial judgments (e.g., verdict) when the gender of both the defendant and victim were manipulated. Overall, the results showed that men rendered significantly fewer guilty verdicts than women, particularly in conditions that included the prototypical type of intimate stalking (female victim/male defendant). In Experiment 2, also using a mock-juror methodology, 129 undergraduates (51 men and 78 women) from a large southeastern U.S. university read a stalking trial summary (involving a female victim and male defendant) and rendered individual judgments as mock jurors. The main research question of Experiment 2 focused on whether victim fear (high or low) impacted trial judgments (e.g., verdict). The results yielded an interaction of participant gender and victim fear. Specifically, whereas different levels of fear did not impact women, men yielded fewer guilty verdicts in the low victim fear condition compared to the high victim fear condition. The results of the present experiments are discussed in terms of the implications of stalking allegations brought to trial.     

Differential Male and Female Responses to Inadmissible Sexual History Information Regarding a Rape Victim

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of exposure to sexual activity information regarding a rape victim. The results of the first experiment indicated that men had a greater tendency to attribute a female target person's sexual activity to dispositional causes than did women. In the second experiment, subjects read an acquaintance rape scenario suggesting that the victim had a promiscuous sexual past. They were instructed either to ignore this sexual history information when making judgments (inadmissible condition) or to use whatever information that they felt was appropriate (admissible condition). Control subjects were given no information regarding the victim's sexual past. Thus, the design was a 2 (Sex of Subject) x 3 (Information Admissibility: Admissible, Inadmissible, or Control) factorial. The results indicated: (a) When compared to those in the inadmissible condition, victim perceptions from subjects in the admissible condition were less favorable, (b) victim perceptions from male subjects were less favorable than those from female subjects, and (c) male subjects in the inadmissible condition attributed more responsibility to the victim than did the controls whereas female subjects in the inadmissible condition attributed less responsibility to the victim than did controls. Possible bases of these findings are discussed.     

Role of employee felt obligation and endorsement of the just world hypothesis: A social exchange theory investigation in an organizational justice context

According to social exchange theory, felt obligation after being treated justly is key to explaining why justice perceptions influence behaviors important to organizations, such as task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Perhaps those who believe in a just world (Just World Hypothesis, JWH) are more likely to feel obligated to reciprocate just treatment with behaviors benefiting the organization. Thus, our goal was to investigate whether belief in the JWH influences to what extent people feel obligated after being treated justly and the importance of felt obligation in regard to behavioral outcomes, such as OCB and task performance. Based on 160 university alumni and their supervisors, results provide support that justice perceptions can relate to both job performance and OCB via felt obligation, providing empirical support for the theoretical role of felt obligation in the social exchange theory explanation of how justice perceptions can translate into employee behaviors benefiting the organization. Results also suggest that endorsement of the JWH interacts with procedural and distributive justice perceptions, but not interpersonal justice perceptions, to influence felt obligation and that the indirect effect of distributive and procedural justice perceptions on both OCB and task performance via felt obligation is only significant for individuals with relatively high levels of endorsement of the JWH. Implications are discussed.     

Incontinence and Perception

The traditional problem of incontinence raises the question of whether there is any way to account for action contrary to judgment. When one acts, rather than only being acted upon by circumstances, the action is explained in terms of the reasons for action one judges oneself to have. It therefore seems impossible to explain action that iscontrary to such judgment. This paper examines the question of how such explanation would be possible. After excluding accounts that either eliminate incontinence or render it inexplicable, I argue that genuine incontinence would require three components: first, a distinction between the types of judgments simultaneously present in the agent; second, the Aristotelian idea that not all of those types of judgments can be directly action-guiding; and third, that the judgments that are action-guiding can be pre-conceptual perceptions. I then use elements of Collingwood's aesthetics to make the case that although such pre-conceptual perceptions would not be propositional judgments and the relationship between them and the behaviors of the agent could not be causal, those behaviors could still qualify as incontinent actions.     

RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND EMPIRICAL ETHICS

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self‐conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics.     

Traditional and Nontraditional Women's Attributions of Responsibility to Physically Resistive and Nonresistive Rape Victims1

This research examined the interactive effect of women observers' sex-role attitudes and a victim's use of physical resistance on perceptions of victim responsibility for a sexual assault. Women read one of two rape scenarios in which a victim either did or did not physically resist a rapist's attack and made judgments concerning victim responsibility. The observers were categorized as being either traditionally conservative or nontraditionally profeminist in their attitudes toward women and their roles in society. An analysis of responsibility judgments indicated that traditional women perceived a victim who resisted the attack as being more responsible for her own victimization than did nontraditional women, whereas nontraditional women assigned more responsibility to a victim who did not resist than did traditional women. These results are considered from a sex-role socialization perspective; the implications of these findings for legal and health care professionals are discussed.     

Effects of Victim,Defendant, and Juror Gender on Decisions in Child Sexual Assault Cases1

We examined the combined influence of juror, victim, and defendant gender on jurors’ decisions in child sexual abuse cases. Mock jurors read scenarios of an assault case involving a man or woman defendant accused of molesting a 15‐year‐old boy or girl. Jurors then rendered verdicts and rated the defendant's and victim's believability and responsibility for the abuse. Female jurors were generally more pro‐victim in case judgments than were male jurors. Additionally, a woman perpetrator was evaluated more leniently than was a man perpetrator, especially by male jurors when the victim was a boy. Case judgments were unrelated to jurors’ social conservatism, sexism, or attitudes toward homosexuality. Results have implications for understanding social perceptions of mixed‐ and same‐gender abuse involving adolescent victims, and juror decision making in man‐ and woman‐perpetrated child sexual assault cases.     

Improving the Credibility of Child Sexual Assault Victims in Court: The Impact of a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner

The present study investigated the influence of a sexual assault nurse examiner's (SANE's) testimony on mock juror perceptions of a child or adolescent victim of child sexual assault. Community members (N = 252, 156 females) read a fictional criminal trial summary of a child sexual assault case in which the victim was 6 or 15 years old and the prosecution presented medical testimony from a SANE or a traditional registered nurse (RN), or did not present medical testimony. Mock jurors were more likely to render guilty verdicts when a SANE testified compared with the other two testimony conditions. In addition, pro-victim judgments (e.g., sympathy toward the victim) and negative defendant judgments (e.g., anger toward the defendant) mediated this relation. Finally, cognitive network representations of the case demonstrated that the RN and no-medical-testimony groups were similar and the SANE group was distinct from the other two conditions. We discuss these results in terms of the implications of SANE testimony in child sexual assault court cases. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Race Shapes Perceptions of Juvenile Offenders in Criminal Court1

We investigated the effects of defendant race, victim race, and juror gender on non‐African American mock jurors' perceptions of crimes committed by juvenile offenders. We predicted that mock jurors, particularly men, would render more pro‐prosecution case judgments when the defendant was African American than White. We also predicted that defendants would be judged more harshly when the crime victim was portrayed as White rather than as African American. Although there were few main effects of defendant race or victim race on case judgments, defendant and victim race by juror gender interactions revealed that men (but not women) demonstrated the predicted bias against African American defendants and victims. Explanations and implications are discussed.     

Male and Female Observers’ Evaluations of a Bullying Case as a Function of Degree of Harm,Type of Bullying,and Academic Level

Acting as disciplinary committee members, participants listened to a school bullying case that varied in terms of type (relational or verbal), degree of harm (low or high), and academic level of the victim and defendant (high school or university). Participants’ judgments (e.g., verdict, recommended sentence, seriousness, perceptions of both students) generally favored the victim when he experienced more rather than less harm, regardless of bullying type, and when the incident took place in a high school rather than a university. Additionally, women’s judgments supported the victim more than men’s. We propose that previous results suggesting that observers downgrade relational bullying occurred because no harm was specified. Moreover, we contend that observers relied on a “bullying schema” that includes the component that bullying occurs in primary and secondary schools, which led them to make less punitive judgments in the university case.     

The Effects of Victim’s Substance Use and Relationship Closeness on Mock Jurors’ Judgments in an Acquaintance Rape Case

Previous research has demonstrated that jurors perceive a female victim who is drunk at the time when she is sexually assaulted as less credible and more deserving of such punishment than a sober victim. In this experiment, we investigated the effect of an alleged acquaintance rape victim’s type of substance use and closeness of relationship with the defendant on the judgments of 152 student mock jurors. Participants read a case summary and answered a series of questions about their impressions of the actors and actions involved in the case. Participants perceived a victim who was sober at the time of the incident as more credible than a victim who was intoxicated due to illegal substance use (alcohol or LSD), and convictions were also most likely when the victim was sober. Women perceived the victim as more credible than men did. Higher victim credibility judgments were associated with less rape myth acceptance (RMA) on the part of participants.     

Predictability and Variability of a Dynamic Environment Impact Affordance Judgments

Abstract

A crucial component of locomotion and mobility is the successful navigation of apertures (e.g., doorways, lanes, corridors). While much research has studied perceptions of action capabilities in a static environment, far less work has considered how action capabilities change in a dynamic environment, particularly when the environment moves in unpredictable ways. The current experiment assessed actors’ perceptions of aperture passability for a dynamically moving gap. In an immersive virtual environment, participants were seated in a wheelchair rolling toward a sliding door while the door oscillated to various widths. The patterns of oscillation were manipulated in terms of their amplitude (sequence standard deviation), predictability (sequence sample entropy), and base width (sequence mean) in a within-participants design. Participants gave judgments of passability within a temporal occlusion paradigm. Results showed that both the amplitude and predictability of the oscillating door impacted the reliability of passability judgments. We suggest that these variables act to alter the salience of optical constraints (e.g., attractors and repellors) within a dynamical systems framework.     

Who Says It's Sexual Harassment? The Effects of Gender and Likelihood to Sexually Harass on Legal Judgments of Sexual Harassment1

The effects of participants’ gender and propensity to sexually harass were examined in a sexual harassment case in which the gender of the harassers and victim were manipulated systematically. Male and female participants scoring either high or low on the Likelihood to Sexually Harass (LSH) scale (Pryor, 1987) reviewed an ostensibly real hostile work environment case and made judgments about the case. When participants were the same gender as the victim, individual differences in LSH failed to influence their judgments. When the participants’ gender was the opposite of the victim's, those low in LSH perceived the behaviors as more likely to be sexual harassment than those high in LSH. These results are discussed and their implications considered.     

Why it won't happen to me: perceptions of risk factors and susceptibility

Four studies were conducted with college student subjects to examine: (1) perceptions of susceptibility to health and safety risks; (2) factors that subjects see as important in determining their susceptibility; and (3) subjects' actual standing on objective risk factors. Subjects were generally unbiased about hereditary risk factors and were even somewhat pessimistic about environmental risk factors. Their views of their own actions and psychological attributes, however, were excessively optimistic. Few acknowledged actions or psychological attributes that increased their risk. This pattern of findings helps to explain why risks thought to be controllable (i.e., preventable by personal action) are likely to evoke unrealistic optimism about susceptibility. Family histories of health problems were incorporated into judgments of susceptibility, but, except for smoking, correlations between behavioral risk factors and judgments of susceptibility were surprisingly weak. Self-esteem enhancement is suggested as a motive that could explain many of the present findings. Several recommendations are offered for health campaigns that seek to produce more realistic perceptions of susceptibility to health and safety problems.     

Rape: A sexual stigma?

The primary purpose of this study was to identify individual differences affecting perceptions of a rapist and a rape victim. It was hypothesized that sex of observer, attitudes towards women, sexuality, the rape itself and perceptions of the targets on a number of behavioral dimensions would predict target perception. Each subject rated one of four persons: a male rapist, a female rape victim, a male control target, or a female control target. The ratings reflected personal impressions of the target and degree of social distance desired. Not surprisingly, the rapist was perceived least favorably. The rape victim did not receive ratings different from the female control target. However, when individual differences were taken into account, it was found that negative attitudes towards women, belief in rape myths, and perceived target behavior (e.g. responsibility) were related to stigmatization of the rape victim, and predicted more favorable perceptions of the rapist. Sex of the observer and attitudes towards sexuality were not among the major predictors of target perception. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Victim and Perpetrator Groups’ Divergent Perspectives on Collective Violence: Implications for Intergroup Relations

Groups in conflict develop strikingly different construals of the same violent events. These clashing perceptions of past violence can have detrimental consequences for intergroup relations and might provoke new hostilities. In this article, we integrate and juxtapose what we know about construals of collective violence by delineating the different dimensions along which these construals differ between victim and perpetrator groups: regarding the question of who is the victim, who is responsible for the harm doing, what the perpetrator’s intent was, how severe the violence was, and when it took place. Then, we discuss the individual‐ and group‐level factors (e.g., collective narratives, social identities) that shape these construals, as well as their implications for attitudes regarding the conflict and support for relevant policies. We distinguish two different core motives that drive construals and their outcomes among victim and perpetrator groups: Perpetrator groups try to cope with moral identity threats and preserve a positive image of the ingroup, while victim groups try to protect their ingroup from future harm doing and desire acknowledgment of their group’s experiences. Lastly, we discuss implications for strategies and interventions to address victim and perpetrator groups’ divergent perspectives of collective violence.     

Tainting the soul: Purity concerns predict moral judgments of suicide

Moral violations are typically defined as actions that harm others. However, suicide is considered immoral even though the perpetrator is also the victim. To determine whether concerns about purity rather than harm predict moral condemnation of suicide, we presented American adults with obituaries describing suicide or homicide victims. While harm was the only variable predicting moral judgments of homicide, perceived harm (toward others, the self, or God) did not significantly account for variance in moral judgments of suicide. Instead, regardless of political and religious views and contrary to explicit beliefs about their own moral judgments, participants were more likely to morally condemn suicide if they (i) believed suicide tainted the victims’ souls, (ii) reported greater concerns about purity in an independent questionnaire, (iii) experienced more disgust in response to the obituaries, or (iv) reported greater trait disgust. Thus, suicide is deemed immoral to the extent that it is considered impure.