Department of Psychology, Colby College.
Department of Psychology, University of Washington.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2022 May;122(5):873-893. doi: 10.1037/pspi0000260. Epub 2021 Jan 14.
Sexual harassment is pervasive and has adverse effects on its victims, yet perceiving sexual harassment is wrought with ambiguity, making harassment difficult to identify and understand. Eleven preregistered, multimethod experiments (total N = 4,065 participants) investigated the nature of perceiving sexual harassment by testing whether perceptions of sexual harassment and its impact are facilitated when harassing behaviors target those who fit with the prototype of women (e.g., those who have feminine features, interests, and characteristics) relative to those who fit less well with this prototype. Studies A1-A5 demonstrate that participants' mental representation of sexual harassment targets overlapped with the prototypes of women as assessed through participant-generated drawings, face selection tasks, reverse correlation, and self-report measures. In Studies B1-B4, participants were less likely to label incidents as sexual harassment when they targeted nonprototypical women compared with prototypical women. In Studies C1 and C2, participants perceived sexual harassment claims to be less credible and the harassment itself to be less psychologically harmful when the victims were nonprototypical women rather than prototypical women. This research offers theoretical and methodological advances to the study of sexual harassment through social cognition and prototypicality perspectives, and it has implications for harassment reporting and litigation as well as the realization of fundamental civil rights. For materials, data, and preregistrations of all studies, see https://osf.io/xehu9/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
性骚扰普遍存在，对受害者造成负面影响，但对性骚扰的感知存在模糊性，使得性骚扰难以识别和理解。十一项预先注册的多方法实验（总参与者 4065 人）通过测试当骚扰行为针对符合女性原型（例如，具有女性特征、兴趣和特征的人）的人时，感知性骚扰及其影响是否更容易，从而研究了感知性骚扰的本质。研究 A1-A5 表明，参与者对性骚扰目标的心理表征与通过参与者生成的绘图、面部选择任务、反向相关和自我报告测量评估的女性原型重叠。在研究 B1-B4 中，与针对典型女性相比，当事件针对非典型女性时，参与者不太可能将其标记为性骚扰。在研究 C1 和 C2 中，当受害者是非典型女性而不是典型女性时，参与者认为性骚扰的说法可信度较低，骚扰本身对心理健康的伤害也较小。这项研究通过社会认知和原型观点为性骚扰研究提供了理论和方法上的进展，对骚扰报告和诉讼以及基本公民权利的实现也具有重要意义。有关所有研究的材料、数据和预先注册信息，请访问 https://osf.io/xehu9/。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
