The role of heterosocial perception in men's likelihood to sexually harass

Sexual harassment against women represents sexually aggressive and coercive behaviour that violates women’s dignity and creates an offensive environment, which threatens women’s well-being and ability to prosper in day to day life (Pina, Gannon & Saunders, 2009). Understanding the perceptual characteristics of men with inclinations to sexually harass, through how they perceive women is important in delineating the reasons why some men may engage in the sexual harassment of women. Heterosocial perception is a concept of how an individual perceives another person interacting with the opposite sex. It is typically measured using the Test of Reading Affective Cues (TRAC), a tool encompassing an array of video clips showing a woman interacting with a man, whereby the woman displays a range of affective cues. The perceiver is assessed on their perceptual accuracy when judging the affective cues. Perceptual accuracies of male rapists and male child molesters have been well researched (Lipton, McDonel & McFall, 1987; Stahl & Sacco, 1995), yet male sexual harassment as a singular category has been neglected. The current thesis explores the potential heterosocial perception characteristics of a distinct group of men who are relatively high in the likelihood to engage in sexual harassment of women from scores on Pryor’s (1987) Likelihood to Sexually Harass (LSH) scale focusing on their differences in performance on the TRAC in comparison to those men who are lower in the likelihood to engage in sexual harassment of women.

Five empirical studies are reported in this thesis. Study 1 presents a modernized version of the TRAC and incorporates an analysis to develop it as a research tool, enabling judgements on five affective cues displayed by a woman; friendly, romantic, neutral, bored and rejecting. The tool provides this range of affective cues that were used in later studies to measure differences in heterosocial perception. Study 2 addressed theoretical explanations taken from previous perception research with sexually aggressive men (Malamuth & Brown, xiv 1994) to explain differences in heterosocial perception for men high in LSH. Explanations are given for potential biases evidenced by men high in LSH focusing on Error Management Theory (Haselton & Buss, 2000) arguing that an overperception bias will increase the frequency of falsely inferring a woman’s sexual intent towards sexual pursuit, but considerably reduce the costs of losing a sexual opportunity by falsely inferring that a woman lacked sexual intent. Altogether, study 2 provided support for the misidentification of negative affective cues (negativeness blindness), the overperception of negative affective cues and the romantic overperception bias of friendly affective cues in the perception of men high in LSH.

Study 3 tested the established theoretical link that internal concepts of social power have within men who report sexual aggression and sexual coercion and the subsequent impact on perception. Unexpectedly, power did not exacerbate perceptual inaccuracy for negative affective cues and the romantic overperception bias of friendly affective cues. In study 4, objectification was assessed in its relationship to perception in high LSH men. Instrumental and both specific and general sexual objectification were significantly higher for men high in LSH. Specific sexual objectification was found to negatively mediate romantic categorizations of romantic affective cues, but general sexual objectification was found to positively mediate romantic categorizations of friendly affective cues for men high in LSH. Results also showed that men high in LSH showed poorest perceptual accuracy on bored and rejecting affective cues, and evidenced a greater romantic judgement of friendly affective cues overperception bias. In study 5, the impact of different mental states on perception was assessed, via the use of a cooling system to facilitate self-regulation. A cooling system is a psychological framework proposed for understanding self-control (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), and in this study it incorporated techniques of distraction, distancing and empathy enhancement. Results showed that the cooling system was not beneficial in making high LSH xv men’s perceptual judgements more accurate and in making their judgements accurate to the level of low and medium LSH men for negative affective cues. However, cooling did improve perceptual accuracy of friendly affective cues removing the overperception bias to romantic judgements in comparison to the neutral condition. The cooling system was not found to reduce instrumental and sexual objectification for high LSH men. There were differences found on empathy between men high and low and medium on LSH. Differences were found such that men high in LSH showed more state empathy, but less trait empathy than men low and medium in LSH.