Abstract
Research on the issues surrounding false allegations of assault against men has been largely based on review of official documentation, not on questions asked of the women themselves. This limits what we know about variables that might contribute explanation as to why some women deliberately lie about having been assaulted. In our survey of 255 women (both college students and community members), 18 admitted they had fictitiously claimed to have been assaulted either to official investigators, or to friends and family members. Their stated motives included revenge, fear, and embarrassment. Our participants also rated the extent to which they could imagine a situation in which they would make a(nother) false claim in the future—101 (39.6%) of them rated this item positively to differing degrees. We also examined individual difference variables including the ‘dark triad’ traits and four measures of sexist beliefs. While Machiavellianism and psychopathy had positive relationships with how easily participants could imagine making a false claim, several of the sexism beliefs explained more variance in imagined intent to falsify a claim, particularly among the women who admitted having made one previously.
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Notes
The legal terms of ‘rape’ and ‘sexual assault’ are defined differently, but the precise definitions vary across jurisdictions (Planty et al., 2013). Additionally, these terms are often not specifically defined by researchers, or are used interchangeably. As such, we used the more general description of ‘sexual violence’ in this work to refer to both categories of crimes.
Linear regression on such a small sample (n = 18) produces output that describes only that sample, and it’s unwise to expect these results to generalize to others. While among the larger sub-group (n = 237) the Adjusted R2s were .15 for Block 1, and .19 for Block 2, the smaller group’s Adjusted R2s = .05 and .45. In addition, the expected random relationship among 7 predictors with this sample size = .41 (R = k/N-1).
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Bertsch, S., Matthews, K. Lies and imagined intent to lie: Personality, sexism beliefs and false claims of assault. Curr Psychol 42, 9810–9818 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02278-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02278-2