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On the Relationship Between Automatic Attitudes and Self-Reported Sexual Assault in Men

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Abstract

Research and theory suggest rape supportive attitudes are important predictors of sexual assault; yet, to date, rape supportive attitudes have been assessed through self-report measures that are methodologically and theoretically limited. To address these limitations, the objectives of the current project were to: (1) develop a novel implicit rape attitude assessment that captures automatic attitudes about rape and does not rely on self-reports, and (2) examine the association between automatic rape attitudes and sexual assault perpetration. We predicted that automatic rape attitudes would be a significant unique predictor of sexual assault even when self-reported rape attitudes (i.e., rape myth acceptance and hostility toward women) were controlled. We tested the generalizability of this prediction in two independent samples: a sample of undergraduate college men (n = 75, M age = 19.3 years) and a sample of men from the community (n = 50, M age = 35.9 years). We found the novel implicit rape attitude assessment was significantly associated with the frequency of sexual assault perpetration in both samples and contributed unique variance in explaining sexual assault beyond rape myth acceptance and hostility toward women. We discuss the ways in which future research on automatic rape attitudes may significantly advance measurement and theory aimed at understanding and preventing sexual assault.

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Notes

  1. We applied a more stringent inclusion criteria by excluding participants with error rates over 25% on the priming procedure (n = 20) and reran all analyses. The results were unchanged when the more stringent criteria was used; thus, we chose to retain the larger sample.

  2. The most common forms of sexual assault occur between acquaintances and involve alcohol and/or verbal coercion (Koss et al., 1987); however, it was not possible to identify still-frame images that clearly depicted these forms of sexual assault. Instead, the images we located involved more overt forms of physical force. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to these images as “rape images” for the remainder of the article.

  3. Although many attitude objects have a naturally contrasting comparison group where positivity toward one category implies negativity toward the other, rape has no obvious contrasting category (for a similar point, see Karpinski & Steinman, 2006). Thus, while we included filler images of related but distinct categories (i.e., sex and violence), we were primarily interested in responses latencies to the positive and negative words preceded by rape images.

  4. Research by Geer and Bellard (1996) and Geer and Melton (1997) indicates that respondents are generally slower to respond to erotic words in lexical decision tasks, a phenomenon which may be due to the taboo nature of sexual content. This “sexual content-induced delay” may have occurred in the present research, but would have had minimal impact on the attitude estimates we derive and relate to participant behavior. This is because differences between participants’ response latencies to positive versus negative targets (which had no sexual content themselves) preceded by the same prime are used in computing the attitude estimates. Thus, any slowing effects in response to sexual content would be canceled out in these comparative analyses.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Cal Yeaman and Tiffany Smith for their assistance collecting data for this project. This research was supported in part by funding for Laura Widman from the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Foundation, the Society the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and NIH/NIAID 5 T32 AI 07001-34: Training in Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 130 Mason Farm Road, CB# 7030, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA

    Laura Widman

  2. Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Laura Widman

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Michael Olson

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  1. Laura Widman
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Correspondence to Laura Widman.

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Widman, L., Olson, M. On the Relationship Between Automatic Attitudes and Self-Reported Sexual Assault in Men. Arch Sex Behav 42, 813–823 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-012-9970-2

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