Picturing Perpetrators: Investigating Mental Representations of Sexual Harassers

Abstract

Sexual harassment causes psychological, occupational, and economic damage to countless victims every day. A pair of recent studies found that people tend to think of white women when they think about victims of sexual harassment, and that this representation affects their perceptions of victims and of harassment behaviors (Goh et al., 2021; Bandt-Law et al., 2021). The present research seeks to further explore perceptions of sexual harassment by investigating how people mentally represent sexual harassment perpetrators. A two-part study employing reverse correlation methodology was conducted with the goal of answering this question by producing a prototypical image from the perceptions of participants, and analyzing people’s perceptions of this prototype’s race, gender, and personal attributes. Study 1 yielded an image of the prototypical sexual harasser, and the reverse of this image (i.e., the non-prototypical sexual harasser). In Study 2, participants rated their perceptions of the prototypical and non-prototypical images. The results of Study 2 clearly indicated that people tend to mentally represent sexual harassment perpetrators as Black men, and that they perceive Black men to be significantly more associated with negative attributes than white women (the non-prototypical sexual harassment perpetrators). These findings add to previous literature that indicates that people’s mental representations of sexual harassment differ from media representations, which suggest that sexual harassment is a behavior perpetrated by white men against white women. These results also have profound implications, not only for interpersonal interactions between Black men and outgroup members, but also for civil litigation proceedings and criminal justice. The influence of prototypes that this line of research has introduced may further elucidate sources of racial bias in workplaces, civil courts, and more.

Keywords: sexual harassment, prototypes, civil rights, race, reverse correlation