Abstract

Copyright Notice
This abstract is provided for traditional scholarship communications and for the personal use of colleagues. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders. These works may not be posted or re-posted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Brase & Miller (2001, Psychology, Evolution and Gender)
Quid pro quo (QPQ) sexual harassment, in which sexual compliance is tied to some consequent behavior of the harassing party, can involve 2 types of social interactions: social exchanges or threats. Two experiments evaluated how QPQ sexual harassment statements were perceived as different types of social interactions due to the manipulation of 3 variables. Experiment 1 had 120 Ss (60 males and 60 females, with an average age of 22.3 yrs) and Experiment 2 had 140 Ss (60 males and 80 females, with an average age of 21.6 yrs) all from a southeastern US University. Statements were predicted and found to be perceived differently across how they were posed (positive vs. negative value statements), across surrounding work contexts (thriving vs. failing), and across the sex of the harassed perceiver. These differing perceptions also affected subsequent behaviors in reasoning about the harassment situation. Implications of these results are discussed, along with limitations and future research directions.