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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedVariation in the application of the "promiscuous female" stereotype and the nature of the application domain: influences on sexual harassment judgments after exposure to the Jerry Springer Show
Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, April, 2005 by Tara Ferguson, Jeff Berlin, Erica Noles, James Johnson, William Reed, C. Vincent Spicer
One major shortcoming of the sexual harassment research is the substantial lack of clarity in people's perceptions of such harassment, as well as the operationalization of sexual harassment into meaningful empirical harassment categories (Gillespie & Leffler, 1987; McKinney, 1990). In order to address this shortcoming, Gruber (1992) developed a comprehensive categorization of sexual harassment that is mutually exclusive and reflective of the recent guidelines of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. These general categories include: (a) verbal comments (i.e., personally demeaning statements or questions and general sexist comments); (b) verbal requests (i.e., goal-oriented statements to seek sexual or relational intimacy); and (c) physical displays (i.e., sexual touching, attempted sexual assault). In support of the validity of this typology, Johnson, Adams, Hall, and Ashburn (1997) demonstrated that the impact of factors such as victim intoxication and participant gender on perceptions of sexual harassment tended to be moderated by the type of harassment. In this study we assessed whether the type of harassment would moderate the impact of the activation of mass media stereotypical depictions on judgments of harassment victims.
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Experiment Overview and Predictions
In this study, participants were informed that they would be participating in two separate experiments. The ostensible purpose of the first study, which was entitled "Public Policy Issues," was to assess participants' perceptions of the government's role in regulating various types of television shows. They were exposed to an episode of the Jerry Springer Show that focused on female guests involved in either promiscuous or nonpromiscuous behavior. Subsequently, they answered questions that assessed their perceptions of issues such as the appropriateness of the government regulation of such shows and the frequency with which they watched the show. The Jerry Springer Show was chosen because one of the goals of this study was to assess the negative consequences of exposure to easily accessible and highly popular media stimuli. The talk show, which typically involves discussion of provocative topics, was extremely popular in the mid-1990s. In fact, during that time period, it was ranked as one of the most watched shows among adults ages 18-35 (Littleton, 1998).
In the second experiment, which was entitled "Decision-Making Processes," participants made judgments of three different passages. The relevant passage involved an incident that occurred between a male supervisor and a female subordinate at a company Christmas party. Participants read that when the supervisor was talking to the subordinate, he made a verbal comment ("Your ass sure looks good in that dress."), a verbal request ("I sure would love to see your ass butt-naked in my bed."), or a physical display ("He placed his hands on her buttocks and firmly gripped them."). Thus, the study had a 2 (exposure condition: promiscuous behavior, nonpromiscuous behavior) X 3 (harassment type: verbal comment, verbal request, physical display) factorial design. After reading the passage, participants answered questions that assessed their perceptions of the woman's promiscuity (which served as the measure of stereotype application), her possible trauma, and her responsibility for the incident.
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