Victims of rape are uniquely vulnerable for being blamed for their assault relative to victims of other interpersonal crimes and thus much research has been conducted to understand why this is the case. But the study of victim blaming in acquaintance rape cases is hindered by contradictory empirical results. Early investigations in victim blaming often treated acquaintance rapes and stranger rapes as synonymous and thus much of these data are suspect for drawing conclusions particular to acquaintance rape. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the research literature on victim blame in acquaintance rape cases, highlighting inconsistencies and drawing particular attention to areas of research in need of further exploration. Specifically, we review the commonly studied individual (perceiver) factors that influence victim blaming, as well as common situational (target) factors included or manipulated within sexual assault scenarios. Our review reveals many inconsistent findings and interactions between perceiver and scenario factors. In an effort to make sense of these complex interactions and inconsistent findings, we suggest a need for more transparency in describing the scenarios used in research on victim blaming in sexual assault cases and greater empirical attention to sociocultural factors that may influence blaming tendencies.

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Sexual assault is often described as motivated by power, yet there is relatively little experimental research investigating the effect of power (and powerlessness) on interpretations of a sexual assault. Two studies manipulated participants' feelings of power prior to a thought-listing task about sexual assault victims (Study 1) or an evaluation of a case of sexual assault (Study 2). Among men, feelings of powerlessness led to reduced victim blaming, while powerlessness tended to increase victim blaming among women (Study 2). These results indicate that powerlessness has different implications for men and women, increasing men's ability to take the perspective of a victim of sexual assault, but increasing women's sense of threat and defensiveness. Both studies support a default status explanation for men such that feelings of powerlessness-a state that deviates from men's typical high-power "default" status in society-increase perspective taking and thereby reduce victim blame. Among women, however, powerlessness may trigger a defensive response, resulting in greater blaming.

There are a number of well-established biases in the ways that individuals process information about others. One such bias is the cross-race effect (CRE), which is the tendency for same-race (SR) faces to be remembered better than cross-race (CR) faces (see Meissner & Brigham, 2001, for a review). While the existence of this bias is well known, psychologists have only recently begun to recognize the importance of motivation in the CRE. Contemporary accounts suggest that the CRE is due, at least in part, to a lack of motivation to process and remember CR faces (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010; Malpass, 1990). The current paper tested this claim through diverging methods designed to manipulate the importance, and thereby motivation to remember, CR faces. We first manipulated outcome dependency (Study 1, described in what follows)

Objectives: The aim of this field experiment was to test the effect of a social psychological intervention on an ethnically diverse sample of first-year college women majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). We hypothesized that grade point averages in STEM courses would be higher in the intervention condition relative to the control condition. Furthermore, we tested competing hypotheses about the moderating role of belonging to either a well-represented (WR) or underrepresented minority (URM) ethnic group in STEM. Method: The sample (N = 199) included 115 women from WR ethnic groups and 84 women from URM ethnic groups who were randomly assigned to condition. Women in the intervention were educated about the harmful impact of gender stereotypes in STEM and provided with effective strategies for coping with stereotype threat. At the end of their first year, we obtained participants’ academic transcripts. Results: At the end of their first year in college, URM women in the intervention condition had higher grade point averages in their STEM courses than URM women in the control condition. The intervention had no effect on WR women. Conclusions: The present research demonstrates the importance of intersectional approaches to studying the experiences of women in STEM.