The authors tested a psycholegal model of how people evaluate social sexual conduct at work with videotaped reenactments of interviews with alleged complainants, perpetrators, and other workers. Participants (200 full-time male and female workers) were randomly assigned to evaluate the complaints with either the reasonable person or reasonable woman legal standard. Participants answered questions about sexual harassment law and completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. Participants who took the reasonable woman perspective, as compared with those who took the reasonable person perspective, were more likely to find the conduct harassing; this was especially the case among participants high in hostile sexism. Medium-sized gender effects were found in the severe case but were absent in the weaker, more ambiguous case. The implications of these findings for hostile work environment law are discussed.

This research tests the possibility that the reasonable woman as compared to the reasonable person test of hostile work environment sexual harassment interacts with hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs and under some conditions triggers protectionist attitudes toward women who complain of sexual harassment, We administered to a sample of undergraduates the ambivalent sexism inventory along with the fact patterns in two harassment cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. We found that those high in hostile sexism, and women, found more evidence of harassment. However, those high in benevolent sexism did not exhibit the hostile sexism effects. Although men were less sensitive to the reasonable woman standard than women, under some conditions the reasonable woman standard enabled both genders to find greater evidence of harassment. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended in 1991 prohibits an employer from discriminating against an individual with respect to compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The courts have applied Title VII's prohibition against gender discrimination to outlaw two types of sexual harassment First, employers may not exact sexual contact in exchange for compensation or advancement (Henson v. City of Dundee, 1982; and Miller v. Bank of Am., 1979) and second they may not subject workers to intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environments because of their gender

Three studies used videotaped harassment complaints to examine the impact of legal standards on the evaluation of social-sexual conduct at work. Study 1 demonstrated that without legal instructions, college students' judgment strategies were highly variable. Study 2 compared 2 current legal standards, the "severity or pervasiveness test" and a proposed utilitarian alternative (i.e., the rational woman approach). Undergraduate participants taking the perspective of the complainant were more sensitive to offensive conduct than were those adopting an objective perspective. Although the utilitarian altemative further increased sensitivity on some measures, it failed to produce a principled judgment strategy. Finally, Study 3 examined the kinds of errors that full-time workers make when applying the "severity or pervasiveness" test to examine more closely the sensitivity of the subjective approach.

The authors reviewed the most recent U.S. Supreme Court holdings regarding sexual harassment (SH) and compared them to legal commentators' calls for reform in the law. Because the courts have ignored empirical evidence, and agreement among social forces is lacking, the judiciary has been unable to send a unified message to regulate social sexual misconduct at work. This analysis of recent social science research suggests that the a more thorough understanding of the fundamentals of SH law is needed. The authors' psycholegal analysis of SH policy adopts the interdisciplinary point of view called social analytic jurisprudence. They summarized some of the empirical findings guided by that perspective and concluded with a set of empirical research questions, the answers to which bring one a more interdisciplinary understanding of social sexual conduct at work.

This article analyzes whether state-approved jury instructions adequately guide jury discretion in the penalty phase of first-degree murder trials. It examines Eighth Amendment jurisprudence regarding guided jury discretion, emphasizing the use of “empirical factors” to examine the quality of state-approved instructions. Psychological research and testimony on the topic of the comprehensibility of jury instructions are reviewed. Data from a recently completed simulation with 80 deliberating juries showed that current instructions do not adequately convey the concepts and processes essential to guiding penalty phase judgments. An additional simulation with 20 deliberating juries demonstrated that deliberation alone does not correct for jurors' errors in comprehension. The article concludes with recommendations for policy and future research.