Eye of the beholder: Effects of perspective and sexual objectification on harassment judgments.

Abstract

Social Analytic Jurisprudence instructs researchers to study the reciprocal relations between law and peoples' lives by developing empirical descriptions of legal assumptions about human behavior. The present work introduced a new experimental paradigm to test some of those assumptions by studying the impact of sexual objectification in a simulated job interview on performance, sexual harassment judgments, and emotions for women who experienced (akin to complainants), observed (akin to coworkers or witnesses), or predicted (akin to investigators, EEOC officers, mediators, jurors, or judges,) the impact of sexual objectification. Consistent with hypotheses, sexual objectification resulted in worse performance predictions, more sexual harassment, and more negative emotion compared with the control condition, but these effects were moderated by perspective. Overall, predictors estimated worse performance, more sexual harassment, and more negative emotion in response to sexual objectification than observers and experiencers. Anticipated negative emotion and self-referencing explained the effects for predictors. Theoretical and practical implications for legal and psychological theory on sexual harassment, objectification, and affective forecasting are discussed.

Do You See What I See? The Consequences of Objectification in Work Settings for Experiencers and Third Party Predictors

“…The male research assistant served as an interviewer, asking the participant to take a seat approximately 2 ft away. The interview consisted of 10 open‐ended questions assessing the participant's previous experience, skills, and interests in secretarial or creative tasks (modified from Gervais et al., and Wiener et al., ). Predictor participants were asked to read a transcript that explained that a male research assistant conducted an interview with a female student to decide whether the female student would complete a boring task, sorting 200 research articles into folders by topic, or an interesting task, creating a colorful poster to display the lab's recent research findings.…”

“…For example, Wiener et al. () found that women who anticipated an objectification experience in a work setting were more likely to report that it would be sexually harassing than women who actually experienced objectification in a work setting. One possibility is that predictors anticipate that women will feel worse following sexual objectification than women who experience objectification actually feel as a result of affective forecasting.…”

“…When and why sexual objectification in work settings constitutes sexual harassment was the primary question that motivated the present work. Toward that end, we adopted a recent laboratory analogue of sexual harassment (Gervais, Vescio, & Allen, ; Wiener, Gervais, Allen, & Marquez, ) to consider the effects of varying degrees of sexual objectification in work settings on women themselves (i.e., experiencers akin to potential complainants in a lawsuit) as well as third‐party perceivers who learned about objectification after‐the‐fact (i.e., predictors akin to potential lawyers, Equal Opportunity Employment Commission [EEOC] officers, jurors, judges). Research on sexual harassment, sexual objectification, and affective forecasting revealed several points of convergence about how people make judgments about sexual harassment from which we derived testable hypotheses.…”

Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing

“…A notable exception is the recent work by Wiener et al 2013). They randomly assigned male and female participants to experience either no objectifying gaze or a brief series of objectifying gazes from a confederate of the opposite sex during a brief interview.…”

“…Gervais, Wiener, and their colleagues Wiener et al 2013) have done this with their use of an objectifying gaze at a person's chest for various lengths of time during a face-to-face interview. While the person may have felt objectified, it may have been unclear as to whether that was the objectifier's intention.…”