Real Versus Imagined Gender Harassment

Abstract

Sexual harassment studies that use hypothetical situations and retrospective surveys may overestimate the degree to which victims actually confront their harassers. The result is that immediate emotional reactions are little understood and victims are often taken to task for nonconfrontational behavior. To address this neglect, we describe our experimental investigation of immediate reactions to sexually harassing questions encountered during a realistic job interview. Behavioral and emotional responses are compared to those in an imagined harassing interview. Results indicate that interviewees who are actually harassed react very differently than those who only imagine their responses. For example, imagined victims anticipate feeling angry but actual targets report being afraid. Anticipated behavior also did not mesh with actual behavior. Implications of these discrepancies for perceptions of "correct" ways to respond to harassment are examined.

Anger and shame elicited by discrimination: Moderating role of coping on action endorsements and salivary cortisol

“…Yet, as indicated earlier, discrimination more typically is not followed by such actions (Foster & Matheson, 1999;Louis & Taylor, 1999;Swim & Hyers, 1999;Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001). It is contended in the present investigation that action propensities may be diminished owing to the presence of other emotions, and in particular shame.…”

“…This said, it should be noted that the present investigation did not assess actual behaviors, but rather women's endorsements of the likelihood that they would engage in such actions if they had the opportunity to do so. As previously noted, intentions do not always correspond to action (Swim & Hyers, 1999;Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001). Thus, the limited support of the hypotheses regarding action endorsements may be due to the methodological paradigm.…”

“…To the extent that discriminatory events are encountered on a chronic, unpredictable basis, and often occur in contexts in which women have a vested interest in maintaining positive social or professional relations, they might very well experience shame associated with losing status in the eyes of others. At the same time, within this context, women are unlikely to confront the perpetrator (Swim & Hyers, 1999;Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001), potentially giving rise to further shame. The fact that shame, and the associated cortisol reactivity, could be elicited within a laboratory context begs the question as to how much more potent such events would be in a real world context.…”

“…Although both shame and anger were evident under conditions of discrimination, other emotions might also be elicited that influence subsequent responses. For example, in some situations of discrimination, fear was exhibited and was associated with a lower likelihood of confrontational action (Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001;Yzerbyt et al, 2003;but cf. Mackie et al, 2000).…”

“…As the emotions experienced are likely to differ when the situation entails actual, rather than hypothetical events (Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001), a laboratory situation was created that involved an explicit incident of discrimination. Specifically, women were placed in an achievement-based context, wherein they experienced failure due Anger vs. shame effects on discrimination responses 165 either to discrimination or to their alleged personal performance.…”