The Impact of Contemplated Exposure to a Survivor of Rape on Attitudes toward Rape1

Abstract

Male and female college students were asked to rate the truth of myths about rape either before or after contemplating how they would react if a close friend or relative told them she had been raped. It was expected that such contemplation would decrease endorsement of rape myths, by increasing sympathy for victims and reducing the tendency to blame victims for sexual assault. Typically, studies have found that women are less accepting of rape myths and more sympathetic to rape victims than men. A reason for this may be that women have thought about rape more and are more likely to have experienced sexual assault or to be acquainted with a survivor. Based on the above findings, it was hypothesized that contemplating exposure to a rape survivor would be particularly beneficial to men's attitudes. Results contradicted the hypothesis and showed that contemplating exposure increased rejection of rape myths for women but slightly increased men's endorsements. In contrast, men and women who were actually acquainted with a rape survivor rejected rape myths more strongly than those who did not claim acquaintance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.