Rape myths as neutralizing cognitions: evidence for a causal impact of anti-victim attitudes on men's self-reported likelihood of raping
✍ Scribed by Gerd Bohner; Marc-André Reinhard; Stefanie Rutz; Sabine Sturm; Bernd Kerschbaum; Dagmar Effler
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 165 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0046-2772
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Men's rape myth acceptance (RMA; prejudiced beliefs that serve to exonerate the rapist and blame the victim) has been shown to correlate positively with self-reported rape proclivity (RP). To explore the causal pathway underlying this correlation, two experiments were conducted in which the relative cognitive accessibility of RMA and RP was varied. Male students were asked to report their RP in the context of a scale assessing attraction toward sexual aggression (Experiment 1) or in response to ®ve realistic date-rape scenarios (Experiment 2), either before or after they ®lled out a 20-item RMA scale. In both studies, the correlation of RMA and RP was signi®cantly greater in the after than in the before condition, suggesting that the belief in rape myths has a causal in¯uence on men's proclivity to rape.