Is personality related to judgments about sexual harassment?

Abstract

Three separate studies were conducted to explore personality correlates of judgments about sexual harassment. ( 1 ) Twenty-one female students aged 18 to 22 yr. were given 11 situations involving actions of an instructor of the opposite sex, ranging from comments on your clothes to looks you up and down or at your breast or crotch and asked to rate each action on a scale of 0 to 4 for how sexually harassing ic was judged to be. Scores on the 11 items were summed. Subjects were also given a self-confidence scale (Girdano 8: Everly, 1979). Judgments of sexual harassment were not related to self-confidence scores (Pearson 7 z 0.02 ) .2 ( 2 ) Another group of 58 female students, aged 17 to 23 yr. were given the sexual harassment scale and a brief form of the Eysenck Personalicy Inventory (Jensen, 1958) to measure extraversion and neuroticism. Sexual harassment attitude scores were not associated with excraversion ( 7 = 0.05) or neuroticism ( r = -0.03) . ( 3 ) A third group of 28 female students, aged 18 to 22 yr., were given the sexual harassment scale and a longer measure of excraversion (Eysenck 8: Eysenck, 1968). Sexual harassment attitude scores were associated with extraversion scores ( r = -0.32, df = 25, $ = 0.05).' Judgments about whecher a situation is sexually harassing were not related strongly to the personality dimensions used here. Self-confidence and neuroticism were noc relaced to judgments, and excraversion was related only in the study using the longer scale. Extraverts saw the situations as less sexually harassing than did introverts, but this finding needs to be replicated before we can be confident about its reliability.