The Role of Pluralistic Ignorance in the Reporting of Sexual Harassment

Abstract

There have been many attempts to explain how and why people report incidents of sexual harassment. One area that has been overlooked is the influence of the targets' social cognition processes on these reports, particularly social comparison processes such as pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a social comparison phenomenon whereby individuals mistakenly believe they are in the minority. In the case of harassment, pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals mistakenly interpret the behavioral responses of others to mistakenly believe that they are alone in their discomfort with harassment. We investigated the role of pluralistic ignorance in this process by exposing undergraduate students to sexist jokes while manipulating their access to behavioral responses of others. We measured their comfort level and their perceptions of the humor of the jokes. We compared their responses, most importantly, with how many jokes they read prior to “reporting” their discomfort with the jokes. We found evidence for the proposed role of pluralistic ignorance in the sexual harassment reporting process, whereby exposure to behavioral responses of others influences perceptions of others' relative comfort and humor, which in turn led to a decreased likelihood of reporting the harassment.