Justice for All Survivors: An Investigation on the Presence of Location Prototypicality and Its Implications on Biasing the Perception of Sexual Harassment

Abstract

Previous work on sexual harassment perceptions has found that victim prototypicality and perpetrator prototypicality can negatively bias harassment perception. However, little is known about whether location or context prototypicality can also shape perceptions of sexual harassment. To fill this gap in the literature, the present research aims to provide new insight into understanding sexual harassment through investigating locational prototypicality and its implications for the perception of harassment. In Study 1, participants (n = 226) were asked to envision an instance of sexual harassment and construct a response to a provided harassment scenario. Subsequently, participants were then asked to indicate where they envisioned this event to have occurred in the form of a text checklist response and a picture checklist response. The overwhelming majority of participants envisioned sexual harassment to have taken place in an office space, confirming the office space context to be the prototypical context for sexual harassment and any location that is not the office space to be considered non-prototypical. Study 2 investigated the effects of this prototype on sexual harassment perception by having participants (n = 381) read scenarios and rate their assessment of the perceived harm, distress, welcomeness, commonness, punishment, and harassment criteria for workplace harassment that had taken place in the prototypical office space and the non-prototypical manufacturing facility and construction site. The results of study 2 show that location prototypicality does indeed bias the perception of harassment and causes people to discount non-prototypical harassment as less harmful, more common, more welcomed, and less likely to meet harassment criteria when compared to harassment in prototypical contexts.

Keywords: Sexual Harassment, Prototypes, Perception, Bias, Locations, Contexts, #MeToo Movement.