Join us for another School of Social Sciences Brown Bag lecture on Monday, October 11th at 12 pm with Heather Smith, Professor of Psychology, and Diana Grant, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice Studies, who will be discussing their recent research, Gendered Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: Can Gender Group Affirmation Reduce the Gap?
Universities and workplaces are legally and ethically required to mitigate sexual harassment, with numerous training programs targeted towards potential perpetrators, targets, and bystanders. The hope is that the training will help bystanders to recognize and intervene in response to sexual harassment or other mistreatment that they may witness. Unfortunately, substantial social psychological research shows that observers often ignore or downplay such mistreatment because of the distress that witnessing injustice can create. Most affirmation interventions focus on affirming the individual self. However, we propose that such distress can be reduced by the opportunity to affirm an important reference group. We predict a group affirmation intervention will be more effective than an individual affirmation because the distress and subsequent reactions evokes positive group affiliations. We draw upon recent experimental results showing gendered perceptions of sexual harassment and a meta-analysis of 58 experiments to propose that an initial group affirmation could improve the effectiveness of online bystander intervention training.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fall 2021 Brown Bag Series will take place via Zoom. Please join us: https://SonomaState.zoom.us/j/
The School of Social Sciences Brown Bag Series is always free, open to faculty, staff, students, and the public, and provides a congenial interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of recent research by School of Social Sciences faculty.