Sexually Aggressive Men's Responses to a Date Rape Analogue: Alcohol as a Disinhibiting Cue

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 1998 by Jeffrey A. Bernat, Karen S. Calhoun, Stephanie Stolp

A major purpose of this study was to examine a potential theoretical explanation for differences in sexual decision-making among men with disparate sexual histories. In partial support of a suspicious schema explanation (Malamuth & Brown, 1994), we found that relatively more aggressive men rated the female character as less honest in expressing her true feelings about wanting to have sex, resulting in an overestimation of how much she wanted to have sex. This supports the notion that sexually aggressive men perceive women as exhibiting an adversarial, game-playing orientation when it comes to sex (e.g., "women don't really tell the truth when it comes to sex"), and thus are more likely to discount the veridicality of women's communication and persist in sexual advances (Malamuth & Brown, 1994). Consistent with this position is theoretical and empirical work (e.g., Burkhart & Fromuth, 1991; Malamuth & Brown, 1994; McFall, 1990) suggesting that sexually aggressive men operate according to coercive cognitive schemas, or belief systems about the nature of sexual interactions between men and women, which function as information processing heuristics for decision-making in sexual interactions. In the present study, it appears that sexually aggressive men who were provided with a disinhibiting, and perhaps more ambiguous, situational context in which the characters consumed alcohol were more likely to rely on their coercive belief systems and interpret the woman's resistance as false. In a naturalistic context, this cognitive bias may allow a perpetrator to actively manipulate his social environment as well as his evaluation of events to participate in desired activities, thereby perpetuating a cycle of aggressive sexual behavior (Bernat et al., in press; Craig, 1990).

Although we found support for the suspicious schema explanation based on aggressive men's perceptions of less than honest communication by the individual female character, we also found that aggressive men rated her behavior as less typical than most women's behavior given the same sexual situation, which is in direct contrast to predictions of the suspicious schema explanation. One potential explanation is that sexually aggressive men based their judgments on their own sexual experiences with women. While the male character in the analogue was required to use force to obtain intercourse, it may be that sexually aggressive men who use alcohol or drugs to impair a victim usually succeed in their endeavors to have sex without resorting to threats or force. Indeed, most sexually aggressive college men report using non-forceful methods (e.g., verbal and psychological pressure, alcohol and/or drugs) to obtain unwanted sexual behavior (Rapaport & Burkhart, 1984). Nonetheless, future research should explore this possibility more definitively.

While the present study establishes an empirical link between character alcohol consumption, laboratory decisions, and sexual aggression, it has several limitations. First, the decisions made by men during a date rape analogue may not necessarily correspond with decisions occurring in naturalistic sexual contexts. However, the finding that sexually aggressive men were more likely to stop the tape at the point of verbal threats or forced sex suggests a correspondence between on line laboratory judgments and personal decisions. This is a closer approximation to real life decisions than most vignette research in which participants typically make judgments after reading a complete account of a rape. The heuristic value of the decision-latency methodology is that it provides information on how people judge sexual situations at different points in their progression. Second, it might be argued that the present results can be explained by demand characteristics, with the sexually aggressive group more willing to engage in socially undesirable behavior in the laboratory than the nonaggressive group. However, in previous studies using this methodology we have shown that neither sexual aggression history (Bernat, 1997) nor decision-latency (Bernat, Stolp, Calhoun & Adams, 1997) is associated with social desirability. An additional limitation is the sample, which consisted of undergraduate male college students who were young and predominantly white. Thus, caution should be dictated in generalizing the present findings to other groups. Future studies should include more diverse samples of men such as ethnic minority males, older adults, and individuals with sexual victimization histories, to further understand the decision processes associated with sexual aggression. Moreover, the inclusion of qualitative methodologies (e.g., articulated thought paradigm), in combination with quantitative data, might provide further insights into why participants decided to prolong the date rape, and thus ensure more ecologically valid findings. Finally, although the present study manipulated character alcohol consumption, we did not manipulate participant's alcohol consumption. It would be interesting to determine whether sexually aggressive and nonaggressive men's laboratory decisions were differentially impacted by alcohol consumption and/or alcohol expectancies (cf. Marx, 1996).