Peer modeling and college men's sexually impositional behavior in the laboratory

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2002 by Damon Mitchell, D.J. Angelone, Richard Hirschman, Roy S. Lilly, Gordon C. Nagayama Hall

The experimenter set aside the three clips and stated that he would leave the participant and confederate alone to watch the clips while he worked with the other students. Two of the video clips were nonviolent, nonsexual, action-oriented scenes (one depicted a roller coaster ride and the other depicted a race). A third depicted a date rape. The video clips were about 1.5 minutes long and came from different commercially available films. The roller coaster scene was from My Life, the race scene was from The Running Man, and the date rape scene was from Higher Learning. Their presentation was randomized for each participant.

After viewing the clips, the participant and confederate were asked to each choose a video clip to show to their female partner. They were told that after they made their choice they would play the clip on their TV-VCR and it would be played simultaneously on a TV in the adjoining room where their female partner would be working. The experimenter indicated that the confederate would be asked to choose first, and then left the room ostensibly to get the confederate's partner set up in the adjoining room. The experimenter could be heard escorting the confederate's partner into the adjoining room and explaining her upcoming tasks in the study. When the experimenter returned to the participant's and confederate's room, he told the confederate to play his chosen video clip on the VCR. In the experimental condition, the confederate chose the sexually aggressive video clip. In the neutral condition, he chose the video clip depicting the roller coaster ride. After the video clip was over, the experimenter could be heard ushering the confederate's partner out of the adjoining room and escorting the participant's partner into the room and explaining her upcoming tasks in the study. The experimenter returned to the participant's and confederate's room and instructed the participant to play his chosen video clip on the VCR.

After the participant showed a video clip, he was escorted out of the room and asked to fill out a brief poststudy questionnaire. One question asked participants to name the video clip they believed would have been most upsetting to their partner. Other items assessed participants' impressions of the video clips and perceptions of the other students using a 5-point Likert-type format. One question asked participants to rate how upset they had anticipated their partner would be with their video clip selection (1 = extremely upset, 5 = extremely happy). Another item asked participants what they believed their partner's actual reaction had been to their video clip selection (1 = extremely upset, 5 = extremely happy). As a manipulation check, we asked participants to write what they believed the purpose of the study had been. All participants were given a partial debriefing and encouraged to attend a full debriefing session at the end of the semester.

RESULTS

Manipulation Check

Written responses from 6 participants to the manipulation check item on the poststudy questionnaire indicated that they had some rudimentary understanding of the experiment's hypothesis. Data from these participants were excluded from analyses. Responses from other participants were consistent with the cover story for the project.