This research explored the cognitive processes that underlie sexual harassment proclivities in men. It was postulated that men who are high in the likelihood to sexually harass women (LS perceive a connection between sexuality and social dominance. Such a sexuality/dominance cognitive link was hypothesized to bias the processing of social information so as to create an illusory correlation between dominance and sexuality terms in a frequency estimation task. Male subjects viewed a series of word pairs in which sexuality and dominance terms were paired equally often with each other and with neutral control words. High-LSH subjects were more confident in their recognition of the sexuality-dominance pairs and estimated having seen them more frequently than low-LSH subjects. Cognitive and behavioral implications of a sexuality/dominance knowledge structure are discussed.
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