On the relationship between automatic attitudes and self-reported sexual assault in men

Research and theory suggest rape supportive attitudes are important predictors of sexual assault; yet, to date, rape supportive attitudes have been assessed through self-report measures that are methodologically and theoretically limited. To address these limitations, the objectives of the current project were to: (1) develop a novel implicit rape attitude assessment that captures automatic attitudes about rape and does not rely on self-reports, and (2) examine the association between automatic rape attitudes and sexual assault perpetration. We predicted that automatic rape attitudes would be a significant unique predictor of sexual assault even when self-reported rape attitudes (i.e., rape myth acceptance and hostility toward women) were controlled. We tested the generalizability of this prediction in two independent samples: a sample of undergraduate college men (n = 75, M age = 19.3 years) and a sample of men from the community (n = 50, M age = 35.9 years). We found the novel implicit rape attitude assessment was significantly associated with the frequency of sexual assault perpetration in both samples and contributed unique variance in explaining sexual assault beyond rape myth acceptance and hostility toward women. We discuss the ways in which future research on automatic rape attitudes may significantly advance measurement and theory aimed at understanding and preventing sexual assault.