reenactments, women found more evidence of legally
defined harassment.
With regard to intragender harassment, early work
found that male workers experience at least as many
potentially sexual harassing behaviors from other men
as from women, but reacted less negatively to encoun-
ters with women. Furthermore, one study reported that
men experience cross-gender social sexual conduct at
work as seductive but same-gender behavior as harass-
ing. Expanding on this work, Margaret Stockdale and
colleagues showed that male-on-male harassment
results, in part, from men’s motivation to enforce strict
gender role norms on less masculine men. Data from a
1995 Armed Forces survey showed intragender harass-
ment occurred mostly among men who treat other men
harshly. That is, these male workers reject other men as
too feminine and do not approach them sexually. While
others have begun to study intragender harassment, the
influence of sexual orientation of men in intragender
cases remains largely untested.
Following up on their earlier work, Margaret
Stockdale and colleagues presented approach and
rejection scenarios in which males experienced
unwanted sexual attention from women or other men.
In the rejection scenarios only, female as compared
with male observers rated higher sexual harassment
using their own personal definitions of harassment.
These results supported Richard Wiener and col-
leagues’ self-referencing hypothesis that people use
themselves as reference points to judge the abusiveness
of harassment complaints. Other research using
vignette studies found that subjective ratings of how
evaluators would perceive the egregious conduct if they
were the object of the unwanted behavior explained the
effects of observer gender. There is also support in the
literature for self-referencing in another scenario study
in which women (compared with men) found more evi-
dence of male-on-male harassment.
Unlike the gender literature, a smaller and much less
organized literature attests to the importance of cultural
factors. Most interestingly, one cross-cultural scenario
study involving eight nations conducted by Janet Sigal
and colleagues found participants from individualist
countries (e.g., the United States and Germany) were
less likely than those from collectivist countries (e.g.,
Taiwan and the Philippines) to find a professor “guilty”
of sexually harassing a female student. Other research
manipulated a litigant race in a mock jury study of sex-
ual harassment to find jurors (especially White males)
more sympathetic to litigants of their own race.While several studies have examined race and eth-
nicity as factors that qualify the way in which workers
experience sexual and ethnic harassment, the results of
those investigations are inconsistent, sometimes sup-
porting conditional findings and sometimes not sup-
porting the effects of these qualifying factors. Louise
Fitzgerald and colleagues empirically developed and
successfully tested an organizational model to explore
the effects of race and ethnicity as explanations for out-
comes of sexual harassment. Others have also built
empirical models to identify some of the correlates of
gender that help explain its effect on harassment judg-
ments. Approaching the problem from a theoretical per-
spective, Richard Wiener and colleagues offer a social
cognitive model of liability decisions to account for
gender, race, and sexual orientation effects.Social Cognitive Model of
Sexual Harassment Judgments
The social cognitive model tries to integrate the law and
psychology in this area. According to this model, sex-
ual harassment judgments emerge from a two-stage
model, with a preliminary judgment based on well-
rehearsed and easily retrievable rules of categorization
(i.e., sexual assault is harassment, telling dirty jokes is
not). The initial judgment compares the complained
after conduct to existing standards of behavior. If the
conduct exceeds an offensiveness threshold, people
perceive it as harassment with little cognitive activity
(e.g., quid pro quo harassment, assault, and rape). If the
conduct falls below a minimum offensiveness, people
perceive it as nonharassing, again with little cognitive
activity (e.g., compliments and personal talk). If the
conduct falls between these norms, or if the observer is
motivated to engage in further efforts, then a second,
deliberative process ensues.
The model anticipates a second stage that triggers
self-referencing to analyze more carefully the com-
plained after incident(s). Here, the effects of the gender,
race, and sexual orientation of the observer, alleged
harasser, and complainant come into play. Because of
prior experiences in and out of work, men and women,
as well as people with different racial/ethnic back-
grounds, cultural backgrounds, and sexual orientations,
use different standards to judge harassment complaints.
Women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals use a
broader definition because their vulnerable positions in
society make them more sensitive to the role of social
underdogs.738 ———Sexual HarassmentS-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:44 PM Page 738