“What makes some men sexual harassers? Science tries to explain the creeps of the world.”
“Over the years, Pryor — a psychologist at Illinois State University — and others have used socially engineered situations in laboratories to study how well the test predicts people’s behavior. And over time, they’ve identified these factors as the most distinctive in harassers: a lack of empathy, a belief in traditional gender sex roles and a tendency toward dominance/authoritarianism.
They also found in studies that the environment surrounding such harassers has a huge effect, Pryor said in a phone interview.
“If you take men who score high on the scale and put them in situations where the system suggests they can get away with it, they will do it,” he said. “Impunity plays a large role.”…
In recent years, psychologists trying to understand the relationship between power and sex have found that, for many men who score high on the harassment scale, the two ideas are often intertwined.
“They are two sides of the same coin and so strongly fused that it’s impossible to cleave them apart,” Pryor said. “If these men have power over someone, they find it difficult not to have those sexual ideas come to mind. And more they think about it, the more that association is reinforced.”
