The Implicit Theories of Rape-Prone Men: An Information-Processing Investigation

Abstract

It has been hypothesised that sexual offenders hold offence-supportive implicit theories (ITs) or schemata. This study aims to determine whether rape-prone men hold the same offence-supportive ITs as those that have been identified in rapists. This study adopts both an explicit and an implicit measure of ITs (a lexical decision task). In the lexical decision task, participants are primed with an incomplete sentence before being presented with a target word. The target word completes the sentence in either a rape-supportive or a non—rape-supportive manner. The authors predict that men higher on proclivity to rape—who presumably hold strong mental representations of rape-supportive themes—would be faster to respond to word completions that are rape supportive relative to men lower on rape proclivity. Using multiple regressions to determine the relative contributions of both explicit and implicit measures for predicting rape proclivity, the authors find that only the explicit self-report questionnaire was significantly related to a person’s rape proclivity score.