Situational and Dispositional Factors in Rape Cognitions: The Roles of Social Media and the Dark Triad Traits.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Lyons, Minna Rowe, Alana Waddington, Rachel Brewer, Gayle
Copyright Year	2021
Abstract	Previous research has established the importance of socially aversive personalitytraits (i.e., the Dark Triad) in rape cognitions (operationalized here asrape-supportive attitudes, rape victim empathy, and hostile masculinity).However, less is known about how sexist social media content influencesattitudes toward rape cognitions depending on the personality of the individual.In an online experiment, after completing the Short Dark Triad-3 questionnaire,participants (N = 180) were primed with either sexist orneutral tweets, rating them for acceptability, humor, rudeness, and ignorance.Participants then completed scales for rape-supportive attitudes, victimempathy, and hostile masculinity. Sexist tweets were rated as significantly lessacceptable and humorous, and more rude and ignorant than neutral tweets.However, those high in the Dark Triad found the sexist tweets as funny andacceptable. Overall, exposure to the sexist tweets did not increase rapecognitions. Moreover, the Dark Triad traits had similar significant, positivecorrelations with rape-supportive attitudes, victim blame, and hostilemasculinity in both sexist and neutral tweet conditions. Multiple regressionanalyses (controlling for gender) revealed that psychopathy was the strongestpositive predictor for increased rape cognitions. Findings suggest that shortexposure to sexist social media content may not influence rape cognitions, butthat dispositional factors such as psychopathy are more important.
Related Links	https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC9149267&blobtype=pdf
ISSN	08862605
Journal	Journal of Interpersonal Violence [J Interpers Violence]
Volume Number	37
DOI	10.1177/0886260520985499
PubMed Central reference number	PMC9149267
Issue Number	11-12
PubMed reference number	33451260
e-ISSN	15526518
Language	English
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Publisher Date	2021-01-15
Publisher Place	Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) whichpermits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the workwithout further permission provided the original work is attributed asspecified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). © 2021 SAGE Publications
Subject Keyword	Dark Triad rape cognitions social media twitter priming
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Clinical Psychology Applied Psychology