Original Article Sociosexuality as predictor of sexual harassment and coercion in female and male high school students ☆,☆☆,★ Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair ⁎ , Mons Bendixen Dragvoll Campus, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway Initial receipt 11 August 2011; final revision received 3 January 2012 Abstract Sexual harassment and coercion have mainly been considered from a sex difference perspective. While traditional social science theories have explained harassment as male dominance of females, the evolutionary perspective has suggested that sex differences in the desire for sex are a better explanation. This study attempts to address individual differences associated with harassment from an evolutionary perspective. Considering previous research that has found links between sociosexual orientation inventory (SOI) and harassment, we consider whether this association can be replicated in a large, representative sample of high school students (N=1199) from a highly egalitarian culture. Expanding the previous studies which mainly focused on male perpetrators and female victims, we also examine females and males as both perpetrators and as victims. We believe that unrestricted sociosexuality motivates people to test whether others are interested in short-term sexual relations in ways that sometimes might be defined as harassment. Furthermore, unrestricted individuals signal their sociosexual orientation, and while they do not desire all individuals that react to these signals with sexual advances, they attract much more sexual advances than individuals with restricted sociosexual orientations, especially from other unrestricted members of the opposite sex. This more or less unconscious signaling thus makes them exploitable, i.e., harassable. We find that SOI is a predictor for sexual harassment and coercion among high school students. The paper concludes that, as expected, unrestricted sociosexuality predicts being both a perpetrator and a victim of both same-sex and opposite-sex harassment. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Sociosexual orientation inventory; Harassment and coercion; Unrestricted sociosexuality; Adolescence 1. Introduction Sexual harassment at work represents a considerable problem in the management of organizations (UN, 2006). Early studies portrayed the traditional view of male perpetrators and adverse consequences for female victims (Fitzgerald, 1993). The feminist perspective has focused on men's need for power as the root cause of conflict between the sexes, seeing sexual harassment as a tool of patriarchy (Browne, 2006; Studd, 1996). Sexual harassment is linked to the need to dominate women accompanied by hostile attitudes (including condoning forced sex) and men's use of their organizational power to oppress their female sub- ordinates (Smith & Konik, 2011; Tangri, Burt, & Johnson, 1982). Evolutionary psychology (EP) presents an alternative perspective claiming that sex is the driving force in sexual harassment—not males' need for power over women (Buss, 1996; Vandermassen, 2011). We support Vandermassen's (2011) perspective that feminism and EP may mutually inform each other, but one needs to treat both approaches as testable scientific theories (Buss & Schmitt, 2011). As such, the contemporary discussion in the journal Sex Roles (Smith & Konik, 2011) may reflect a watershed in the debate between these two perspectives, resulting in less polemic and more empirical testing (although see Liesen, 2011). Sexual harassment is defined as unwanted sexually oriented behavior such as offensive sexual attention or hostile behaviors that focus on gender (Fitzgerald, Collins- worth, & Harned, 2001; Studd, 1996). It is worth noting that “unwanted” and “offensive” are from the perspective of the Evolution and Human Behavior 33 (2012) 479 – 490 ☆ Preliminary analyses of some of the data reported in this paper were presented at HBES, June 2008, Kyoto. ☆☆ Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. ★ Data collection was supported by a grant from Sør-Trøndelag County Authority to M.B. and L.E.O.K. ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +47 7359 1956. E-mail address: kennair@ntnu.no (L.E.O. Kennair). 1090-5138/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.01.001