INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES Sexual Harassment Under Social Identity Threat: The Computer Harassment Paradigm Anne Maass, Mara Cadinu, Gaia Guarnieri, and Annalisa Grasselli University of Padova Two laboratory experiments investigated the hypothesis that threat to male identity would increase the likelihood of gender harassment. In both experiments, using the computer harassment paradigm, male university students (N = 80 in Experiment 1, N = 90 in Experiment 2) were exposed to different types of identity threat (legitimacy threat and threat to group value in Experiment 1 and distinctiveness threat and prototypicality threat in Experiment 2) or to no threat and were then given the opportunity to send pornographic material to a virtual female interaction partner. Results show that (a) participants harassed the female interaction partner more when they were exposed to a legitimacy, distinctiveness, or prototypicality threat than to no threat; (b) this was mainly true for highly identified males; and (c) harassment enhanced postexperimental gender identification. Results are interpreted as supporting a social identity account of gender harassment. Sexual harassment is a serious problem in practically all coun- tries in which women have entered the job market (see Gruber, Smith, & Kauppinen-Toropainen, 1996; Rubinstein, 1987; Wasti, Bergman, Glomb, & Drasgow, 2000). No work setting seems to be immune to the phenomenon, considering that it has been found in business (Fitzgerald & Shullman, 1993; Powell, 1983; Terpstra & Baker, 1987), education (Buschman & Lenart, 1996; Dekker & Barling, 1998; Gervasio & Ruckdeschel, 1992; Maass & Cadinu, 2001; Shepela & Levesque, 1998), and public service and the military (Fitzgerald, Magley, Drasgow, & Waldo, 1999; U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1981, 1988). Although sexual harassment is counternormative in most countries and illegal in some, cumulative probabilities of becoming a victim of sexual harassment are surprisingly high, resulting in a large proportion of working women experiencing harassment in some form at least once during their lifetime. For some forms of sexual harassment, this risk increases at critical stages during a woman’s career, namely at hiring and at promotion (for results of a national survey conducted in Italy, see Istituto Nazionale di Statistica [ISTAT], 1998). The negative consequences of this phenomenon for both the victim (including physical symptoms, psychological distress, de- pression, and decreased job satisfaction) and the organization (absenteeism, decreased productivity) are well documented in the literature (Baker, Terpstra, & Larntz, 1990; Morrow, McElroy, & Phillips, 1994; Rubinstein, 1987; Schneider, Swan, & Fitzgerald, 1997). It is not easy to define sexual harassment, but there is agreement on two aspects. First, sexual harassment is generally defined in subjective terms. The different definitions offered by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Guidelines on Dis- crimination Because of Sex, 1980) in the United States, by the Rubinstein (1987) report conducted for the European Parliament in 1986, and by most researchers in the field all converge in that they define sexual harassment as verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature that is unwelcome by the victim and that tends to interfere with the recipient’s work. Thus, both legal and scientific defini- tions stress the subjective experience of the victim as a defining feature of sexual harassment. Second, researchers generally agree that the term sexual harass- ment covers a wide range of phenomena, from relatively benign forms such as telling sexist jokes to public exposure of porno- graphic material at the workplace to extreme forms of harassment such as sexual blackmail and sexual aggression. Fitzgerald’s three- fold classification of sexual harassment in sexual coercion, un- wanted sexual attention, and gender harassment is widely accepted (see Fitzgerald et al., 1988; Fitzgerald & Hesson-McInnis, 1989; Fitzgerald, Swan, & Fischer, 1995; Gelfand, Fitzgerald, & Dras- gow, 1995). Applying this distinction, the least severe but most common form of sexual harassment is gender harassment or mi- sogyny. This category includes verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey insulting, hostile, or degrading attitudes toward Anne Maass, Mara Cadinu, Gaia Guarnieri, and Annalisa Grasselli, Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Univer- sity of Padova, Padova, Italy. This research was funded by a start-up research grant by the University of Padova on Sexual Harassment at the University. We thank the other members of the research team, Franca Agnoli, Luciano Arcuri, Chiara Levorato, and Massimo Santinello, for their valuable help during the different stages of this project. We are also grateful to Alessandra Rosa- bianca, Elisabetta Cloch, and Mattia Taroni for their help in the data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anne Maass, Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Universita ` di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, 35139 Padova, Italy. E-mail: anne.maass@unipd.it Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, Vol. 85, No. 5, 853– 870 Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.853 853