College men’s over-estimations of peer attitudes and behaviors related to alcohol and sexual assault

What is it about?

Past research has shown that college students’ attitudes and behaviors are significantly influenced by their beliefs about their peers’ attitudes and behaviors. However, concerningly, research has also shown that college students are often vastly incorrect about their peers’ attitudes and behaviors. Even more concerningly, college students on average believe that their peers hold more high-risk attitudes and engage in more high-risk and sexually aggressive behaviors than their peers actually do. The current work expands what was previously known about these misperceptions by assessing a more comprehensive inventory of drinking and sexually aggressive behavior variables. The work also examines how a participant’s own risk for perpetrating sexual assault relates to the magnitude of their misperceptions. All variables assessed in this study have been associated with the risk of perpetrating alcohol-related acquaintance-initiated sexual assault among college students. Measures were completed by all 567 college men participants from their own perspective, as well as from the “typical college male” perspective. All assessed variables were vastly over-perceived. In addition, college men at higher risk for perpetrating sexual assault generally showed even greater overestimation of their peers’ high-risk attitudes and behaviors than men at low risk for perpetration.

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Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The current work found that all assessed variables were markedly over-perceived and that men at higher risk for perpetrating sexual assault often showed these over-estimations to an even greater extent than their low-risk peers. For men already at higher risk for perpetrating acquaintance-initiated alcohol-related sexual aggression, this vast over-perception may lead them to believe that their peers approve of high-risk attitudes and behaviors than they actually do. For college men at low risk of perpetrating sexual assault, this may provide a substantial barrier to intervening as a bystander when risky or aggressive behavior is occurring. Taken together, the current work provides many potential targets for future prevention and intervention. For instance, providing corrective feedback about peers’ attitudes and behaviors has been shown to help reduce heavy drinking and increase safer-sex practices among college students.