Can we measure self-defense behavior?

What is it about?

What do people do when presented with the threat of date rape? What kinds of things do college women say and/or do? Does that change is the threat becomes more serious? Thats what this study set out to explore. Participants were college women who were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. In each condition, the severity of the threat of date rape (as presented by a realistic audio recording) was varied. The severity of the threats presented were: low, medium, medium-severe. In these conditions, the participant did label the situation as threatening or not; they were simply asked to react. In the fourth condition, participants were not asked to react until they identified the situation as threatening. We found that in general college women's responses increased in intensity as the threat increased - good! What you might expect, except this had never actually been done. We did NOT find that this was related to scores of assertiveness or whether the participants thought the situation was threatening or not.

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Why is it important?

This study provides a way to examine women's responses to the threat of date rape. This could be used an assessment to identify people who may be at risk - if they have less strong reactions than average they may benefit from additional training. It also provides a way for researchers to study how different things might affect how a person respond's to threat - what if another person is in the room? what is the threat is presented by a friend? etc.

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