Does the Co-Viewing of Sexual Material Affect Rape Myth Acceptance? The Role of the Co-Viewer’s Reactions and Gender

Abstract

While media research has long ago acknowledged that watching TV is a social activity, only a few studies have examined the effects of co-viewing on adult reactions to a televised text. In the current investigation, we used social-cognitive theory combined with previous research on the intra-audience effect, audience identification, transportation, and attitude change to develop hypotheses connecting co-viewers' reactions, co-viewers' gender, and viewer's post-exposure attitudes. Participants watched a movie segment that ended in a rape scene. We manipulated their confederate co-viewers' displayed reaction (enthusiastic or bored) and gender, and subsequently measured perceived co-viewers' attributions of responsibility for the rape, the viewers' transportation, identification with the male protagonist, and acceptance of the rape myth (the tendency to attribute responsibility for sexual violence to the victim). Results demonstrated that for those participants who correctly perceived the engagement manipulation, the effect of the confederate co-viewer's engagement manipulation on rape myth acceptance was positive and significant. In addition, both manipulations had an indirect effect on rape myth acceptance, sequentially mediated through transportation and identification.As social creatures, our reactions to various situations depend on the reactions of the people around us, a fact demonstrated, for example, by seminal social-psychological research on conformity and bystander intervention. If our reactions to our environment

You Brought it on Yourself: The Joint Effects of Message Type, Stigma, and Responsibility Attribution on Attitudes Toward Medical Cannabis

“…To measure transportation into the narrative, we used a 10‐item scale based on Tal‐Or and Tsfati's () Hebrew translation of the scale devised by Green and Brock (). A confirmatory factor analysis using principal component analysis with oblique rotations demonstrated that five items formed a strong factor, which accounted for 55.2% of the variance (eigenvalue = 2.76).…”

When Arabs and Jews Watch TV Together: The Joint Effect of the Content and Context of Communication on Reducing Prejudice

“…This construct was based on Tal‐Or and Tsfati's () Hebrew translation and adaptation of Green and Brock's () transportation scale that included the following seven items: “While watching, activity going on in the room around me was on my mind” (R); “I could picture myself in the scenes I watched”; “I was mentally involved in the scenes I watched”; “After watching, I stopped thinking about the scenes I watched” (R); “I wanted to learn how the movie ended”; “The scenes affected me emotionally”; and “My mind wandered while watching” (R). After dropping item 1 that reduced the reliability, we calculated an index based on the mean of the remaining six items (Cronbach's alpha = .70, M = 5.16, SD = 1.06).…”

“…Similarly, participants identified more with a male protagonist depicted in an action movie when watching with a male coviewer than with a female coviewer (Tal‐Or, ). Participants even identified more with a male rapist when viewing a film clip ending with a rape scene together with a male confederate coviewer than when watching with a woman (Tal‐Or & Tsfati, ).…”

“…The participants' experience of the film is thus expected to change as a result of the interaction with the coviewer (Tal‐Or & Tsfati, ). But how do their thoughts about the coviewer and their consequences change as a result of the film?…”

Critical Media Effects Framework: Bridging Critical Cultural Communication and Media Effects through Power, Intersectionality, Context, and Agency

“…It acknowledges that much of entertainment consumption, especially in a hyper-digital era, is shared and is a social experience. A few media scholars have incorporated context by studying social characteristics of media use and viewers' responses (Banjo, 2013;Banjo et al, 2017), co-viewers' gendered reactions to sexual violence in film (Tal-Or & Tsfati, 2015), social connectedness via co-viewing (Haridakis & Hanson, 2009), and social media context versus a physical viewing context (Cohen & Lancaster, 2014).…”