Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effects of narcissism and gender on perceptions of sexual violence. Participants consisted of 133 undergraduate students who read one of two scenarios in which sexual violence did or did not occur in a dating situation and answered five questions related to perceptions of sexual violence: sincerity of woman’s refusal, woman’s unpleasantness, woman’s sexual satisfaction, violence of man’s behavior, and masculinity of man’s behavior. The results showed significant two-way interactions between participant gender and sexual violence (present vs. absent) and between narcissism and sexual violence in most cases. Specifically, men and individuals high in narcissism were more tolerant of sexual violence compared to women and those low in narcissism, respectively. This study contributes to the literature in that it replicated the effect of gender on perceptions of sexual violence using the everyday context of dating sexual assault. More importantly, this study demonstrated that narcissism is related to tolerant perceptions of sexual assault.