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OBJECTIVE Custody is a legal state that requires police to Mirandize suspects and, in some jurisdictions, to record their interrogation. The present study compared the custody perceptions of police, judges, social psychologists, and laypeople. HYPOTHESES We predicted that (a) high-custody vignettes would elicit less perceived freedom than low-custody vignettes; (b) police and judges would see these situations as less custodial relative to social psychologists and laypeople; (c) these differences would arise mostly in ambiguous vignettes; and (d) participants in general would perceive suspects as objectively having more freedom to leave than they subjectively feel they have. METHOD Police officers (n = 223), trial judges (n = 219), social psychologists (n = 228), and laypeople (n = 205) read a vignette of a police-suspect encounter that presented high-, ambiguous, or low-levels of custody and indicated their perceptions of the suspect's freedom to leave. RESULTS Participants perceived the most freedom in the low-custody vignettes, followed by ambiguous and high-custody vignettes, and all groups differed significantly from each other (ηp2 = .39). Police and judges overestimated how free they thought the suspect would feel compared to social psychologists and laypeople, who did not differ from each other (ηp2 = .085). Participants in general saw the suspect as objectively freer than they thought he felt, and themselves as feeling freer than they believed the suspect did (ηp2 = .35). Police defined a "reasonable person" as someone who is mentally stable, whereas judges were more likely to cite a person of average intelligence. CONCLUSION Despite the assumption that custody can be defined by the effects of objective circumstances on the reasonable person, results revealed substantial variation of perceptions between police and judges on the one hand, and social psychologists and laypeople on the other. As a result, legal safeguards triggered by custodial interrogation may be inconsistently applied to real suspects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

In Title VII sexual harassment jurisprudence, U.S. courts use a 2-prong subjective-objective test to determine the viability of a sexual harassment claim: The complainant must show that the employer's conduct was unwelcome and sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment because of the complainant's sex from both the complainant's perspective (subjective prong) and a reasonable person's perspective (objective prong). This online study used a diverse national sample (361 MTurk Community Members) to investigate whether people apply the objective prong in a uniform manner, as the law assumes, or show predictable differences. Participants read a vignette about a female interviewee's allegations of sexual harassment following from severe, mild, or no sexual objectification by a male interviewer during a job interview. The interviewee claimed that she was either harassed or not by the interviewer during the interaction, as well as claiming to enjoy or reject sexualization. Participants made judgments about whether the interviewer's behavior was sexually harassing from the interviewee's and a reasonable person's perspective. Overall, participants' sex and enjoyment of sexualization moderated their judgments of sexual harassment when considering the situation from both points of view, demonstrating that there is no convergence on a unified standard for evaluating whether specific behavior is sexually harassing. Drawing comparisons to obscenity law, we argue that the use of data to form social fact evidence may help decision makers in hostile work environment cases to apply a more uniform understanding of what is hostile and abusive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

In 2 studies, we found support for current sexual harassment jurisprudence. Currently, the courts use a 2-prong test to determine the viability of a sexual harassment claim: that the adverse treatment is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter conditions of employment based on a protected class from the perspective of the individual complainant (subjective prong) and from the perspective of a reasonable person (objective prong). In Experiment 1, trained male undergraduate research assistants administered sequential objectifying gazes and comments to undergraduate female research participants. We found that the pervasive objectification delivered by multiple men (compared with 1 man) did not elicit more negative emotion or harm the experiencers' task performance, although it did lead them to make increased judgments of sexual harassment. In Experiment 2, observers (who viewed a recording of an experiencer's interactions with the male research assistants) and predictors (who read a protocol describing the facts of the interaction) anticipated the female targets would experience negative emotions, show impaired performance, as well as find more evidence in the interaction of sexual harassment. Observers' judgments mirrored those of the experiencers' while predictors' judgments demonstrated affective forecasting errors. Predictors were more likely to anticipate more negative emotion, worse performance, and greater likelihood of sexual harassment. Overall, these studies demonstrate the impact and importance of considering perceptions of sexual harassment from multiple perspectives and viewpoints. (PsycINFO Database Record

This research tests the possibility that the reasonable woman as compared to the reasonable person test of hostile work environment sexual harassment interacts with hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs and under some conditions triggers protectionist attitudes toward women who complain of sexual harassment. We administered to a sample of undergraduates the ambivalent sexism inventory along with the fact patterns in two harassment cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. We found that those high in hostile sexism, and women, found more evidence of harassment. However, those high in benevolent sexism did not exhibit the hostile sexism effects. Although men were less sensitive to the reasonable woman standard than women, under some conditions the reasonable woman standard enabled both genders to find greater evidence of harassment. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.

This paper presents a brief psycholegal analysis of hostile work environment sexual harassment law especially as it distinguishes between the reasonable person and reasonable woman tests of severity and pervasiveness. We tested two hypotheses: (1) women (but not men) would show stronger judgments of harassment when using the reasonable woman standard, and (2) this relationship would be strongest for women who identified with harassed victims and men who did not. We presented to a sample of undergraduates an in-group identification measurement task followed by the fact patterns in two cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. Although we found gender and in-group identification effects, we found no legal standard effects. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.

Some federal courts have used a reasonable woman standard rather than the traditional reasonable man or reasonable person standard to determine whether hostile environment sexual harassment has occurred. The current research examined the impact of the reasonable woman standard on federal district court decisions, controlling for other factors found to affect sexual harassment court decisions. Results indicated that there was a weak relationship between whether a case followed a reasonable woman precedent-setting case and the likelihood that the court decision favored the plaintiff. The implications of our findings for individuals and organizations involved in sexual harassment claims are discussed.