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This article distinguishes generic prejudice, prejudgments about classes of cases and defendants, from other forms of juror bias that undermine the impartiality principle of the Constitution. It develops an experimental method to study 2 types of generic prejudice (biases based upon specific charges, and biases based upon crime categories) and tests the role of cognitive resource theory and simple attention models in explaining when generic prejudice is most likely to be a threat to jury decisions. Results of 2 experiments using undergraduate research participants as mock jurors demonstrate that generic prejudice is more likely to be found in sexual assault cases relative to homicide cases, but that general adjudicative bias favoring the prosecution or the defense across crime categories is more likely to be found in homicide cases. There was some support for cognitive resource theory as an explanation for evaluations in sexual assault cases, and simple attention models for evaluations in homicide cases.

The influence of the availability of personally known and media known sexual harassment victims and harassers on perceptions of social sexual workplace conduct was examined. Male and female full-time workers evaluated two videotapes that depict sexual harassment in the workplace. Results indicated that perceived likelihood of harassment and discrimination increased as participants recalled more examples of harassment victims whom they personally knew. In some instances, recall of victims in the media had a similar influence. As predicted, the influence of availability was stronger for men than for women. Similar findings resulted from the analyses of the unwelcomeness, severity, and pervasiveness of the conduct; however, legal standard, gender, or case often moderated this relationship. The implications of these findings are discussed.

A dual processing model of sexual harassment judgments predicted that the behavior of a complainant in a prior case would influence evaluations in an unrelated subsequent case. In the first of two experimental scenarios depicting social-sexual conduct at work, the female complainant's conduct was manipulated to be aggressive, submissive, ambiguous, or neutral. Half of the participants were asked to reflect upon the first scenario after reading it and before answering responsibility questions. The other half simply reviewed the scenario and answered the questions. When the complainant acted aggressively, her behavior in the first scenario caused men who reflected on the fact pattern to find less evidence of harassment. Most interestingly, an aggressive complainant observed in the first scenario caused participants (especially women) to rate lower the likelihood that a neutral complainant in a second independent case was the victim of gender discrimination. Across cases, men found less evidence of harassment than did women.