“Are they into each other?” What drinking alcohol and leaving a party together signal to college students about sexual intent

Abstract

Objective: Misperception of sexual intent is linked to incidence of sexual assault. The present study tested the effects of gender, alcohol consumption, and leaving a party together, in isolation and in interaction, on perceptions of sexual intent. Participants: Undergraduates (N = 438) completed an online survey between Winter 2017 and Winter 2018. Methods: Participants read one of eight versions of a vignette about a social interaction between male and female college-aged acquaintances and rated the targets’ sexual interest in each other. Who was consuming alcohol (both targets, female only, male only, or neither) and whether the targets left together were manipulated. Results: Alcohol consumption and leaving together interacted. Leaving together signified to participants that both targets had greater sexual intent. When targets left separately, participants viewed both targets as less sexually interested in each other when only the female was drinking. Conclusions: Implications for sexual assault on college campuses are discussed.

Keywords:

• Alcohol
• college students
• gender
• sexual assault
• sexual intent

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States and received approval from the Santa Clara University IRB.

Funding

No funding was used to support this research and/or the preparation of the manuscript.

Notes

1 As an exploratory analysis, we also examined Differential Sexual Interest: the ways participants viewed the targets relative to each other (that is, whether people saw the male target as being more or less interested than the female target was). See Supplementary Materials.