Salience of Rape Affects Self-Esteem: Individual versus Collective Self-Aspects

Previous research showed that reading about a rape impaired the self-esteem (SE) of women low in rape myth acceptance (RMA), whereas an opposite trend emerged for high-RMA women (Bohner, Weisbrod, Raymond, Barzvi, & Schwarz, 1993). In an extended replication, 156 female students who had not been targets of sexual violence and were either high or low in RMA participated. To prime individual versus gender-related self-aspects, participants were asked to describe themselves either as a unique individual or `as a woman'; to manipulate rape salience, they then read either a neutral text or a text about a rape. Subsequently, both individual SE and gender-related collective SE were assessed. When rape was salient, low-RMA women showed a decrease in that aspect of SE that had previously been activated, with a stronger effect overall on collective SE, whereas high-RMA women's SE again was not impaired. These findings replicate and extend previous results.