Subjects read a passage which described an interaction between a man and a woman at an office party. The woman was either sober or intoxicated, and eventually the man engaged in 1 of 3 behaviors which involved varying degrees of sexual innuendo and/or aggression: (a) verbal comment, (b) verbal request, and (c) nonverbal physical display. The results indicated that perceptions did not vary as a function of target person's intoxication in the nonverbal‐display condition. On the other hand, in the verbal‐comment and verbal‐request conditions, subjects in the intoxicated‐target‐person condition perceived the initiator more favorably than subjects in the sober‐target‐person condition. In addition, they indicated that perceptions did not vary as a function of target‐person intoxication level in the nonverbal‐display condition. On the other hand, in the verbal‐comment and verbal‐request conditions, male subjects were more favorable toward the initiator than toward female subjects.
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Johnson et al. (1997) studied this question.