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Studies reveal women don't react to sexual harassment the way they imagine they would

Most women predict they'd feel angry and confront the harasser, but that's not how real-life scenarios played out.

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When it comes to sexual harassment, imagined reactions play out differently in real life.

It's easy to imagine what we'd do or how we'd respond to imaginary scenarios, playing the hero in an emergency, speaking up when we witness an injustice or confronting someone who mistreats us.

Real life, however, can feel different than we expect it to as emotions and fight-or-flight chemicals flood our minds and bodies.

Two studies illustrate this reality when it comes to responding to sexual harassment, finding that imagined responses don't tend to play out in real-life harassment scenarios.

A 2002 study published by Julie A. Woodzicka and Marianne LaFrance in the Journal of Social Issues examined the way women anticipated they would respond to sexual harassment in imagined scenarios vs. how women respond when facing a real sexual harassment scenario in a job interview and found that the two did not match up.

Psychologist Kaidi W, Ph.D. shared excerpts from the study on X, illustrating the study's key findings.

Setting up a real sexual harassment scenario posed an ethical dilemma for the study design, as they couldn't create severe harassment without the subjects knowing. They created a job interview that participants thought was real and had the male interviewer intersperse three sexually intrusive questions amidst regular questions:

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"Do people find you desirable?"

"Do you think it's important for women to wear bras to work?"

When presented with such questions in an imagined scenario, women shared how they predicted they'd respond. "The most prominent emotion women imagined they'd feel was anger (27%), while fear was rarely mentioned (2%)," Wu wrote. "62% of women said they'd confront the interviewer. 68% said they'd refuse to answer at least one harassing questions."

However, when the researchers set up the job interview, women facing the questions in real life reacted very differently. None of them refused to answer all the questions, none confronted the interviewer, none left the interview, and none reported the harasser to the supervisor.

Notably, the most prominent emotion women experienced in the real scenario was fear. "Simply put, women imagined feeling angry, but women in the situation were actually afraid," the authors wrote.

"It is noteworthy that the self-reports of being afraid were not due merely to actually being in an interview situation in contrast to an imagined interview situation," the authors added. "For when we compared interviewees in the sexually harassing interview to those who got the surprising but nonharassing questions, we found that women who were asked harassing questions reported feeling significantly more afraid than did their nonharassed counterparts."

Another finding was that women facing the harassing questions exhibited more non-Duchenne smiling (basically feigning a smile) than the others. Non-Duchenne smiling is associated with accommodation or appeasement as opposed to genuine pleasure. The authors suggest that the women may have been smiling in such a manner to signal that they were "willing to play by the rules so that they could get out of that place."

Another study from 2023 also found a gap between how people think they'd respond to a sexually harassing situation vs. how they actually do.

A study by the University of Exeter, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, found that people who imagined a sexual harassment scenario predicted that they would feel a strong need to take formal action, such as reporting the harassment to authorities.

But people who had actually experienced harassment shared different needs that often overrode the need for immediate justice

Senior author Manuela Barreto, from the University of Exeter said: “We found there is a widely held belief that quick and formal reporting is the correct response to sexual harassment. It’s what’s generally meant with the phrase ‘coming forward.' Yet most people who are sexually harassed do not report it formally and those who do, often report the offence a significant time after it happened."

“There is an assumption that those who experience sexual harassment are primarily guided by their desire for justice," shared lead author Thomas Morton of the University of Copenhagen who worked on the research at the University of Exeter. "But this research shows that peoples’ needs are wider than what others might expect, and include needs for safety, personal control, and for life to just return to normal. Of all the needs that people expressed, the need for justice was not the highest priority. This might explain why people don’t take the kind of formal actions, like reporting to police, that others expect them to."

"If you have not experienced sexual harassment, it is hard to accurately anticipate what you might need, and therefore what you would do to satisfy those needs," Morton added. "Our research suggests that the assumptions people make are often wrong, or at least don’t reflect what the people who have experienced sexual harassment say they need.”

The Me Too movement brought needed awareness to how often women face sexual harassment, but it also raised a lot of questions about why women don't confront or come forward to report it. These studies are a good reminder that we don't truly know how we are going to feel or respond until we are facing a real-life scenario ourselves, so we can't truly judge how another person handles an experience with sexual harassment. They also help us expand our understanding of how easy it is to underestimate fear and a sense of security as primary motivating factors in our responses, even if we are convinced our righteous anger and justice will override them.

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Optimistic women are more likely to live past 90, study finds

They also found living longer transcends race and ethnicity.

Photo by Robin Noguier on Unsplash

Who knew optimism was the key to a longer life?

There's something to be said for having a positive outlook on life. Optimism may not only make you happier, it can also help you live longer. Yes, you're reading that correctly: Being optimistic can actually add years to your life. A study done by researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found a correlation between lifespan and optimism in women. The authors discovered that optimistic women had a longer lifespan, many living past the age of 90.

In a previous version of this study, data showed the correlation between living past the age of 85 and higher levels of optimism. But that study looked at a mostly white people. This later study expanded the pool of participants to include more people from diverse backgrounds.


In this version of the study, the research team looked at data from 159, 255 participants from the Women’s Health Initiative. The group included women between the ages of 50 and 79 (specifically postmenopausal women). The women had to fall into that age bracket between 1993 and 1998, then they were followed for 26 years.

“Although optimism itself may be affected by social structural factors, such as race and ethnicity, our research suggests that the benefits of optimism may hold across diverse groups,” Hayami Koga, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Population Health Sciences program in partnership with Harvard Chan School, and lead author of the study said in a press release.

According to the press release, the study "found no interaction between optimism and any categories of race and ethnicity, and these trends held true after taking into account demographics, chronic conditions, and depression."

“A lot of previous work has focused on deficits or risk factors that increase the risks for diseases and premature death. Our findings suggest that there’s value to focusing on positive psychological factors, like optimism, as possible new ways of promoting longevity and healthy aging across diverse groups," Koga said.

Think about it. There's a lot to be said about positive thinking—it's not always easy to do, and yes, toxic positivity is a very real thing. But reframing your way of thinking to allow for more positivity clearly isn't a bad thing. Will it allow you to transcend things like structural racism, discrimination and other legitimate life barriers? Absolutely not. It will, however, give you a stronger foundation to pull from when those things start to make you weary.

I don't know if there's a way to teach people to be optimistic without it feeling hokey. However, if you tell someone, "Hey, this could put years on your life clock," they might be more interested. Koga believes that the findings of this study can allow people to look at how they approach their health.

As the study reveals, a lot of the factors that contribute to longevity that we traditionally think of, such as diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes, don't seem to hold as much weight compared to an optimistic outlook. According to the study's findings, lifestyle choices "accounted for less than a quarter of the optimism-lifespan association," and more than half of the women in the group (53%) achieved "exceptional longevity." It defines exceptional longevity as living 90 years or longer. When compared to the least optimistic participants, the optimistic women had a 5.4% longer lifespan. According to the CDC, as of 2020, the average life expectancy for women is 80.5 years. So those who have a more optimistic outlook might live 10 years longer than the current average lifespan. That definitely gives you something to think about!

“We tend to focus on the negative risk factors that affect our health,” Koga said. “It is also important to think about the positive resources such as optimism that may be beneficial to our health, especially if we see that these benefits are seen across racial and ethnic groups.”

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Dogs can understand human gestures, even if they've never been around humans

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A 2009 study found that dogs have the intelligence of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. They can also understand up to 250 words and gestures. And they've had a long time to get it right. We started domesticating dogs 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, and that domestication runs deep. It turns out, even dogs who have never heard a human yell "roll over" might still understand basic commands. A new study found that stray dogs can understand human gestures, such as pointing, which suggests that dogs innately understand people.

Dr. Anindita Bhadra of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata and her colleagues studied 160 stray dogs across several cities in India. Two covered bowls were placed in front of each dog. One bowl contained raw chicken, and the other bowl was both empty and food-scented.

RELATED: If you're allergic to dogs, you might only be allergic to males, according to a new study

Another experimenter then pointed at one of the bowls for varying amounts of time. The humans stood away from the bowls in order to allow the dog to "judge what the humans intention is and then make a decision," Bhadra told National Geographic.

Half of the dogs refused to come close to the researchers, and many seemed anxious. According to Bhadra, it's likely these dogs had prior bad experiences with people.

Of the dogs that did participate in the study, 80% of dogs went to the bowl that was being pointed at regardless of the length of time the pointing occurred. They hadn't ben trained to understand pointing, they just went. Researchers believe this indicates that dogs can understand complex human gestures. You have to give it to the dogs. Some animals would just sit there and smell the pointing finger.

"We thought it was quite amazing that the dogs could follow a gesture as abstract as momentary pointing. This means that they closely observe the human, whom they are meeting for the first time, and they use their understanding of humans to make a decision. This shows their intelligence and adaptability," Badhra told National Geographic.

RELATED: Dog owners are more likely to kiss their dogs than their significant others

However, the dogs weren't above developing trust issues. If the dog discovered that the human was pointing to the empty bowl, the dog was less likely to follow the human's cues again.

Badhra says the study can help children and adults have "a more peaceful co-existence" with stray dogs by helping humans learn how to interact with the animals. There are approximately 300 million stray dogs in the world, many of which carry diseases such as rabies. Knowing how to deal with a stray dog can help prevent such attacks from occurring.

Now if only researchers could figure out if dogs innately know how to eat pasta from the same bowl as another dog, Lady and the Tramp-style…

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Left-handed people have one advantage over right-handed counterparts, study finds

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Approximately 10% of the population is left-handed, and the balance between lefties and righties has been the same for almost 5,000 years. People used to believe that left-handed people were evil or unlucky. The word "sinister" is even derived from the Latin word for "left."

In modern times, the bias against lefties for being different is more benign – spiral notebooks are a torture device, and ink gets on their hands like a scarlet letter. Now, a new study conducted at the University of Oxford and published in Brain is giving left-handers some good news. While left-handers have been struggling with tools meant for right-handers all these years, it turns out, they actually possess superior verbal skills.

Researchers looked at the DNA of 400,000 people in the U.K. from a volunteer bank. Of those 400,000 people, 38,332 were southpaws. Scientists were able to find the differences in genes between lefties and righties, and that these genetic variants resulted in a difference in brain structure, too. "It tells us for the first time that handedness has a genetic component," Gwenaëlle Douaud, joint senior author of the study and a fellow at Oxford's Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, told the BBC.

RELATED: This Huntington's disease trial shows how promising gene editing may be

Scientists then studied brain images from 10,000 people and found right-handed and left-handed people had differences in the parts of the brain associated with language. In left-handed people, "the left and right sides of the brain communicate in a more coordinated way," Douaud told CNN. The differences suggest that left-handers have better verbal skills than righties. It almost makes up for constantly bumping elbows with the person next to you at the dinner table.

"This raises the intriguing possibility for future research that left-handers might have an advantage when it comes to performing verbal tasks, but it must be remembered that these differences were only seen as averages over very large numbers of people and not all left-handers will be similar," Akira Wiberg, a Medical Research Council fellow at the University of Oxford who worked on the study, said in a release.

While the findings are fascinating, they're only just the beginning. Scientists need to do further studies to really dig into their meaning. "We need to assess whether this higher coordination of the language areas between left and right side of the brain in the left-handers actually gives them an advantage at verbal ability. For this, we need to do a study that also has in-depth and detailed verbal-ability testing," Douaud told CNN.

RELATED: Game-changing genetic editing just let one teenager 'dodge' sickle cell disease

Other studies have found that your dominant hand is 25% determined by genetics, and 75% determined by environmental factors, which should come as a relief to anyone who doesn't like feeling they're at the mercy of their genes.

So if you're left-handed, you're probably going to be a great conversationalist, but you're still going to end up with ink smudges on your hand if you want to write down your words.

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