It’s on Us, Together: A Look at Sexual Assault Prevention as a Case of Group Based Attitude Change

Abstract

Sexual assault is a problem on college campuses. Many campuses have created intervention programs to address this problem. It is important, then, to understand the psychological underpinnings of these programs to understand where they serve students by changing their attitudes towards sexual assault and where they make the problem worse. This paper looks at the psychology of existing programs, and suggests a more effective model rooted in vicarious cognitive dissonance and the elaboration likelihood model to address norms within a salient in-group. The proposed study has implications both in sexual assault prevention, and in the psychology of attitude change. Keywords: attitude change, vicarious cognitive dissonance, sexual assault, prevention