Bryn Bandt Law

All Publications

• Do gender prototypes influence attorney willingness to represent sexual harassment victims? Law and human behavior Ferguson, Z. E., Glazier, J. J., Bandt-Law, B., Kaiser, C. R. 2025

  Abstract

  When women make sexual harassment claims, those who deviate from (vs. conform to) gender prototypes are viewed as less credible, their experiences are minimized, and they receive less support. We explored whether this prototype bias affects attorneys' willingness to represent nonprototypical claimants, beliefs about settlement success, and perceptions of case merit.We hypothesized that attorneys exposed to a gender nonprototypical (vs. prototypical) woman claimant would perceive her claim as less desirable to represent, as less deserving of financial compensation, and as having less legal merit. We expected these effects to be unique to claims involving sexual harassment as we did not anticipate that gender prototypicality would affect attitudes toward those making control grievance claims. We further hypothesized that attorneys' personal and metabeliefs about prototypes of sexual harassment victims would mediate the effects of plaintiff prototypicality on the dependent measures.Civil rights attorneys (N = 553) from across the United States participated in an online survey. Sample demographics roughly approximated those of the American Bar Association at the time across gender (31.83% women, 67.27% men, 0.90% other genders), race (3.07% Black or African American, 3.80% East or Southeast Asian, 4.70% Latino/a or Hispanic, 1.99% Middle Eastern, 0.72% Native American or Alaska Native, 0.36% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 88.43% White, and 3.44% other or declined to state), and age (M = 52.04 years). Attorneys reviewed an employment discrimination claim about either sexual harassment (experimental condition) or whistleblowing (control). We manipulated the description of the plaintiff such that she possessed either gender prototypical (i.e., feminine, communal) or nonprototypical (i.e., masculine, agentic) attributes, interests, and characteristics.Attorneys reported that jurors perceive sexual harassment victims as more likely to resemble prototypical (vs. nonprototypical) women; however, attorneys did not rate nonprototypical (vs. prototypical) sexual harassment claimants as less credible or worthy of compensation and representation. Attorneys' personal and metabeliefs about prototypes of sexual harassment largely did not mediate effects.These findings diverge from prior scholarship with laypeople and suggest that attorneys may draw upon their legal socialization and focus primarily on aspects of the cases rather than extralegal factors, like plaintiff prototypicality, when evaluating the merits of a case. The findings also suggest that exposure to claims with more individuating and contextual information may encourage careful reasoning and reduce reliance on stereotypes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  View details for DOI 10.1037/lhb0000624

  View details for PubMedID 41182704

• The Underestimation of Transgender Women's Vulnerability to Workplace Sexual Harassment. Personality & social psychology bulletin Bandt-Law, B., Cheek, N. N., Glazier, J. J., Olson, K. R., Kaiser, C. R. 2025: 1461672251368955

  Abstract

  Despite experiencing sexual harassment more frequently and more severely than cisgender women, transgender women survivors'/victims' experiences of workplace sexual harassment are often omitted or ignored. Drawing from theorizing on victim prototypes and perceptions of sexual harassment, we show across six studies (total N = 2,022) that people incorrectly believe that transgender women are less likely to experience workplace sexual harassment compared to cisgender women. This effect is stronger among individuals who deny that transgender women are, in fact, women. We also show that people perceive harassment claims from transgender women who experience unwanted advances to be less credible than identical claims from cisgender women. Perceptions that transgender women are unlikely and non-credible victims of sexual harassment have important implications for understanding the erasure and neglect of transgender women survivors and the obstruction of transgender women's civil rights.

  View details for DOI 10.1177/01461672251368955

  View details for PubMedID 41054339

• People believe sexual harassment and domestic violence are less harmful for women in poverty JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Cheek, N. N., Bandt-Law, B., Sinclair, S. 2023; 107

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104472

  View details for Web of Science ID 000990410000001

• Gender Prototypes Shape Perceptions of and Responses to Sexual Harassment CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Kaiser, C. R., Bandt-Law, B., Cheek, N. N., Schachtman, R. 2022; 31 (3): 254-261

  View details for DOI 10.1177/09637214221078592

  View details for Web of Science ID 000798682600001

• Narrow prototypes and neglected victims: Understanding perceptions of sexual harassment. Journal of personality and social psychology Goh, J. X., Bandt-Law, B., Cheek, N. N., Sinclair, S., Kaiser, C. R. 2022; 122 (5): 873-893

  Abstract

  Sexual harassment is pervasive and has adverse effects on its victims, yet perceiving sexual harassment is wrought with ambiguity, making harassment difficult to identify and understand. Eleven preregistered, multimethod experiments (total N = 4,065 participants) investigated the nature of perceiving sexual harassment by testing whether perceptions of sexual harassment and its impact are facilitated when harassing behaviors target those who fit with the prototype of women (e.g., those who have feminine features, interests, and characteristics) relative to those who fit less well with this prototype. Studies A1-A5 demonstrate that participants' mental representation of sexual harassment targets overlapped with the prototypes of women as assessed through participant-generated drawings, face selection tasks, reverse correlation, and self-report measures. In Studies B1-B4, participants were less likely to label incidents as sexual harassment when they targeted nonprototypical women compared with prototypical women. In Studies C1 and C2, participants perceived sexual harassment claims to be less credible and the harassment itself to be less psychologically harmful when the victims were nonprototypical women rather than prototypical women. This research offers theoretical and methodological advances to the study of sexual harassment through social cognition and prototypicality perspectives, and it has implications for harassment reporting and litigation as well as the realization of fundamental civil rights. For materials, data, and preregistrations of all studies, see https://osf.io/xehu9/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

  View details for DOI 10.1037/pspi0000260

  View details for PubMedID 33444038

• Terror in time: extending culturomics to address basic terror management mechanisms. Cognition & emotion Dechesne, M., Bandt-Law, B. 2019; 33 (3): 492-511

  Abstract

  Building on Google's efforts to scan millions of books, this article introduces methodology using a database of annual word frequencies of the 40,000 most frequently occurring words in the American literature between 1800 and 2009. The current paper uses this methodology to replicate and identify terror management processes in historical context. Variation in frequencies of word usage of constructs relevant to terror management theory (e.g. death, worldview, self-esteem, relationships) are investigated over a time period of 209 years. Study 1 corroborated previous TMT findings and demonstrated that word use of constructs related to death and of constructs related to patriotism and romantic relationships significantly co-vary over time. Study 2 showed that the use of the word "death" most strongly co-varies over time with the use of medical constructs, but also co-varies with the use of constructs related to violence, relationships, religion, positive sentiment, and negative sentiment. Study 3 found that a change in the use of death related words is associated with an increase in the use of fear related words, but not in anxiety related words. Results indicate that the described methodology generates valuable insights regarding terror management theory and provide new perspectives for theoretical advances.

  View details for DOI 10.1080/02699931.2018.1460322

  View details for PubMedID 29637804

• The Sustainability Game: AI Technology as an Intervention for Public Understanding of Cooperative Investment Theodorou, A., Bandt-Law, B., Bryson, J. J., IEEE IEEE. 2019

  View details for Web of Science ID 000843154300070

• The effect of mortality salience on death penalty sentencing decisions when the defendant is severely mentally ill JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION CONFLICT AND PEACE RESEARCH Bandt-Law, B., Krauss, D. 2017; 9 (2): 141-154

  View details for DOI 10.1108/JACPR-04-2016-0225

  View details for Web of Science ID 000399073900007