Extracting implicit theories about the risk of coercive control in romantic relationships

People readily make attributions about the likely behavior of others, based on very limited information, We exploited this tendency to assess people's sensitivity to personological and social-circumstantial evidence of risk o f coercive control in romantic relationships, by unobtrusively varying info rmation about a fictitious couple in a between-groups design and asking vie wers to make predictions about the feelings and behavior of the three chara cters-a man, his girlfriend, and his sister. Key features of the story were systematically altered to elicit attributions of the man's aggressive and jealous inclinations to see if people are sensitive to the psychological li nk between sexually proprietary inclinations and risk of violence. The stor y manipulations were effective in eliciting attributions of the man's aggre ssive inclinations, of the woman's polyandrous inclinations, and of the man 's likely jealousy. As expected, people predicted that an aggressive and je alous man would be likely to use violence and other controlling actions aga inst his girlfriend.