Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression (AMMSA) scale

1. Abstract

The Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression (AMMSA) scale is a standardized psychometric instrument developed by Heike Gerger, Helga Kley, Gerd Bohner, and Frank Siebler (2007) to quantify contemporary, subtle, and covert cognitive endorsements of beliefs that justify, minimize, or obscure sexual violence. Originating from social psychological paradigms that distinguish traditional, overt hostility from modern, subtle prejudice—analogous to shifts observed in racial and modern sexism literature—the AMMSA addresses critical psychometric limitations embedded within classical Rape Myth Acceptance (RMA) instruments, such as Burt’s (1980) Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. Traditional inventories suffer from pervasive floor effects, social desirability biases, and positively skewed response distributions when administered to contemporary cohorts. The AMMSA is composed of 30 self-report items evaluated on a 7-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree).

Psychometrically, the AMMSA demonstrates a robust unidimensional global factor structure reflecting general myth endorsement alongside multiple conceptual themes: denial of the scope of sexual violence, antagonism toward victims alleging abuse, naturalization of male sexual impulses, exoneration of perpetrators via external attributions (e.g., alcohol, media consumption), and illegitimate victim-blaming. Across initial and extensive cross-cultural validation samples (totaling over N = 1,279 across foundational bilingual German and English cohorts, and expanded in subsequent international studies), the instrument consistently demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging between α = .91 and .95, and strong test-retest reliability across multi-week intervals (r > .80). Scores on the AMMSA adhere closely to a normal distribution, resolving historical measurement artifacts. Crucially, the AMMSA displays superior construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity, accurately predicting victim-blaming judgments in mock-juror paradigms, self-reported inclinations toward sexual aggression, and resistance to sexual violence prevention programming.

2. Keywords

Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression, AMMSA, Rape Myth Acceptance, sexual violence, modern sexism, subtle prejudice, victim blaming, psychometrics, scale validation, sexual aggression

3. Authors

The Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression (AMMSA) scale was conceived, developed, and validated through collaborative research conducted by scholars in social psychology and clinical methodology:

• Heike Gerger, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany; and Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. Primary investigator in social-cognitive determinants of health and interpersonal attitudes.
• Helga Kley, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany; and Division of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany. Specialized in experimental psychopathology and quantitative methodologies.
• Gerd Bohner, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstraße 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany. Corresponding author (Email: [email protected]). Renowned international scholar in attitude formation, cognitive representations, persuasion, and the social psychology of sexual aggression.
• Frank Siebler, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany; and Department of Psychology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway. Methodologist specializing in scale construction, implicit cognition, and cross-cultural psychometrics.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the AMMSA scale is to deliver a psychometrically rigorous, contemporary, and reliable measurement tool capable of assessing nuanced, socially masked cognitive structures that support, legitimize, or trivialize sexual aggression. When Martha R. Burt published the foundational Rape Myth Acceptance Scale in 1980, the sociopolitical and cultural landscape permitted explicit endorsement of aggressive stereotypes (e.g., overt claims that victims secretly desire forced penetration or that women habitually lie about rape for vindictive pleasure). However, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, progressive social norms, extensive feminist legal reform, and increased media visibility rendered explicit endorsements of sexual assault socially unacceptable. Consequently, classic scales began exhibiting severe floor effects, truncated variances, and marked positive skews, as respondents easily recognized socially normative demands and suppressed overt agreement. Researchers were frequently left unable to differentiate individual variance within subclinical or general population cohorts.

To overcome this measurement bottleneck, Gerger, Kley, Bohner, and Siebler (2007) recognized that prejudice and ideological hostility evolve rather than vanish. Drawing direct methodological parallels to the historical evolution of modern racism (McConahay, 1986) and modern sexism (Swim et al., 1995), the authors formulated the AMMSA to capture implicit assumptions, indirect rationalizations, and socially camouflaged defenses of sexual coercion. Rather than requiring rape myths to be demonstrably false—a criterion that historically tangled researchers in philosophical and empirical disputes over demographic baselines—the conceptual foundation of the AMMSA establishes that modern myths are defined by their functional and ethical consequence: they are cognitively and socially *wrong* because they serve to deny, downplay, or justify male sexual violence against women.

In research contexts, the AMMSA serves as a gold-standard predictor of information processing biases in legal and investigative decision-making. It reliably forecasts mock-juror verdicts, police officer credibility assessments of complainants, and public reactions to high-profile sexual assault allegations. In higher education and military environments, it provides an indispensable evaluation index for primary prevention interventions (e.g., bystander training programs), enabling evaluators to ascertain whether educational curricula disrupt deep-seated cognitive rationalizations of violence. In clinical and forensic settings, while not designed as an isolated diagnostic instrument, the AMMSA assists clinicians and criminologists in mapping cognitive distortions, entitlement dynamics, and treatment progress among sex offenders and at-risk populations prone to boundary violations.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the AMMSA is the degree to which an individual cognitively endorses modern, subtle, and ethically regressive beliefs regarding sexual aggression. Rather than representing an idiosyncratic collection of attitudes, modern myth acceptance reflects a cohesive, ideologically grounded belief system that operates covertly across social contexts. Although the AMMSA was designed and is most robustly utilized as an overall unidimensional construct, its constituent items comprehensively cover five interlocking thematic facets identified in contemporary socio-sexual discourse:

1. Denial of the Scope and Severity of Sexual Violence

Modern myth acceptance manifests through cognitive minimization, wherein individuals convince themselves and others that sexual aggression is no longer a pressing systemic issue. Modern myths posit that legal protections, victim shelters, and institutional support mechanisms have effectively resolved the problem, rendering ongoing public outrage obsolete. Items representing this facet assert that society over-allocates resources to rape victims relative to victims of other violent crimes or suggest that societal focus should be redirected toward other global crises (e.g., environmental degradation). By arguing that sexual violence has been successfully contained, respondents intellectually detach from the urgency of institutional and cultural interventions.

2. Antagonism Toward Women Alleging Victimization

Parallel to the Modern Sexism component of resentment toward women’s collective demands, this facet reflects pervasive skepticism regarding the motives and credibility of accusers. Modern myths rarely deploy crude assertions that women enjoy violence; instead, they accuse women of instrumentalizing allegations for ulterior motives, such as gaining leverage in child custody battles, seeking revenge for failed consensual relationships, or garnering social capital by appearing politically progressive and “emancipated.” This dimension captures the belief that harmless interpersonal overtures are weaponized by hypersensitive or vindictive women in the “battle of the sexes.”

3. Naturalization and Biological Determinism of Male Sexuality

A central pillar of modern justification involves portraying male sexual urges as uncontrollable, biologically mandated, hydraulic forces. Utilizing archaic metaphors of male libido as a “steam boiler” that inevitably requires releasing pressure, modern myths subtly remove agency and moral accountability from perpetrators. Such rationalizations imply that when sexual arousal is initiated in dating or intimate contexts, physiological imperatives override cognitive restraint, framing coercive escalation as an unfortunate biological inevitability rather than a calculated violation of consent.

4. Exoneration of Perpetrators via Situational and External Attributions

Modern myths frequently exonerate perpetrators by shifting causal responsibility away from deliberate intent onto external, situational catalysts. Chief among these scapegoats are the ubiquitous portrayal of sexuality in mass media—posited to artificially inflate uncontrollable sexual drives—and the consumption of alcohol. By treating intoxication or media exposure as the fundamental “culprit” of sexual assault, this dimension fosters a diffusion of personal responsibility, transforming criminal perpetration into an accidental byproduct of environmental intoxicants or cultural saturation.

5. Shifting Responsibility and Illegitimate Victim-Blaming

Unlike explicit classical victim-blaming, which bluntly claimed victims “asked for it,” modern iterations couch responsibility-shifting in terms of normative dating expectations, female coyness, and risk mismanagement. This dimension incorporates expectations that women must proactively regulate sexual pace (“hit the brakes”) while men naturally “push ahead.” It includes cognitive scripts that interpret a woman entering a private residence for coffee or walking down an unlit street as an implicit forfeiture of the right to bodily autonomy, thereby redistributing moral culpability onto the victim’s perceived failure of risk avoidance.

6. Theoretical Framework

The AMMSA is theoretically grounded at the intersection of social-cognitive attitude theory, feminist critical psychology, and the cognitive restructuring paradigms developed in contemporary prejudice research. The primary theoretical frameworks anchoring the scale include:

The Modern Prejudice Paradigm

The central architecture of the AMMSA is directly imported from the Modern Racism (McConahay, 1986) and Modern Sexism (Swim et al., 1995) frameworks. These models posit that as overt bigotry becomes heavily sanctioned under egalitarian cultural norms, underlying hostility does not disappear; rather, it mutates into covert rationalizations. Modern prejudice is characterized by three core tenets: (a) denial of continuing discrimination, (b) antagonism toward minority/disadvantaged groups demanding equity, and (c) resentment toward policies or assistance programs perceived as providing unfair advantages. Gerger and colleagues (2007) mapped these exact tenets onto sexual violence: denying that sexual assault remains prevalent, resenting victims who make public disclosures, and expressing indignation toward the legal, psychological, and institutional support provided to survivors.

Ambivalent Sexism Theory

The AMMSA connects seamlessly with Glick and Fiske’s (1996, 2001) Ambivalent Sexism Theory, which conceptualizes gender attitudes as an interplay between Hostile Sexism (HS) and Benevolent Sexism (BS). Modern myths about sexual aggression serve as the functional bridge between these two orientations. For instance, prescriptive benevolent myths reward women who conform to traditional, passive, and protective scripts (punishing those who deviate into “dark alleys” or assert sexual freedom), whereas modern hostile myths directly attack non-traditional women as manipulative fabricators who falsely claim harassment. The AMMSA measures the cognitive schemas that legitimize patriarchal social hierarchies by enforcing gender-role boundaries under the guise of commonsense logic.

Social Cognitive Heuristics and Just-World Ideology

The scale incorporates Lerner’s (1980) Just-World Hypothesis, which posits that individuals experience deep psychological distress when confronted with unpredictable, catastrophic harm befalling innocent actors. To maintain the illusion that the world is inherently orderly, predictable, and fair, observers systematically attribute causal blame to the victim’s choices or character. Modern myths provide readily accessible cognitive heuristics: if a victim had alcohol, accepted an invitation to an apartment, or dressed attractively, the observer can rationalize the occurrence of assault as a logical consequence of behavioral carelessness rather than an arbitrary act of male violence, thereby mitigating their personal vulnerability anxieties.

7. Validity

Empirical evaluations across independent laboratories in Europe, North America, and globally have confirmed that the AMMSA scale exhibits outstanding psychometric validity across all foundational dimensions:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity has been exhaustively demonstrated through significant, theoretically aligned correlations with established social-cognitive constructs. In their initial four-study validation sequence (N = 1,279), Gerger et al. (2007) reported high positive correlations between the AMMSA and Burt’s (1980) Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (ranging from r = .66 to r = .81), indicating strong convergence with classical constructs while substantially attenuating floor effects. Furthermore, AMMSA scores correlate robustly with:

• Hostile Sexism (r = .60 to .72) and Benevolent Sexism (r = .38 to .49), establishing its grounding within patriarchal belief structures.
• Modern Sexism (r = .55 to .68), corroborating its explicit alignment with covert gender-bias paradigms.
• Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (r values typically between .40 and .55), affirming that modern myths serve broader systemic dominance functions.
• Adversarial Sexual Beliefs (r = .50 to .62), reflecting expectations that heterosexual interactions are fundamentally manipulative and exploitative.

Discriminant Validity

The AMMSA successfully discriminates modern myth acceptance from unrelated psychological traits. Correlations with generalized intelligence, non-social cognitive performance measures, and generic negative affectivity remain statistically indistinguishable from zero. Importantly, while classical RMA scales correlate substantially with impression management and social desirability measures (e.g., the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), the AMMSA shows markedly attenuated associations with social desirability (typically r = −.08 to −.18). Because the items are framed subtly—avoiding direct endorsements of violent felonies—respondents do not perceive the items as explicit moral traps, preserving ecological validity and variance.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The AMMSA displays predictive validity in experimental and applied legal contexts. Bohner et al. (2008, 2010) demonstrated that participants scoring higher on the AMMSA:

• Assign significantly lower credibility to female complainants in simulated rape trials.
• Assign higher levels of responsibility, blame, and negligence to victims while exhibiting elevated empathy toward accused male defendants.
• Recommend substantially shorter prison sentences or vote for outright acquittal in ambiguous acquaintance-rape scenarios.
• Among male respondents, the AMMSA significantly predicts self-reported likelihood to sexually harass and likelihood to rape if assured of absolute impunity, displaying superior predictive power compared to classical RMA inventories.

8. Reliability

The AMMSA scale possesses exceptional reliability profiles, demonstrating high internal consistency across diverse cultural demographics, gender classifications, and linguistic translations:

Internal Consistency

In the scale’s initial psychometric development program across four independent validation studies, Gerger et al. (2007) documented Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of extraordinary strength:

• Study 1 (German version, N = 207 university students): α = .92.
• Study 2 (German version, N = 405 community sample): α = .95.
• Study 3 (English version, N = 214 British undergraduate students): α = .93.
• Study 4 (Parallel validation of English and German forms, N = 453): α = .91 for the English instrument and α = .94 for the German instrument.

Subsequent cross-national investigations have continually confirmed these estimates. Translated and adapted into Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Turkish, and Polish, internal consistency values regularly exceed α = .90, with McDonald’s omega (ω_total) similarly ranging between .92 and .96, indicating that random measurement error is minimal.

Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability assessments demonstrate that the AMMSA captures enduring ideological orientations rather than fleeting situational mood states. In longitudinal designs tracking participants across 4- to 8-week test-retest intervals, stability coefficients remained highly resilient, yielding Pearson correlation coefficients ranging from r = .80 to r = .88 (Gerger et al., 2007; Bohner et al., 2013). Item-total correlation coefficients consistently surpass .40 across all 30 statements, with median item-total correlations hovering around .55 to .65, ensuring that every retained item contributes meaningfully to the overall measurement model.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the AMMSA has been thoroughly investigated through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Structure

During scale construction, Gerger et al. (2007) submitted a vast pool of candidate items to principal axis factoring with both oblique and orthogonal rotations. While theoretical content analyses isolate distinct ideological themes (denial of scope, antagonism toward claimants, naturalization of male libido, external attribution, and victim-blaming), empirical extraction criteria unequivocally favored a dominant single-factor solution. Across samples, scree plots exhibited a sharp discontinuity after the first initial eigenvalue. The first unrotated factor accounted for a substantial proportion of common variance (frequently between 35% and 48%), with the ratio of the first-to-second eigenvalue routinely exceeding 4:1. All 30 items loaded significantly onto this dominant general factor, with standardized factor loadings ranging from λ = .38 to λ = .74, demonstrating that an overarching latent dimension of modern myth acceptance binds these attitudes together.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

Subsequent structural modeling via CFA evaluated competing models: a strictly orthogonal multidimensional model, a correlated five-factor model mirroring the theoretical sub-facets, and a hierarchical (bifactor or higher-order) unidimensional model. Results from multiple studies demonstrate that while a five-factor first-order structure fits the data reasonably well, a hierarchical general-factor model or a single-factor model with correlated residuals for closely related semantic items provides the most parsimonious and psychometrically sound fit to observed data.

Standardized CFA goodness-of-fit indices reported in empirical literature typically meet conventional structural thresholds:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .91 to .94
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .90 to .93
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .044 to .058 (90% CI [.039, .063])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .042 to .052

These empirical findings validate the standard scoring convention: computing a single composite AMMSA index across the 30 items rather than relying on fragmented subscale scores.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression scale (AMMSA)
• Authors: Heike Gerger, Helga Kley, Gerd Bohner, and Frank Siebler
• Publication Year: 2007
• Format / Administration: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report questionnaire. Cross-sectional and longitudinal administrations are supported.
• Item Count: 30 declarative statements
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 16 and older; utilized across college samples, general community cohorts, legal/juror pools, and forensic intervention environments.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored as follows:
  • 1 = completely disagree
  • 2 = disagree
  • 3 = disagree somewhat
  • 4 = neutral
  • 5 = agree somewhat
  • 6 = agree
  • 7 = completely agree
• Scoring Procedure:
  • All 30 items are keyed in a positive direction; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • A respondent’s total composite score can be calculated as the arithmetic sum (ranging from 30 to 210) or, more commonly, as the mean score across all answered items (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Higher numerical scores reflect greater cognitive acceptance of modern myths about sexual aggression, greater victim-blaming proclivities, and stronger rationalizations of coercive sexual behaviors.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression (AMMSA) scale was officially published in 2007 in the peer-reviewed journal Aggressive Behavior (Wiley). In accordance with standard international academic research practices, the scale is an open-access empirical instrument available free of charge for non-commercial research, institutional evaluation, and clinical education purposes. Researchers and practitioners are not required to pay licensing fees or obtain formal contractual clearances for non-commercial investigations. However, formal citation and attribution of the seminal development paper (Gerger et al., 2007) is ethically mandatory in all resulting publications, theses, and technical reports. Commercial exploitation, incorporation into proprietary commercial platforms, or fee-based training packages requires explicit written authorization from the primary copyright holders and the publisher.

12. References

• Bohner, G., Eyssel, J., Pina, A., Siebler, F., & Viki, G. T. (2013). Rape myth acceptance and sexual violence against women: Cognitive and motivational processes. In The Psychology of Sexual Aggression and Victimization (pp. 17–45). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203083468
• Bohner, G., Jarvis, C. I., Eyssel, J., & Siebler, F. (2008). The causal influence of rape myth acceptance on blame attribution in domestic versus acquaintance rape: A test of modern cognitive theories. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38(2), 257–279. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.452
• Burt, M. R. (1980). Cultural myths and supports for rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(2), 217–230. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.2.217
• Gerger, H., Kley, H., Bohner, G., & Siebler, F. (2007). The Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression (AMMSA) scale: Development and validation in German and English. Aggressive Behavior, 33(5), 422–440. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20195
• Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 491–512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.491
• Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56(2), 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.2.109
• Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0448-5
• McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern racism, ambivalence, and the Modern Racism Scale. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism (pp. 91–125). Academic Press.
• Swim, J. K., Aikin, K. J., Hall, W. S., & Hunter, B. A. (1995). Sexism and racism: Old-fashioned and modern prejudices. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(2), 199–214. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.2.199

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)