Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory

Abstract

The Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory (ASBI; Mosher & Anderson, 1986) is an established self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess the frequency and severity of sexually aggressive tactics perpetrated by men against women within dating and heterosocial contexts. Developed to address the profound psychometric shortcomings of single-item direct queries and hypothetical “likelihood-to-rape” vignettes—which consistently suffer from social desirability bias, defensive underreporting, and extreme measurement error—the ASBI employs an act-specific, behavioral frequency methodology. The instrument comprises 20 items rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (extremely frequently), yielding total scores between 20 and 140, alongside an empirically validated 10-item short form (scores ranging from 10 to 70). Orthogonal varimax factor analysis delineates six distinct behavioral dimensions: Sexual Force, Drugs and Alcohol, Verbal Manipulation, Angry Rejection, Anger Expression, and Threat. The inventory demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .94 for the full 20-item instrument and .87 for the 10-item brief form. Extensive construct, convergent, and discriminant validity studies confirm robust associations between ASBI scores and the Hypermasculinity Inventory (specifically callous sexual attitudes, the belief that violence is manly, and the view that danger is exciting), illicit substance use, and significant negative associations with sex-guilt and hostility-guilt. Furthermore, experimental laboratory investigations employing guided imagery paradigms demonstrate that high scorers exhibit unique patterns of subjective sexual arousal coupled with affective distress, reflecting the reactivation of mood-congruent state memories. The ASBI remains an indispensable operational tool in clinical, forensic, and social psychological research investigating the etiology, maintenance, and prevention of sexual violence.

Keywords

Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory, ASBI, Donald L. Mosher, sexual aggression, hypermasculinity, date rape, callous sexual attitudes, behavioral self-report, psychometrics, sexual coercion

Authors

The Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory was authored by Donald L. Mosher, Ph.D., and Ronald D. Anderson, M.A., at the University of Connecticut (Department of Psychology, Storrs, Connecticut, USA). Dr. Donald L. Mosher is widely recognized as a pioneering psychologist in the domains of human sexuality, guilt dispositions, and male sexual aggression. His foundational research established the psychometric conceptualization of the “macho personality constellation” (hypermasculinity) and developed widely cited instruments including the Mosher Forced-Choice Guilt Inventory and the Hypermasculinity Inventory (Mosher & Sirkin, 1984). Correspondence regarding historical archival records of the ASBI was directed to Donald L. Mosher at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory is to provide a reliable, behavioral, and continuous measure of sexually aggressive tactics utilized by men to obtain sexual access to non-consenting women in dating, courtship, and casual heterosocial interactions. Prior to the development of the ASBI, empirical investigations into sexual assault and acquaintance rape relied predominantly on two flawed measurement strategies: direct categorical questions asking whether a respondent had ever committed “rape” or “assault,” and hypothetical projective scenarios asking male participants how likely they would be to commit a rape if they were guaranteed not to get caught (the “rape-with-impunity” paradigm). Psychometric investigations demonstrated that direct categorical inquiries yield widespread false-negative reports due to legal defensiveness, pejorative labeling, and denial, while hypothetical intention items measure abstract cognitive tolerance rather than actual historical behavioral enactment.

Mosher and Anderson (1986) formulated the ASBI to circumvent these methodological barriers by stripping away legalistic and socially stigmatizing nomenclature. Instead of utilizing words such as “rape,” “coercion,” or “assault,” the inventory operationalizes aggression through granular, descriptive behavioral statements that capture a spectrum of coercive practices. These range from psychological pressure and verbal manipulation to substance-facilitated incapacitated assault, intimidation, physical restraint, and explicit physical violence. By quantifying the reported frequency of these concrete acts, the ASBI provides a sensitive gradient of individual differences in perpetration history.

In research contexts, the ASBI functions both as an individual-differences independent variable—classifying men into low, moderate, or high tiers of sexually aggressive propensity—and as an essential dependent variable for evaluating the efficacy of sexual violence prevention interventions, assessing the predictive power of hypermasculine personality structures, and analyzing laboratory paradigms involving emotional and physiological reactivity to erotic and violent stimuli. In clinical and forensic settings, while not intended as a standalone diagnostic instrument, the scale serves as an informative checklist for identifying specific behavioral patterns, cognitive scripts, and risk factors in batterer intervention and sexual offender assessment programs.

Psychological Construct

The ASBI operationalizes sexual aggression not as an isolated, impulsive legal infraction, but as a multi-dimensional behavioral continuum embedded in patriarchal and coercive sociosexual dating scripts. The overarching construct reflects the willingness to override a woman’s lack of consent through psychological, chemical, or physical domination. Factor-analytic investigations by Mosher and Anderson (1986) revealed that this overarching construct is composed of six distinct behavioral facets:

1. Sexual Force

This dimension encompasses overt, physically violent, and non-consensual acts of penetration and restraint. Behaviors in this subscale involve physical subjugation, tearing off clothing, pinning the victim down, or engaging in multi-perpetrator (“gang”) sexual abuse. Items reflecting this dimension capture unambiguous felony-level acts of forcible rape (e.g., bringing a date home and forcing intercourse, participating in a group assault, or physically immobilizing a woman). In the original normative sample of college men, 28% endorsed having perpetrated one or more of these behaviors at least once.

2. Drugs and Alcohol

The chemical facilitation dimension captures the intentional exploitation, provision, or administration of intoxicating substances—such as alcohol, sedatives, or illicit narcotics—to diminish a woman’s capacity to evaluate situations, resist unwanted advances, or assert boundary control. This includes using alcohol deliberately to induce incapacitation or offering expensive drugs with the explicit psychological expectation of an obligatory sexual transaction. This behavioral tactic is the most widely prevalent form of coercive strategy within collegiate dating contexts, endorsed by 75% of the normative sample.

3. Verbal Manipulation

This subscale captures psychological coercion, emotional exploitation, and manipulation grounded in traditional sexual script expectations. Tactics include weaponizing relationship termination (threatening to break up if sex is denied), fabricating false emotional intimacy, inducing guilt regarding male physiological discomfort (e.g., the “blue balls” myth), and deceptive negotiation to enter private physical spaces. Approximately 64% of respondents endorsed using verbal manipulation strategies.

4. Angry Rejection

Angry rejection represents a retaliatory response to sexual boundary setting and refusal. When sexual access is denied, the perpetrator reacts with overt hostility, verbal disparagement, derogatory name-calling, physical pushing, and explicit threats of abandonment or relationship replacement. Endorsed by 43% of respondents, this facet operationalizes the cognitive entitlement that views a woman’s sexual autonomy as a personal injury justifying punitive behavioral retaliation.

5. Anger Expression

This facet involves the instrumental exhibition of male rage designed to intimidate and terrify the victim into compliance. Behaviors include sudden explosive displays of anger, swearing, property destruction, forceful gripping, and physical intimations of impending assault. Unlike direct sexual force, anger expression relies on creating an immediate, visceral fear of violence, communicating to the victim that failure to comply will result in severe physical harm. Approximately 46% of men endorsed this tactic.

6. Threat

The threat dimension encompasses explicit, calculated verbal warnings of physical bodily harm if compliance is not granted, juxtaposed with conditional promises of safety if the victim fully capitulates (e.g., warning a woman she could get hurt unless she relaxes, or stating that harm will be withheld only if she obeys instructions). Endorsed by 13% of the collegiate sample, this subscale represents extreme, terroristic coercion bordering on hostage-taking behavioral dynamics.

Theoretical Framework

The ASBI is grounded in the theoretical framework of the Macho Personality Constellation, also termed hypermasculinity, articulated by Donald L. Mosher and Mark Sirkin (1984). Hypermasculinity is conceptualized as an organized cognitive-affective dynamic consisting of three interrelated components:

• Callous Sexual Attitudes Toward Women: Cognitive schemas that objectify women, normalize sexual conquest, devalue female agency, and legitimize exploitative sexual tactics.
• Violence as Manly: The cultural and personal belief that aggression, physical force, dominance, and interpersonal toughness are defining hallmarks of authentic masculine identity.
• Danger as Exciting: A sensation-seeking propensity that frames dangerous, chaotic, and risk-laden behaviors as thrilling and reinforcing rather than threatening.

According to Mosher and Anderson’s theoretical model, men who internalize this constellation develop behavioral repertoires that view sociosexual interactions not as collaborative, mutual exchanges, but as competitive, zero-sum confrontations. In these interactions, female refusal is framed as an obstacle to be overcome through escalation. When standard courtship behaviors fail, hypermasculine scripts sanction an escalating ladder of coercive intervention: beginning with verbal manipulation and chemical incapacitation, progressing through intimidation and emotional retaliation, and culminating in overt physical subjugation.

The theoretical framework also integrates Gordon H. Bower’s (1981) Network Theory of Affect and Mood-Congruent Memory. Mosher and Anderson posited that aggressive sexual perpetration leaves enduring associative memory structures. In men with histories of sexual aggression, exposure to sexual-violent stimuli (such as guided imagery of rape) activates associative networks connecting physiological sexual arousal with complex negative affects, including anger, power, distress, and guilt. Rather than being purely psychopathic actors devoid of affect, sexually aggressive men operate within conflicted, volatile psychological networks where sexual conquest is intrinsically intertwined with hostility, dominance, and emotional turmoil.

Validity

The construct, convergent, criterion, and predictive validity of the ASBI have been empirically established through multiple psychometric and experimental studies:

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

In their seminal validation study involving 125 college men, Mosher and Anderson (1986) examined the relationship between the ASBI and established personality indices. The ASBI total score demonstrated statistically significant, theoretically consistent positive correlations with the Hypermasculinity Inventory (HMI) total score (r = .33, p < .001). Examination of specific subscales revealed robust correlations with Callous Sexual Attitudes (r = .53, p < .001), Danger as Exciting (r = .26, p < .01), and Violence as Manly (r = .23, p < .01).

Discriminant and divergent validity was confirmed through negative associations with generalized moral inhibitions. Using the Mosher Forced-Choice Guilt Inventory (Mosher, 1966), ASBI scores correlated strongly and inversely with Sex-Guilt (r = -.53, p < .001) and Hostility-Guilt (r = -.49, p < .001). These findings indicate that men reporting frequent aggressive sexual behavior possess markedly lower internal self-regulatory sanctions against sexual transgression and interpersonal hostility.

Criterion and Known-Groups Validity

In a specialized validation study examining subcultural populations characterized by high rates of sensation seeking and non-traditional lifestyles, Zaitchik (1986) administered the ASBI to a sample of 55 male rock musicians. Demonstrating potent criterion-related validity, ASBI scores correlated extraordinarily highly with the macho personality constellation (r = .75, p < .001). Moreover, the ASBI demonstrated strong predictive validity regarding illicit substance utilization, correlating with cocaine use (r = .72), amphetamine use (r = .70), and marijuana use (r = .50), supporting the functional connection between systemic substance-involvement cultures and chemically facilitated sexual aggression.

Experimental and Laboratory Validity

Mosher and Anderson (1986) conducted a laboratory experiment utilizing a standardized guided imagery paradigm in which 125 men mentally projected themselves into the role of a perpetrator executing a realistic, non-eroticized, violent acquaintance rape. Compared to low-scoring counterparts, men with elevated ASBI scores exhibited significantly greater subjective sexual arousal to the violent scenario, demonstrating construct validity regarding sexualized aggression. Concurrently, high-scoring men also reported heightened post-imagery affective ratings of anger, distress, shame, fear, and guilt. This confirmed the revivification of state-dependent episodic memories of past interpersonal trauma and violent perpetration.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory has been evaluated across multiple independent samples, confirming high internal consistency for both full and abbreviated versions:

Internal Consistency

• Full 20-Item Inventory: In the primary normative validation sample of 125 college men (Mosher & Anderson, 1986), the ASBI achieved a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .94. Item-total correlations across the 20 items were consistently high, supporting the author’s recommendation that despite multi-factorial behavioral components, the summed score operates as an exceptionally homogeneous metric of overall sexually aggressive behavior.
• 10-Item Short Form: Evaluated in an independent sample of 55 adult males (Zaitchik, 1986), the 10-item abbreviated form demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha of .87, confirming that the reduced instrument maintains adequate psychometric precision for rapid-screening environments and large-scale demographic surveys.

Measurement Error and Temporal Stability

Because the ASBI queries cumulative historical behavioral perpetration rather than transient psychological states, standard short-term test-retest reliability assessments are robust. However, due to the high sensitivity of the content, reliability is contingent on strict anonymity. Studies utilizing identified questionnaires yield suppressed variance and attenuated reliability coefficients, whereas anonymous administration with machine-scoreable sheets demonstrates high internal stability and minimal measurement error.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the ASBI was determined through exploratory factor analysis by Mosher and Anderson (1986). Initial psychometric piloting involved administering an expanded pool of 33 candidate behavioral statements to a sample of 125 male undergraduate students at the University of Connecticut.

Extraction and Rotation

Principal axis factor extraction followed by an orthogonal varimax rotation was performed. Based on eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and examination of the scree plot, a six-factor solution accounting for the predominant variance was retained. Thirteen items exhibiting cross-loadings greater than .35 on multiple factors, ambiguous structural alignment, or negligible communalities were eliminated, yielding the final 20-item scale.

Factor Loadings and Composition

While the six-factor model articulates the specific behavioral avenues employed by perpetrators, structural analyses demonstrate that the individual factors intercorrelate moderately to strongly. Consequently, psychometric consensus supports the aggregation of all 20 items into a single, highly reliable composite score of aggressive sexual behavior.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory (ASBI)
• Alternative Forms: 10-item Short Form (ASBI-SF; comprises Items 1, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18, and 19)
• Construct Assessed: Historical frequency and severity of sexually coercive and physically aggressive behaviors against women in dating/heterosocial settings
• Target Population: Adult and adolescent males (principally validated with college and young adult cohorts)
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or secure, anonymous computerized questionnaire
• Item Count: 20 items (Full Scale); 10 items (Abbreviated Scale)
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type frequency scale:
  • 1 = Never
  • 2 = Very rarely
  • 3 = Rarely
  • 4 = Sometimes
  • 5 = Frequently
  • 6 = Very frequently
  • 7 = Extremely frequently
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 7 minutes for the full 20-item version
• Scoring Procedure: All 20 items are keyed in the positive direction (no reverse-scored items). The overall score is calculated as the direct sum of all 20 items.
  • Full Scale Range: 20 to 140 (Higher scores denote greater behavioral aggression)
  • Short Form Range: 10 to 70
  • Subscale Scores: Summed scores of designated factor items (Sexual Force: 6–42; Drugs/Alcohol: 3–21; Verbal Manipulation: 4–28; Angry Rejection: 2–14; Anger Expression: 3–21; Threat: 2–14)

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory was constructed in 1983 as part of Ronald D. Anderson’s master’s thesis under the supervision of Donald L. Mosher, with full psychometric properties officially published in the Journal of Research in Personality in 1986. The instrument resides in the public academic domain for educational, non-commercial clinical, and scientific research purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Mosher and Anderson (1986). No licensing fees or commercial purchase orders are mandated for academic researchers. Inquiries regarding archival permissions and historical psychometric data can be directed to the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut.

References

Anderson, R. D. (1983). Hyper-masculine attitudes, aggressive sexual behaviors, and the reactions of college men to a guided imagery presentation of realistic rape (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36(2), 129–148. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.36.2.129

Mosher, D. L. (1966). The development and multitrait-multimethod matrix analysis of three measures of guilt. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 30(1), 25–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022987

Mosher, D. L., & Anderson, R. D. (1986). Macho personality, sexual aggression, and reactions to guided imagery of realistic rape. Journal of Research in Personality, 20(2), 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-6566(86)90111-X

Mosher, D. L., & Sirkin, M. (1984). Measuring a macho personality constellation. Journal of Research in Personality, 18(2), 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-6566(84)90026-6

Zaitchik, M. (1986). Macho personality and life satisfaction in rock musicians (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Items of the Scale