An experiment published in a psychology journal in 2008 found that men who were given power over women tended to flirt more overtly than men who lacked such power. Another experiment found that those who thought of themselves as powerful underestimated both personal risks, like the chances of developing gum disease, and a more general level of risk, like the number of people who die in plane crashes each year.

“They don’t see threats even if they’re right in front of their face,” Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the second study, said in an interview. Alluding to superstar harassers, Professor Anderson added, “They’re so focused on sexual gratification, they don’t see the moral, ethical and legal problems.”

Many people in an organization, from the most junior scheduler to the chief executive, have some form of power. The distinctive feature of superstars is that they are more likely to use their power with impunity.

Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University, said in an interview that although he had seen no reliable data on superstars and sexual harassment per se, evidence showed that organizations tended to tolerate a wide range of misbehavior from people they perceived as stars. “They seem to also get away with things,” he said, “in a way they would never be able to do if they were not viewed as superstars.”

Professor Katz cited a study by two economists in which corporate chief executives who won high-profile awards, typically those conferred by major business publications, subsequently spent more time away from the job on outside pursuits like writing books. They were also more likely to manipulate the earnings that their companies reported.

Such license to misbehave appears to have been common for stars in some of the recent high-profile harassment cases. A former Fox News producer who quit several years ago said that Mr. O’Reilly’s contention that no one had complained about him to the network’s human resources department was basically meaningless because bringing a complaint meant having to be ready to quit.

(Fox News brought in a new head of human resources this year who was given responsibility for overhauling and expanding the department and who reports directly to the network’s corporate parent.)