Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

With Harvey Weinstein’s trial in progress (and boy, is he lucky that he is being tried more or less simultaneously along with Trump, because he’s been spared a lot – so far), and also having been recently reminded of Megyn Kelly, I thought it might be a good time to discuss clearing up some misconceptions about sexual assault. Many of these misconceptions come about because anyone, of any gender, of any cage, can be a target for, and a victim of, sexual assault. But there is not one person, of any gender or any age, who thinks beforehand that it might happen to him/her/them. And trying to imagine what we would do, in this as in so many aspects of life, is highly self-deceiving.

The article between the double-line barriers is republished, but I have taken the liberty of highlighting a few points which struck me. The words are republished – the teal color (and bolding) are mine.
==================================================================

Weinstein jurors must differentiate between consent and compliance – which research shows isn’t easy

Vanessa K. Bohns, Cornell University

Did the women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault consent to his sexual advances of their own free will, or were they coerced?

Jurors’ answers to this question will be critical in determining the outcome of Weinstein’s trial, which began jury selection in New York on Jan. 7.

I’m a scholar of social influence, compliance and consent, and I’ve found that people often fail to fully appreciate the coercive dynamics of situations from the outside.

The jury’s task

Although more than 80 women have publicly accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault, the New York trial comes down to two accusers who say Weinstein sexually assaulted them.

Weinstein has argued that the encounters were consensual and claims as evidence emails and texts showing an ongoing, intimate relationship with one of his accusers following the alleged assault. Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna Rotunno, for her part, has stated, “I believe women are responsible for the choices they make.”

His defense team’s strategy, it appears, will be to cast doubt on the accusers’ accounts, depicting their actions as more autonomous and self-directed than the women claim their actions to have been.

To tease apart these competing accounts, jurors are likely to ask themselves, “Could these women have tried harder to avoid or remove themselves from these situations? Could they have said ‘no’ more forcefully?”

Unfortunately, research suggests that the answers people tend to come up with to these hypothetical questions don’t accurately capture how someone would actually behave in a such a situation.

We tend to imagine that people – including ourselves – would behave in bolder and more forceful ways in response to offensive and inappropriate behavior than people actually do when confronted with such behavior.

What the research says

In a classic study, researchers asked one group of women how they would respond to being asked a number of sexually inappropriate questions in a job interview.

When these women thought about this situation hypothetically, 68% said they would refuse to answer at least one of the questions, 62% said they would tell the interviewer the question was inappropriate and 28% said they would walk out of the interview.

However, when the researchers invited another group of women to take part in what they believed to be a real job interview and actually subjected them to the same questions, not a single interviewee refused to answer even one question, and hardly any explicitly addressed the inappropriate nature of the questions with the interviewer.

Moreover, participants who contemplated being asked these questions hypothetically imagined feeling angry. However, participants who actually found themselves in this situation reported feeling more afraid. Instead of confronting the interviewer out of anger, as anticipated, participants facing the interviewer in reality instead tried to appease him by smiling.

My colleagues and I have similarly found that people fail to appreciate how hard it is for someone to refuse inappropriate, intrusive and romantic requests.

In one of our studies, 86% of participants believed a “reasonable person” would say “no” to an invasive request to unlock and hand over their phone to us to look through, and 72% said they themselves would refuse to do so. However, when we asked participants to do just that, only 3% actually refused.

In another study, participants overestimated by 56% the number of students on a college campus who would refuse to vandalize a library book when asked to do so, and in yet another, we found that targets of romantic advances felt more uncomfortable saying “no” than perpetrators of such advances realized.

Compliance versus consent

What all of this means is that while people frequently feel coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, others tend not to recognize these coercive pressures.

As a result, we tend to view others’ actions as freer and more autonomous than they experience them. We assume someone must have wanted to go along with something on some level; otherwise they would just have just said “no,” or said “no” more forcefully.

The jury selection process is supposed to uncover potential biases in the hopes of assembling an impartial jury. Much has been made of the difficulty of putting together an impartial jury due to jurors’ preexisting biases against Weinstein.

However, the widespread bias toward interpreting compliance as consent means that jurors are just as likely to have biases against his accusers’ version of events. Unfortunately, these more entrenched psychological biases are less likely to come out during jury selection.

[ Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter. ]

Vanessa K. Bohns, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

==================================================================
If the discrepancies between what people think they would do and what they actually do are confusing to you, if they make you wonder what you or others probably should be doing to reduce the likelihood of injustice being done – and stubbornly defended – you are not alone. That’s why I had such a delightful “Eureka!” moment when I came across an article (“diary”) at Daily Kos called “The Big Dog Problem.”

I’m not much of a dog person, but even the most intractable cat person must in honesty admit that some dogs do some things right. The author of this diary (user name “dogsbody”) uses his observations of canine behavior, as well as examples drawn from those observations by analogy, to illustrate how people who have privilege can learn to use that privilege to lift up people who have less privilege. Of course the more privilege one has, the more applicable it is. But it’s not that long, and it’s appealingly written. I recommend it highly.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I’d ask you to help all of us who think we are empathizing with survivors, or trying to, to realize that we probably don’t have a clue – that, if we think we wouldn’t have acted the way a survivor did, we are probably dead wrong. And to listen.

The Furies and I will be back.