Say it ain’t so: when reality doesn’t accord with our beliefs

I’ve spent a lot of this week collecting references for some papers I’d like to write. One attempts to challenge the very pervasive belief that being aroused by fiction sexually, emotionally, sentimentally or fearfully is somehow fundamentally negative – that it impairs our judgement completely and renders us quivering idiots (no, that’s not quite how I word it in the paper). The other seeks to defend the seemingly indefensible: the eroticization of fictional depictions of rape. So, I’ve been collecting a lot of papers, research from a wide set of disciplines. I’ve also being paying more attention to debates I’ve, until recently, had little interest in.

Take the debate that porn leads to rape. The more porn, the more easily accessible it is and the harder-core it is, the more it will influence people and cause them to rape. Well, no. This turns out not to be true in the general population. In fact, several large scale studies in various countries indicate that the opposite is true. (D’Amato, A. (2006). Porn up, rape down. Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series.).  In a significant survey of many of the studies done on this topic, Ferguson puts it thus:

Real world rape data clearly does not support the belief that pornography contributes to rape in a negative sense. Rather data in the USA, Europe, and Japan supports the catharsis hypothesis that pornography is inversely related to rape. However, as this data is correlational in nature it is not possible to make a causal attribution

(Ferguson, C. J. (2013). Pornography. In Adolescents, Crime, and the Media: A Critical Analysis, Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development (pp. 141–158). New York, NY: Springer New York.)

A study done specifically on the effects of pornography consumption on sex offenders ( Mancini, C., Reckdenwald, A., & Beauregard, E. (2012). Pornographic exposure over the life course and the severity of sexual offenses: Imitation and cathartic effects. Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(1), 21–30.) suggests that adolescent exposure to porn has some correlation to levels of victim harm, but that,

…although findings from the current study support the view that pornographic exposure (during adolescence) can lead to increased victim harm, little conclusive evidence exists to support the view that pornography use consistently impacts an offender’s propensity to become violent during a sexual attack. On the contrary, findings from this study also highlight null effects—that is, offenders who viewed pornography during adulthood did not inflict significantly more more violence during the crime. Not least, results indicate as well a potentially beneficial, cathartic effect—offenders who used pornography immediately prior to the offense were significantly less likely to physically injure their victims.

We now have some very useful data. Exposure to porn doesn’t cause people to rape, but there is a correlation where adolescent exposure is concerned. This gives us good guidance: we should not let our children watch porn. That’s good to know, since most responsible parents do their damnedest to limit their children’s exposure to it anyway. However, the study doesn’t say that adolescents who watch porn become sex offenders. It says that sex offenders who’ve been exposed to porn during adolescence are affected. This is still cor-relational, not causal. There are very probably a lot of reasons why people become sex offenders, and it would be foolish to heap all the blame on porn, or even a small portion of it. We know this because, over the centuries and all across the globe, people have been raping other people since time immemorial, and very few of them have been exposed to porn at any age.

Although data shows that rape rates are coming down (D’Amato, 2006), people have refuted the veracity of this data by arguing that it is based on reporting rape, and that perhaps levels of reporting have gone down. However, this is an argument that cuts both ways. It could very easily be argued that reporting has gone up, since being a victim of rape is no longer as socially stigmatized as it once was. In the absence of any evidence that there has been a dramatic fall in reports of rape in the past 25 years, I will take the good news.

Now, if we could just widen the effect of whatever it is we’re doing and exert some influence on places like the Democratic Republic of Congo – which at the moment seems low on democracy and sky high on incidences of horrific and violent rape – we’d be even better.

But… many won’t.  I’ve encountered a very shrill, insistent dismissal of research results in some of the ‘rape culture’ discussions I’ve come across. These voices are well-intentioned. They believe passionately in trying to keep women safe from harm. They are fighting for a world in which women have better lives. And it’s not as if they are making a fuss over nothing. Women are getting raped. There are many, many women the world over living awful, miserable lives. But how does doggedly clutching on to a belief that may not be true help these women? There are reasons why men rape and why women, proportionally, are treated so poorly in society. It’s important to find out the real causal factors and deal with those. But my suspicion is that porn is an easier enemy to take aim at than the real ones. The social and psychological mechanisms that allow one person to see another as a non-entity whose feelings don’t matter, whose life doesn’t count, whose success should be feared are probably very complex. They were around long before even photographic pornography began. We’ve been treating each other like shit for centuries.

On an equally emotive and contested topic, a large longitudinal study (11,000 participants) has just been published on the psycho-social effects of TV and video games on children. (Parkes, A., Sweeting, H., Wight, D., & Henderson, M. (2013). Do television and electronic games predict children’s psychosocial adjustment? Longitudinal research using the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Archives of Disease in Childhood.) It turns out that there is very little, only on TV watching, not game playing, and only when children watched 3+ hours of TV per day.

I’m not a huge fan of porn. I find it facile, artificial and annoying. Similarly, I find video games – especially the really violent ones – disturbing. Intuitively, I would have thought that porn might cause some men to be more likely to commit rape. Intuitively, I would have thought spending hours shooting shit up on a videogame would make children more violent. It would be gratifying to believe that my aesthetic judgement is borne out in statistics that show how evil these things are.

But it turns out my intuition is wrong, they’re not. And personally, I’m happy to hear this, because it means that we aren’t doing awful shit to ourselves consuming this stuff. What disturbs me is the number of people whose agenda so depends on these results being different that they simply discount them and ignore them and keep on repeating and disseminating blatantly false information.

And if you thought this had any political stripe, you’d be wrong. Because there are literally millions of people who refuse to acknowledge that global warming is causing a rise in sea levels, even when the scientific data is overwhelming. (Bulkeley, H. (2013). Cities and climate change. Routledge.)

I don’t think simple confirmation bias explains this. I think people become dogmatic about what they want to believe, what seems ‘right’ to them, and they weave it so deeply into their lives that to consider they might be mistaken or working without valid information threatens their sense of self and sometimes, even, the purpose of their lives.

I guess the purpose of this post is just to say that although there is nothing wrong with questioning the data that science provides, it is also equally important to question ourselves. Why do we want something to be true/not true? What is our emotional investment in the debate and is that getting in the way of accepting new information and reconsidering our earlier assumptions?

Because if we cannot do this, then what is the point in having a debate at all? What is the point in using data at all, if the aim is only to gratify our egos by being ‘right’.