Society & Role Theory: Social Reality Distortion

“. . . . . to live in society means to exist under the domination of society’s logic. Very often men act by this logic without knowing it. . . . . . Roles carry with them both certain actions and the emotions and attitudes that belong to those actions. . . . . Each role has its inner discipline, what Catholic monastics would call its ‘formation’. . . . . It is impossible to exist with full awareness in the modern world without realizing that moral, political and philosophical are relative, that, in Pascal’s words, what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other. . . . . the sincere man is one who believes his own propaganda. . . . . The moral effort to lie deliberately is beyond most people. It is much easier to deceive one-self. . . . . The liar by definition knows that he is lying. The ideologist does not.” sociologist Peter Berger commenting on the power of society and a person’s social roles to shape or distort thinking, beliefs and reality (Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, 1963)

The liberal politics site Crooks & Liars posted a short video clip of a Fox News interview between Mike Wallace and vice president Mike Pence. The short exchange was about an incident that Bob Woodward wrote in his recently published book, Fear: Trump in the White House. In that September 2017 incident, president Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn sees a letter on Trump’s desk, reads it and takes it. If Trump had signed the short letter, it would have withdrawn the US from an existing free-trade deal with South Korea. Apparently, Cohn thought doing that would have harmed US interests.

Wallace asked Pence, “do you have any doubt that happened”? The response Pence gave can be fairly called either (1) a rock solid example of what professor Berger was talking about when he spoke of the power of society and social role to dictate reality, or (2) intentional deceit.

Pence replied “I have every doubt that that happened. I really do.” Wallace showed Pence a copy of the letter, and it was what Woodward’s book said it was, i.e., a withdrawal from the trade agreement. Wallace let Pence continue to defend the president. In essence, Pence’s response to being shown the letter was to completely ignore it while continuing to defend Trump, e.g., “this is a president who puts people around the table, around the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office that bring him all of the options. . . . .” In other words, Pence acted as if the letter did not exist and that Cohen did not do what the Woodward book said he did.

Is Pence a sincere man who believes his own propaganda? If one carefully looks at Pence, one can reasonably believe that he is being sincere. He is a blind Christian social conservative ideologue. At this point, one can reasonably believe that in this incident Pence was incapable of mustering the moral effort to lie, or more specifically, to deceive. Personal observation of Pense so far indicates the man is vacuous and in a powerful thrall to Trump. If that assessment is basically correct, then Pence probably did believe everything he was saying about what a great president Trump is. And, he also believed that whatever Cohn did with the letter was something other than what Woodward said about the incident.

That view of Pence living the role of a rigid, blind ideologue arguably is more likely true than the alternative intentional deceit explanation. If that analysis is correct, then one can begin to see why there are at least two incompatible visions of Trump. One is positive enough to support him, and the other is negative enough to disapprove.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

If professor Berger is right about society’s capacity to induce self-deceit as people live their roles in society, then one question asks which group is more self-deceived, Trump supporters or opponents. Each side will probably generally see the other as self-deceived. And, if Pence’s reaction to the evidence that Wallace showed him is typical, then facts do not seem to carry much weight for at least some supporters. Given that, how one can bridge the gulf in perceptions of reality between the two sides is not at all clear.

But, if nothing else, this is just another situation where two opposing points of view, or competing social roles, lead to incompatible realities. This is probably mostly why many (most?) Trump supporters cannot see the things that his opponents see, and vice versa.

B&B orig: 9/11/18

The Neuroscience of Social Media Addiction

Drug addiction involves brain changes that lead to intense craving for something such as alcohol and a loss of control over its use. Fighting addiction is hard or impossible for almost all addicts. Part of the biology usually involves release of a 'pleasure signal' called dopamine. Current research indicates that the brain feels pleasure the same way. A feeling of pleasure can come from a drug or alcohol, a monetary reward, sex, or a good meal. Feeling pleasure involves release dopamine, a neurotransmitter, in the a cluster of nerve cells underneath the cerebral cortex (the nucleus accumbens). Neuroscientists call this the brain’s pleasure center because dopamine release there is usually linked to feelings of pleasure.

A news article on the effects of social media indicate that dopamine release appears to be part of what makes social media addictive for at least some people. Companies that rely on user attention are becoming more sophisticated at getting it: “The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel ‘insecure’, ‘worthless’ and ‘need a confidence boost.’ Such granular information, Harris adds, is ‘a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person.’”

The article comments: “ One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.

Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.

‘The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,’ Eyal writes. ‘It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.’ None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all ‘just as their designers intended.’”

In another article, Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction, the moral issue is pinpointed: “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.

In the Industrial Age, Thomas Edison famously said, ‘I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent’. In the Internet Age, more and more companies live by the mantra ‘create an obsession, then exploit it’. Gaming companies talk openly about creating a ‘compulsion loop’, which works roughly as follows: the player plays the game; the player achieves the goal; the player is awarded new content; which causes the player to want to continue playing with the new content and re-enter the loop.

Many Internet companies are learning what the tobacco industry has long known -- addiction is good for business. There is little doubt that by applying current neuroscience techniques we will be able to create ever-more-compelling obsessions in the virtual world.”

What about politics?: To the extent that players in politics can take advantage of the tricks that social media companies use to play with our minds, there is no reason to think that they are not going full-bore to do the same with partisan politics. It is likely that Russia has deployed this to influence elections in America and other countries. Like other businesses, American politics doesn't generally operate with much or any regard for moral issues, so that is not a significant concern for major players.

But even more fundamentally and aside from social media, can rigid, unshakable belief in a political, economic or religious ideology by itself led to the same or similar biological responses? Is rigid ideology not just blinding and distorting, but also addicting? Maybe.

One study found a correlation between a gene involved in dopamine signalling and certain social circumstances. That study claimed to describe “a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.”

Another researcher wrote: “Engagement with electronically mediated information, such as participation with social media, often provides the illusion of democratic freedom. In actuality, social media, as it exists within a neoliberal context, provides what I refer to as dopamine democracy, which entails the appearance of democratic choice that is actually uncritical choice brought about through incentive salience.” Although that links electronic media to politics, it at least elevates dopamine responses to a central role in democratic politics. There is no reason this does not also apply to non-democratic politics to some non-trivial extent.

Another research group writes: “Twin and family studies suggest that political attitudes are partially determined by an individual's genotype. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) exon III repeat region that has been extensively studied in connection with human behaviour, is a plausible candidate to contribute to individual differences in political attitudes.”

Again, that is not proof that ideology alone can be an addiction or compulsion. But, it is more evidence that brain biology is relevant to politics. That probably should not be a surprise since brain biology is, or appears to be, relevant to everything that humans experience. Correlations between dopamine responses and religious beliefs[1] have been described, and it is possible that religious extremism can sometimes be seen as a clinical addiction.[2] Based on a limited search of the scientific literature, it is not clear that political ideology alone has been come to be seen as an addiction or compulsion.

Footnotes:
1. “Second, these results may be relevant for behavioural genetics studies looking at the heritability of religiousness. Individual differences in cognitive flexibility, and specifically the WCST, RAT, and AUT Flexibility, have been linked to dopaminergic systems, and so perhaps future behavioural genetic and epigenetic investigations on the heritability of religiosity should investigate the role of genes implicated in dopamine functioning. In fact, an integrative predictive processing framework for understanding religion has been recently proposed, implicating the dopaminergic system in the maintenance of religious and paranormal beliefs.” (citations omitted)

2. “Today one of the main criteria for a diagnosis of drug addiction/alcoholism is: continuing to consume alcohol or another drug ‘despite unpleasant or adverse consequences’ (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). For the Christian martyrs the same criteria would apply. People of that time and place—Rome, 2nd century A.D.—could also say that this new Christianity was like a drug that endangered lives and that being a Christian had all the adverse financial, social, psychological and physical consequences that we now see in the lives of drug addicts and alcoholics. And yet Christians, of all ages, in spite of the consequences, continued to profess their faith… and continued to be eaten by lions.”

B&B orig: 9/14/18

The Biology of Malicious Envy and Schadenfreude in Politics

The NPR program Hidden Brain discusses the role of malicious envy and schadenfreude in society and politics. The 52 minute podcast can be downloaded here.

This discussion focuses on the last 16 minutes, which considers the core research and postulated impacts on politics.

Malicious envy in society (~ 35-41 minutes): Researcher Mina Cikara found that schadenfreude can arise in members of a group when failure or mishap happens to a member of an out-group, such as a member of an opposing group. She wrote:

“ People who identify strongly with their social groups frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening out-group members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. e. In neuroimaging studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of ventral striatum (VS), a brain region involved in reinforcement-learning. In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm.”

Her research team used brain scans (fMRI) and facial muscle smile responses (facial electromyography) to dissect the biology of schadenfreude pleasure that arises when a target group experiences mishaps or failure. Pleasure responses arise when out-groups or members of an out-group experience failure or mishap. The amount of schadenfreude pleasure a person experiences, e.g., high VS activity, is an accurate predictor of how likely the person is to engage in physical violence to eliminate the source of malicious envy.

Especially envied groups are ones that are seen as competitive and/or high status in society. These groups are more likely to elicit feelings of malicious envy and resulting behavior to eliminate the source.

Malicious envy in politics (~ 41-50 minutes): Researchers hypothesize that the relative economic success of Jews in Germany and Austria in the 1930s and 1940s when most of the the rest of society was struggling could have triggered malicious envy in some members of society. They suggest that emotion was effectively played on and amplified by Nazi propaganda. Engineered Jewish group misfortunes such as Kristallnacht generated schadenfreude among the populace. Over time, feelings of schadenfreude decreased social resistance to further assaults on local Jewish populations.

This hypothesis is consistent with brain scan and other data sources that indicate people can become desensitized to discrimination or even violence against an out-group. One needs to slowly build that resistance to accepting violence, but it can be done.

Sometimes people and groups that are to powerful to pull down or socially neutralize. In those situations, researchers have found a powerful, innate human desire to wind up in last place among all groups. Last place aversion, a topic of interest in various fields of research,[1] leads people to accept being anywhere in social status except at the bottom. That urge can lead people to actively support political policies that undermine their own interests so long as their own status does not sink into last place.

Apparently, humans have a powerful biological need to not be socially dead last as an individual or group member.

Malicious envy and schadenfreude playing out among groups can be socially destructive. In politics, these emotions play out as partisan politics. Researchers find that people who are the most partisan and the most strongly affiliated with a party tend to view political events through a lens of envy and schadenfreude. Evidence of this appears among both democrats and republicans. These emotions are postulated to be a gateway to violence and brutality.

The program points out that this line of research is fairly new and its full impact on politics and social and international violence is still unknown.[2] The program ends with this thought: “The first step to fighting envy is to admit we have it.”

Footnote:
1. For example, in organizational management: “We find that the rank response function is U-shaped. Subjects exhibit ‘first-place loving’ and ‘last-place loathing’, that is subjects increase their effort the most after being ranked first or last. We discuss implications of our findings for the optimal design of firms’ performance feedback policies, workplace organizational structures and incentives schemes.”

2. In her paper, Cikara comments: “This area of inquiry lies at the intersection of two questions: (i) why does acting on behalf of a group sometimes make individuals behave in ways that violates their personal beliefs and moral standards, and (ii) how do people overcome their aversion to doing harm in order to participate in collective violence?”

B&B orig: 9/17/18

An Essay: Non-Overlapping Magesteria

Stephen Jay Gould, 1941-2002

Magisterium: The teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church, especially as exercised by bishops or the Pope

Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist wrote an essay, Nonoverlapping Magesteria, in response to a statement by Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1996, to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The statement, entitled “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth”, defended both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine. Gould found the worldwide publicity the statement received puzzling because it did not appear to state anything new. As far as Gould knew, there was no conflict between church doctrine and evolution. The church valued science and there was no conflict with evidence about evolution as long as religious people believed that “at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature.”

That doctrine was fine with Gould, a Jewish agnostic, because “science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue.” To try to figure out what prompted such a widespread public response to the 1996 proclamation, Gould read two church pronouncements on evolution, Pope Pius's Humani Generis of 1950 and Pope John Paul's October 1996 proclamation. That made the basis for the uproar very clear. Once he understood the facts, Gould said the 1996 proclamation “could not be more welcome for evolutionists and friends of both science and religion.”



In Gould’s view, science and religion were nonoverlapping magesteria where knowledge and teaching from one area could not overlap into each other’s domain. He explained: “The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. . . . . This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man's land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult.”

Doctrine in 1950: Gould explained church doctrine in 1950 like this: “In short, Pius forcefully proclaimed that while evolution may be legitimate in principle, the theory, in fact, had not been proven and might well be entirely wrong. One gets the strong impression, moreover, that Pius was rooting pretty hard for a verdict of falsity. . . . . To summarize, Pius generally accepts the NOMA principle of nonoverlapping magisteria in permitting Catholics to entertain the hypothesis of evolution for the human body so long as they accept the divine infusion of the soul. But he then offers some (holy) fatherly advice to scientists about the status of evolution as a scientific concept: the idea is not yet proven, and you all need to be especially cautious because evolution raises many troubling issues right on the border of my magisterium.”

In 1950, evolution was ruffling the church magesterium’s skirts and that made the pope uneasy.

Doctrine in 1996: “John Paul—states and I can only say amen, and thanks for noticing—that the half century between Pius's surveying the ruins of World War II and his own pontificate heralding the dawn of a new millennium has witnessed such a growth of data, and such a refinement of theory, that evolution can no longer be doubted by people of good will . . . . . John Paul, nearly fifty years later, reaffirms the legitimacy of evolution under the NOMA principle—no news here—but then adds that additional data and theory have placed the factuality of evolution beyond reasonable doubt. Sincere Christians must now accept evolution not merely as a plausible possibility but also as an effectively proven fact. In other words, official Catholic opinion on evolution has moved from ‘say it ain't so, but we can deal with it if we have to’ (Pius's grudging view of 1950) to John Paul's entirely welcoming ‘it has been proven true; we always celebrate nature's factuality, and we look forward to interesting discussions of theological implications.’”

Hence, the Catholic church made a full declaration peace with evolution in 1996. Before then, it was just an uneasy truce of sorts.

Are the science and religious magesteria really nonoverlapping?: Gould argues that the Catholic magesterium or religion is where “the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives” should occur. That assertion seems to say that human cognitive or social science have little or nothing to say about either spirituality or ethics/morals. Is that true?

His essay is explicit that he sees no overlap, but instead he sees “two magisteria [that] bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border.”

When he wrote Nonoverlapping Magesteria, presumably in the mid or late 1990s, cognitive and social science had generated at least some data on the biology of spirituality and ethics/morals, although those areas of inquiry have advanced significantly since then. Presumably, Gould believed the data he was aware of at that time did not lead him to think that science could, or maybe ever would, generate knowledge and insights about spirituality and ethics or morals.

It is worth noting that Gould seems to reject Creationism and a literal reading of the bible, which would seem to violate his view that the separation of church and science is inviolate. He dismisses ‘scientific creationism’, which he sees an an oxymoron like this: “Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.”

From a 2018 point of view, cognitive and social science have generated a great deal of empirical data that are claimed to apply to spirituality and ethics or morals. S. Matthew Liao’s 2016 book, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality, summarizes the state of the art and it cites hundreds of references. That book discusses many experiments showing the morality of things such as life and death decisions and their sensitivity to both personal morals or mindset and social context. Brain scan data shows differential responses when one is in a ‘spiritual’ thinking mode compared to an ‘analytic’ thinking mode. When one of those thinking modes is in operation, it tends to suppress the other.

Could Gould have been mistaken that the magesteria do not overlap? Is it possible that the science magesterium can teach the religious magesterium, but not vice versa? One source states that, in regard to the nonoverlapping magesterium hyopthesis, “Gould put forward what he described as ‘a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to . . . the supposed conflict between science and religion.’ . . . . If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution.”

Maybe scientists can claim insight at least into the biology of moral truth, but not ‘higher insight’. That raises the question of what is the difference between ‘higher insight’ and insight from science? That would appear to be a question for the church magesterium or magesteria to decide.

B&B orig: 9/198/18

Ideological Cleansing: Republican RINO Hunts Continue Bagging Game

The New York Times published this editorial last June. It speaks for itself.

“When the obituary for the Republican Party is written, the year 1980 will be cited as the beginning of the end. Reaganism was in full flower, but the big tent was already folding. Republican leaders endorsed a constitutional ban on abortion at the convention that summer, ending the party’s historic commitment to women’s rights and personal freedom.

‘We are about to bury the rights of over 100 million American women under a heap of platitudes,’ protested Mary Dent Crisp, the co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Her colleagues assured her that the platform was nonbinding and that reproductive health services were not in danger.

But she was prescient. As pro-choice Republicans, we refuse to support a party that has rightly earned the labels anti-woman and anti-common sense. Our organization, the Republican Majority for Choice, the organization founded by Ms. Crisp in 1988, is shutting its doors. The big tent has collapsed for good.

As Republicans, we spent four decades working inside the party to produce effective policies helping women and families. Despite growing malice from an anti-choice faction, we kept our disagreements within the family. We redoubled our efforts to find common ground, rather than simply walk away.

But these successes [by the Republican Majority for Choice group] were dismissed by party leaders who became increasingly beholden to the social extremists who were winning primaries in our broken, gerrymandered electoral system.

Lifelong Republicans were booed out of state and local committee meetings for just raising abortion rights and family planning ideas. The nastiness escalated to personal attacks on men and women who had dedicated countless hours and dollars to the party.

We don’t have the space to outline President Trump’s transgressions, but it is important to understand that his rise is an inevitable result of the hostility to women within the Republican culture. Women’s reproductive freedom has shifted with the wind: Remember that Ronald Reagan once supported abortion rights, as did George H. W. Bush, Mitt Romney and Mr. Trump himself.

It is no wonder that women are voting with their feet. According to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center, 56 percent of women identify as or lean toward Democrats. The gap is even wider among college graduates and minority voters. The party should take note that 70 percent of millennial women have either registered as Democrats or lean Democratic. We will no longer be available to help the Republicans appeal to these changing demographic realities.

It has become taboo within the party to even say ‘pro-choice’. Most of our supporters gave up on the party as it moved to the extremes not just on abortion but also on other social and fiscal issues.

This Republican Party is no family of ours. And so we say goodbye.”

B&B orig: 9/20/18

Statistics on Women Alleging Sexual Assault

The issue of allegations of sexual assault by women is currently relevant and highly divisive. Being aware of statistics about it helps put the issue in a more rational context. (NOTE: The statistics here have been challenged as misleading.)

False assault allegations: The BBC recently reported that academic studies over the past 20 years, have led to the conclusion that about 2-10% of sexual assault accusations are false The BBC commented: “Two to 10% is too many, but it is not a big proportion of the total. Fake rape accusations get a lot of attention.” . The lawyer for Prof Ford’s lawyer says she believes Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her client, Christine Ford.

A 2010 research paper from a symposium on false sexual assault allegations commented: “One of the most controversial disputes affecting the discourse related to violence against women is the dispute about the frequency of false allegations of sexual assault. In an effort to add clarity to the discourse, published research on false allegations is critiqued, and the results of a new study described. All cases (N = 136) of sexual assault reported to a major Northeastern university over a 10-year period are analyzed to determine the percentage of false allegations. Of the 136 cases of sexual assault reported over the 10-year period, 8 (5.9%) are coded as false allegations. These results, taken in the context of an examination of previous research, indicate that the prevalence of false allegations is between 2% and 10%.

[The data this 2010 paper reports appears to be in error. The false allegation prevalence is about 17% based on the number of incidents that actually found enough evidence for prosecution or academic discipline.]

Rape is unique. No other violent crime is so fraught with controversy, so enmeshed in dispute and in the politics of gender and sexuality. For example, despite decades of careful social science research, prevalence rates are still frequently challenged on political grounds, and bold assertions are made in the absence of any data (e.g., MacDonald, 2008; Roiphe, 1993). And within the domain of rape, the most highly charged area of debate concerns the issue of false allegations. For centuries, it has been asserted and assumed that women ‘cry rape’, that a large proportion of rape allegations are maliciously concocted for purposes of revenge or other motives. Most famously, Sir Matthew Hale, a chief justice of the court of the King’s bench of England, expressed this view in a form that became the basis for special jury instructions that would be used late into the 20th century (Schafran, 1993). Hale (1847) wrote,

It is true rape is a most detestable crime, and therefore ought severely and impartially to be punished with death; but it must be remembered, that it is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.

The determination that a report of sexual assault is false can be made only if the evidence establishes that no crime was committed or attempted. This determination can be made only after a thorough investigation. This should not be confused with an investigation that fails to prove a sexual assault occurred. In that case the investigation would be labeled unsubstantiated. The determination that a report is false must be supported by evidence that the assault did not happen. (IACP, 2005b, pp. 12-13; italics in original)”

Senate republicans and president Trump refuse to allow the FBI to do a thorough investigation, Dr Ford’s sexual assault claim is not seen as false under the law. It is simply uninvestigated, not merely unsubstantiated. People who claim the allegation is false are making bold assertions in the absence of data, or even in the face of some contrary data.

The 2010 paper goers on to observe: “All of the methodological issues outlined previously underscore the necessity to scrutinize law enforcement classifications of sexual assault cases. However, such scrutiny requires access to confidential information, and few studies have either attempted or succeeded in obtaining such information. As a result, many published studies on false rape allegations have relied on the classifications made by law enforcement agencies. As such, they are unable to determine whether those classifications adhere to IACP and UCR guidelines and whether they are free of the biases that have frequently been identified in police investigations of rape cases. . . . . Given these serious limitations in the literature on false rape reports, there are actually very few studies that provide meaningful data on the frequency of false reports. Among the 20 sources listed in a recent review article (Rumney, 2006), only a handful provided clear definitions and used systematic methods to evaluate their data.”

Based on that, it seems that much more research on this topic is necessary. Given the importance and social divisiveness of the topic, this should be a high priority academic research topic.

Why women do not report sexual assaults, or delay reporting: The national Institute of Justice wrote in 2010: “The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that the majority of rapes and sexual assaults perpetrated against women and girls in the United States between 1992 and 2000 were not reported to the police. Only 36 percent of rapes, 34 percent of attempted rapes, and 26 percent of sexual assaults were reported. Reasons for not reporting assault vary among individuals, but one study identified the following as common:”

1. Self-blame or guilt.
2. Shame, embarrassment, or desire to keep the assault a private matter.
3. Humiliation or fear of the perpetrator or other individual's perceptions.
4. Fear of not being believed or of being accused of playing a role in the crime.
5. Lack of trust in the criminal justice system.

In the case of allegations against Kavanaugh, one can clearly see intense social pressure at play leading many Americans to conclude all allegations are at best confused and false or intentional lies and unwarranted character assassination at worst. Kavanaugh’s defenders point to his sterling character and the delay in reports against him as evidence he could not have ever sexually assaulted any woman. The limited available facts associated with the allegations contradict those assertions and/or are consistent with the allegations.

More recent data indicates the following: “Only 310 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to police. That means about 2 out of 3 go unreported.”

Individuals of college-age:
Female Students: 20% report
Female Non-Students: 32% report

The elderly:
28% report

Members of the military:
43% of female victims and 10% of male victims reported.

Reasons Victims Choose to Report—or Not:

Of the sexual violence crimes reported to police from 2005-2010, the survivor reporting gave the following reasons for doing so:
28% to protect the household or victim from further crimes by the offender
25% to stop the incident or prevent recurrence or escalation
21% to improve police surveillance or they believed they had a duty to do so
17% to catch/punish/prevent offender from reoffending
6% gave a different answer, or declined to cite one reason
3% did so to get help or recover loss

Of the sexual violence crimes not reported to police from 2005-2010, the victim gave the following reasons for not reporting:
20% feared retaliation
13% believed the police would not do anything to help
13% believed it was a personal matter
8% reported to a different official
8% believed it was not important enough to report
7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble
2% believed the police could not do anything to help
30% gave another reason, or did not cite one reason
Additional more recent statistics, e.g., perpetrators by race, are here: https://rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence

B&B orig: 9/26/18