Booga, Booga, Booga

Sometimes, the scariest thing about Halloween is that it comes along just prior to Election Day. Oh, well. It's my punishment for being a consistent voter...

I See, Therefore I Know

I was first introduced to the concept of Correspondent Inference Theory in Max Abrahm's paper Why Terrorism Does Not Work. Why Terrorism Does Not Work stayed with me (I have two previous posts that reference it), and so when I saw that Professor Abrahms had written an article for The Atlantic, A Psychological Theory Explains the Mail Bomber Reaction I was all over it.

Correspondent Inference Theory says, simply, that people tend to presume the motives of an action from the observable consequences of that action. And this, according to Professor Abrahms, is why terrorism doesn't work. Because no matter what political goals a terrorist might have, when a bomb goes off and people die, the destruction and the body count are inferred to be the goal, and whatever geopolitical concessions a terrorist may have demanded are forgotten.

Having not really had any experience with the broader theory, my own thinking on the topic was confined to terrorism, until I was mulling over the rush to ascribe motive to recent mail-bombing attempts and the weekend's synagogue shooting. While doing this I happened to have a conversation with a co-worker who was complaining about Facebook's supposed censorship of Right-leaning voices and it struck me. The Professor could have titled his paper "Why Everything Does Not Work."

Given a) the lack of an intuited link between the visible consequences of an action and the actor's desired intent and b) a high level of emotional resonance of either the action or the consequences, people will tend to fall into the correspondent inference fallacy. (And it does strike me as a straightforward logical fallacy.) And the visible consequences don't have to be material to have an impact. Take Colin Kaepernick for instance. The number of people who claimed that they felt disrespected by Mr. Kaepernick's choice to kneel, rather than stand, during the National Anthem lead any number of people to infer, incorrectly, that this feeling of disrespect was Mr. Kaepernick's intent, when his stated goal was to draw attention to police violence against Black people in the United States. just like the terrorists that Professor Abrahms discussed in Why Terrorism Does Not Work, Mr. Kaepernick's intent was drowned by the perceived effects of his protest.

And just about every form of activism that people typically engage in has this problem. The Me Too movement is plagued by suspicions that it's actually a cover for a broad score-settling with men, rather than a call for accountability. Of course, this one of those things that once you see, you can find everywhere, and so it's important to be careful. The fact that Correspondent Inference Theory can lead people to a logical fallacy doesn't mean that every time someone guesses at someone's motive, they're wrong; it's possible to come to the correct answer even with incomplete information. And people can come to conclusions with more information than one thinks they have; amusingly, it's possible that a charge of falling into the correspondent inference fallacy can result from one falling into the correspondent inference fallacy oneself.

But understanding the phenomenon grants a different perspective on events, and the reactions to those events.

And it's made me ask myself a simple question, one that I've often overlooked: Why do I believe the people I believe? Why do I believe that terrorists have political goals, or that Conservative activists are genuinely spooked by social justice culture? Why do I avoid attributing motives in line with the observable consequences in those cases where they strike me as incorrect?

Part of it, I think, is that I have a bias towards complexity, and the Correspondent Inference Theory seems to lead people to more simplistic answers for questions of "Why?" than I find workable. Maybe it's that, given that I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, I'm not a "naïve psychologist," as Fritz Heider described many people, and my marginally greater degree of sophistication (at the expense of being naïve in other areas) serves me in this regard. In the end, I don't really know. But understanding Correspondent Inference Theory and its predictions of human behavior make a lot of peices appear to fall into place. And that is, in the end, a useful thing.

Danger Zone

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he believes the reaction to the allegations of sexual assault and other misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh makes it "a very scary time for young men in America."

"It is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of," Trump said. "This is a very, very -- this is a very difficult time. What's happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice."
Jeremy Diamond. "Trump says it's 'a very scary time for young men in America'" Tuesday, 2nd October, 2018.

More recently, "The USC chapter of Young Americans for Freedom set up a table on Trousdale Parkway Wednesday, displaying a poster that read, 'It’s a Dangerous Time for Men — Change My Mind'." So much for profiles in courage.

These comments have sparked heated discussions about what "dangerous" means or what should count as "scary." Or what is a person justifiably afraid of. But perhaps all of this misses the forest for the crooked, frightening shadows of trees.

President Trump and the University of Southern California's Young Americans for Freedom are basically saying that the current culture that demands greater accountability for sexual assault and misconduct makes it dangerous to be a young man (although the cynic in me questions the degree to which the President and USC YAF are referring to all men) and as a result, men have legitimate reason to be afraid for themselves.

Being a Black man (although no longer a young one) myself, I am acquainted with this concern. But I'm also well aware of the difficulties in quantifying this concern. Between 1980 and the mid 1990s, the rape conviction rate per 1,000 male population doubled, from about .1 to about .2. Now, I haven't been able to find any more recent numbers than that (although I'm sure they're out there and my Google-fu is simply weak), but let's suppose that in the intervening 20+ years, the renewed focus on sexual assault and misconduct has lead to that rate doubling again, to .4 men out of every 1,000. That's about 1 in every 2,500 men. Of course, this is an annual number, so it doesn't give us lifetime statistics. And it's both a snapshot in time and a wild-ass guess, so it's not particular useful to long-term estimates. But it's the number that I was able to come up with, so I'll work with it.

Wikipedia tells us that "In 1994, African Americans accounted for between 45 percent and 50 percent of crimes for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault." Of course, this is likely inaccurate, since I doubt that the clearance rate for crimes in 1994 was a) 100% and b) completely accurate. In other words, there's no way of knowing these percentages for actual crimes - you can only work with arrests and convictions, or other items that are statistically counted. But since convictions are basically what we're after, this will work with our back-of-the-text-file calculations. As Black people are about 13% of the population, a rate between 45 and 50% represents being over-represented by a factor of somewhat over three and a half. So our .4 per 1,000 rate jumps to about 1.46 per 1,000 or about 1 person in every 684. Given an overall exoneration rate of about 11.6% or a little under one in eight, and my chances of going to jail in any given year these days for a sexual assault that I didn't commit, is somewhere in the area of .17 out of one thousand. That becomes 1.7 out of one hundred, or about 1.7%. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that Black people are also over-represented in exonerations, but this is wonky and inaccurate enough as it is.

Now, the point of that exercise was to attempt to put an actual number on my chances of being incorrectly convicted of sexual assault. It's not a simple task, as you can see, but it comes up with a fairly low number, that's still likely on the high side. Of course, that 1.7% annual chance, compounded over time, becomes fairly substantial, but not likely enough to keep me up at night.

But what if it was? What if my chances of being convicted of a rape that I didn't commit were high enough that it felt like a clear and compelling risk? Well, there wouldn't be much that I, as an individual, could do about it. (Which is part of the reason there's no really point in losing sleep over it.) But if there was, the most effective path would likely be to understand what lead to that elevated chance and address it.

Dealing with the uncertainties of criminal prosecutions would be one way to approach the topic. Are police and prosecutors doing everything readily available to them to weed out potentially innocent parties when choosing who they are going to arrest and prosecute? Are they incentivized to do these things? If not, why not?

And that's where we get to a deeper part of the problem. President Trump and the University of Southern California's Young Americans for Freedom are attempting to push back against the current social drive to do more to hold people accountable for sexual misconduct by pointing to the fears of being wrongfully accused, rather than addressing the fears of being subjected to sexual misconduct. In other words, they're focused on their own fears of someone else's fear response. But if women were less afraid of being assaulted...

Of course, that's a tall order. Changing someone else's emotional response to the world around them is difficult. Once a woman has come to understand that any given man may be ready, willing and able to attack her sexually, it may be too late to substantially alter that perception. And, as so many other things, safety is a perception. I had it drilled into me from a young age that I was not safe from accusations of sexual misconduct. And even having an understanding of how one would go about calculating the numbers (even though I don't have accurate statistics at hand) doesn't completely remove the concern. And I will admit that my day-to-day behavior reflects those concerns.

And that's in part because no-one cares about them, which doesn't leave me room to ignore the causes of those concerns. People being afraid of me is bad for me, and so I have learned to take steps to mitigate those fears. But this isn't a new thing for me. USC's Young Americans for Freedom, on the other hand, may be coming face-to-face with this for the first time. And they're young people. Learning to understand why other people may be afraid of them, rather than afraid for them in the way they they're afraid for themselves takes time. And a willingness to take responsibility for people's fears of them, in the absence of personal fault for those fears take longer. (And the President isn't helping.)

Proven

I've been pondering that perhaps the idiom "jumping to conclusions," is somewhat misleading. I think that perhaps "bridging to confirmations" is a more accurate understanding of the phenomenon. Information that appears provide evidence of what people already think is true is treated as definitive evidence and then provides a ready path between reality and that particular truth.

It's been said that the best way to get someone to believe something is to start with something that they already want to believe, and perhaps the willingness with which people can latch on to perceived proofs demonstrates this. But, of course, there is vindication is being correct, and so maybe this is just to be expected.

The Meaning of “Consensus”

This article and its research were based on a false premise. There is no consensus about what “political correctness” means.

A solid research study would have asked Americans simple questions like, “Do you think all people should be treated the same?” or “Do you think all people deserve to be treated with respect?”
Kate Permut
Letters: “The Term ‘Political Correctness’ Primes People to Respond Negatively”

Of course, that presumes that there is a consensus about "treating all people the same" or "treating all people with respect" means. And I would submit that the bickering over PC culture is a direct result of the fact that there is no such consensus. And that leaves out any debates that terms like "should" and "deserve" inject into the picture.

Ms. Permut goes on to say that for her: "[Political correctness] means 'Treat everyone with the same respect'." But what does that mean, in practice? Treating everyone the same, treating everyone with respect and treating everyone as they wish to be treated are not necessarily the same things. And they can each mean different things to people on different sides of an interaction.

Reading through the letters, it was interesting how people often laid out simple, or even simplistic, definitions of “political correctness.” Such as: “just being polite,” or “fostering politeness and respect.”

This is, I think something we often see when people are dealing with something they understand to be self-evident. It's simple enough that no shading or nuance is needed. Of course all people shouldn't be treated the same. There are any number of reasons to treat two people differently under the same circumstances. But, for instance, not allowing a handicapped person to park closer to doors is not what Ms. Permut had in mind when she wrote her statement. Likewise, what treating someone with respect means differs. I suspect that the respect given to someone who has just done a service and someone who has just committed a crime might be quite different from one another. And she likely expects people to understand that. But the problem with simply expecting people to assume things is that they don't know where their assumptions should begin and end.

Therefore, there is something incomplete in pointing out the lack of consensus around the term political correctness, but failing to understand the lack of consensus in other terms, especially those that we consider "simple." Expecting the boundaries of assumption to be bright enough that they don't need to be clearly drawn is a minefield.