The Availability Heuristic is a well-known cognitive bias that primes people to more readily believe something when they can easily come up with examples. Of the cognitive biases that I’ve encountered among rationalists in the skeptical and atheist communities, this bias is the one I’m most capable of coming up with examples. I am therefore primed to believe more readily that atheists and skeptics are not immune to this bias — myself included.

But there’s a little-discussed inverse to this bias, where examples are generally filtered out of one’s daily existence because they don’t impact on you directly, and thus, you are less ready to believe someone claiming to experience them. I call this the anti-availability heuristic, though I’m sure there are better names for it.

This anti-availability heuristic bias might take effect in you, the otherwise rational person, when you witness one of the thousands of microaggressions someone else experiences but they are “Somebody Else’s Problems” and you don’t internalize them; when the only ways they impact on you are when someone else is complaining about them, particularly when they’re happening to someone you don’t empathize with. Your bias might manifest when you claim to be skeptical equally of all claims and so you pretend to subject these claims to the same level of scrutiny that you subject every other claim to, and find those claims wanting specifically because you, personally, never experienced them. This, you will note, is a failure of empathy, and not actually skepticism. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about these events that you need to present videotaped evidence of a single event to prove that society in general should discourage certain sexist behaviours.

You might hear about these struggles and recognize that they exist in a detached, objective sort of way, but you might also be tempted to discount them as whining, to demand higher standards of evidence for, say, the cumulative effects of microaggressions over time, because to you, one incidence of such an “annoyance” might be deemed “zero bad”. In these ways, the inverse to the Availability Heuristic makes it more difficult for the privileged (on any axis) to recognize their privilege.

Privilege is a well-understood and well-evidenced bit of sociology, the scientific study of how humans interact with one another. It is as uncontroversial among sociologists as evolution is amongst biologists, and privilege theory is as powerful in its ability to explain how power aggregates on multiple axes and can cause real damage to the underprivileged. Privilege theory works to explain why people who are not necessarily bad can still have a complete failure of empathy when faced with experiences they don’t recognize as being as prevalent as they might be for someone else.

If you’ve never been in an area where you’re the racial minority (remember, privilege doesn’t mean “the white guy is evil” — depending on where you are, in a predominantly non-Caucasian area, you might be less privileged!), you might think we live in a post-racial society, simply because you’ve never experienced racism directly and you’re primed to think only of the visible minorities’ successes, even where your visible-minority neighbor might experience prejudices against her daily. You might not recognize a dogwhistle event as something actually coded to diminish someone else’s accomplishments, like when a black person is called “articulate” — what might be complementary to you, the white person, might carry the subtext to a black person that their eloquence is somehow out of the ordinary for their race.

If you’re straight, and you can marry the one you love without prejudice, you can walk down the street holding hands with that person without risking physical retribution, and you see the hard-won battles for gays’ rights to marry their own loved ones, you might be fooled into thinking that this means we live in a post-homophobic society because you’ve never encountered hatred or bullying for deviating from societal norms — even where your gay neighbor, also celebrating those hard-won victories for gay marriage, remembers every slur and every refusal of service and every time someone says something like “as long as they don’t shove their gayness in my face” and every time they couldn’t express their affection for their loved ones in public the same way that heterosexuals can.

And if you’re already primed to discount these events because you’ve not experienced them, you might demand higher standards of evidence for such daily occurrences than you might for less-common but equally personal claims, like that a person has a headache or stubbed their toe. Stub your toe three times a day, and see what kind of real damage your foot eventually incurs. Get a headache every single day, and see how long it takes for you to see a doctor, even if it turns out every one of those headaches was something best treated with ibuprofen and nothing more sinister.

This is one sort of privilege — the inability to see the microaggressions as cumulative because you’ve not experienced them enough or at all. Privilege is not overt hate, it is not a discounting of everything a privileged person might have to say about civil rights issues that do not directly affect them, and it is not something to be ashamed of in those who have it. The folks claiming that accusations of privilege is being used as an argument-ender are sometimes unaware how their arguments contribute to the ongoing damage they’re doing to the people experiencing the things they’ve discounted as “zero bad”. When someone tells you to “check your privilege”, they generally mean to examine whether or not your anti-availability-heuristic bias has prejudiced you against the idea that you might not have all the data necessary to draw the conclusions you’ve evidently drawn.

When you’re in the privileged class, you’re the norm, and society caters to you — even if you don’t have all the privilege because you’re, say, less than wealthy, even when you’re disproportionately catered to. When society creates art and entertainment that reflects your experiences, you barely notice, because it’s always for you, about you; you notice when it’s for someone else, and it might bother you, or just not interest you, and you can choose not to consume it. For the minorities who are underrepresented, or who are represented only as tokens, they hardly have a choice — though there’s a market there, nobody is serving it, so they have to take what entertainment they can.

Because you’ve got lots of examples of media treating you — people who look or act or sound like you — as a worthy topic of consideration, you may even feel it most poignantly when that representation isn’t exact. You can identify with the white male power fantasy video game characters because you’re a white male, but the black female picking up the same game won’t feel the same connection. You can read the superhero comic with men who are forceful and active participants and shapers of their worlds, and barely notice that every woman’s spine is curved like a centaur and every woman’s pose traced straight out of porn. Because all you can see is the wider shoulders and better-defined muscles of a character that is otherwise you, you might claim that the men’s bodies in such media are unattainable too, and therefore Sexism Is Over(tm).

The prevalence of you-shaped characters in media and politics and every aspect of your life, despite the actual background population splits, is a way of coaxing you, the privileged white male, into believing that (despite your under-privilege on one axis of wealth) your life is in fact great — and this further primes you to dismiss when others’ lives are not. It is a pat on the head by society, even where women or trans folk or visible racial minorities might get precious little of the same.

You don’t balk when a character in a rebooted franchise is recast from a minority and made to be a white character just like you, but you think that gender-flipping a member of an originally nearly all male cast or turning a supporting white character in a reboot like the Marvel Movie Universe, or Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm (who spends the movie ON FIRE) into a black person is an unacceptable breech of canon. You might even be okay with flipping one or two characters in an expansive universe “as long as they don’t take it too far” — not recognizing that even though Nick Fury was turned black, the rest of the cast was still lily-white, and nowhere near in proportion to the background population. You might not necessarily see the problem with turning the white bad guy dark-skinned, and the dark-skinned good guy white. But if, say, Tony Stark had been cast as a black man, the howls of protest would echo to this day. Khan Noonien Singh — a Sikh Indian played by notably dark-skinned Ricardo Montalban, who struggled with racism throughout his acting career and his life — was recast to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch, and that has the effect of making the pluralistic Roddenberry vision of the future more homogeneously white. This has had the effect of causing many wags on the intertubes to dub the new movie Star Trek: Into Whiteness. And it was all done to appeal to a “certain audience”, you see.

This is another bit of privilege, and it can manifest itself in nasty ways when you aren’t aware you’re doing it. (Have you noticed yet that privilege has that hallmark of being something you’re generally unaware of?) You notice little ways that the underprivileged try to even the score, and dismiss those little ways as being some sort of overreach — you attack the Women In Secularism conference for being all about women when the whole secular movement “should” be pluralistic by fiat because we’re all rationalists, and yet you are willing to dismiss every grievance a woman might legitimately have with our movement. You might fight back against “fascism” like harassment policies, and try to prove them unnecessary by repeatedly harassing people who advocate for them. Or you might simply back off and say “whoa, whoa, I don’t want to be involved with all that divisive feminist stuff, I just want to be rude to Ray Comfort and Sylvia Browne, leave me out of it”, even though that de facto benefits the people who would rather (overtly or otherwise) that this movement stay an old boys’ club. The fear of overreach or the temptation to sit on the fence about such things — to keep our powder dry and only fight the fights that are directly related to the core “mission” of the movement — actually undercuts this movement, because that same core mission would be very well served by increasing our numbers and diversifying the pool of ideas within it.

And then you have the people who see all this happening and decide that “both sides” have done damage — that the people banning harassers from their forums, or blocking them on Twitter, or quitting the movement altogether, are on equal footing with the people doing the harassing, creating new accounts to parody them, dehumanizing them at every turn, and simply refusing to engage with the ideas presented. These people who cry “a pox on both your houses” are the outsiders with little insight into a nuanced and multifaceted situation, whose availability heuristic does not provide any actual filter, and they consider the claims on one side that a person was “banned for no good reason” to be exactly on par with the other side’s unwillingness to consider slurs like “cobweb cunt” or a photoshop of someone as a blimp to be an actual attempt at dialogue.

Worse, there are people who fetishize dialogue itself. Who think that harassers and harassed should simply sit down and have beers with one another and learn that they aren’t really all that different. As though every dispute is between equals, and every viewpoint equally valid, and every grievance equal in weight and just a matter of perspective. If only Israel and Palestine could sit down and not eat pigs together! If only creationists and scientists could sit down and have coffee, they might be able to split the difference between the 6000 years old Earth and the 4.7 billion year old Earth! If only feminists and antifeminists could get together and figure out that neither side is so radical, and they could just split the difference between “women are overreaching and taking men’s rights away” and “kill then eat the fried testicles of all men!” — no, wait — hmm. That last one sounds suspiciously skewed. I think someone’s not accurately portraying the arguments that us feminists have actually been presenting here.

And yet, the harassment continues apace, even while the harassers are grudgingly forced to admit that, when made to actually read the arguments made by one of their targets in one of these fetishized “dialogues”, that there really isn’t that much difference between their ultimate goals or their thought processes on some fundamental philosophical points. They mostly just don’t agree with the specific words as far as I can tell, even when the ideas behind those words are entirely uncontroversial and well-evidenced. And to fight against those words, they harass, they cajole, they demean, they harangue, they dehumanize, and they even have to invent whole new fields of hyperbole when merely Godwinning the conversation is insufficient.

The privileged are not evil, of course. At least, not necessarily. They need to be challenged on that privilege, and made aware how that privilege amounts to a cognitive bias, and if they after a time prove themselves incapable of critical self-examination, ties sometimes need to be cut. So why don’t those people who deny privilege even exists ever want to let us cut those ties? Why the demands for our attention and time, the assaults on our privacy months after we’ve disengaged? Why do they think they deserve the privilege of that attention and time?

Why are these people, who follow you out of a bar and grab your shoulder yelling “DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME” after you’ve attempted to avoid an obvious bar fight, still being treated as honest interlocutors just trying to present differences of opinion? Would that availability heuristic bias extend to your attempt to ward off blows, would you be chastised for bringing your fists up to defend yourselves the same way that people are chastised as being “just as bad” as the harassers for daring to ban abusive people from their blogs?

I daresay the “pox on both houses” folks are suffering the most from this anti-availability-heuristic bias. Or, said another way, they are privileged in not recognizing the scope of the damage one side is experiencing. They should check that privilege. Once they do, and recognize the ways in which their fence-sitting disadvantages one side and advantages another, they might recognize that they’re actually doing damage to dialogue even when they fetishize it.

The post Privilege, Dialogue, Harassment, and the Anti-Availability Heuristic appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Last year, when the bugs crawling out from under the rock that had been overturned several months prior by Rebecca Watson continued unabated, and pretty much everyone was shocked that that many creepie-crawlies resided in our vaunted skeptical community, I wrote a series of posts on the whole ordeal called The Problem with Privilege. One of those posts dealt with the rampant and repeated demands for evidence regarding the incident that Rebecca had called creepy — as though recounting a story and saying “guys, don’t do that, it’s creepy” was some kind of misandrist clarion call, which must be rebuffed lest it result in fewer pick-up artists getting their dicks wet.

So these trolls, being part of the skeptical community (apparently), used our strengths against us by attacking the claim on its merits, since the claim “I was tipsy in an elevator at 4am and a guy followed me in and asked me to his room” doesn’t meet the high standards of evidence we use in the skeptical community when it comes to extraordinary claims. Never mind that it was a perfectly ordinary claim about someone’s experience with a slightly-offputting person that did not result in any physical harm. Specifically, I characterized this compulsion as hyper-skepticism, along the same lines as 9/11 truthers, birthers, and other conspiracy theorists.

We’re now seeing the exact same tactic being used again in the wake of a conflagration that Jen McCreight accidentally set off when she casually mentioned at the Women In Secularism CFI conference that female speakers occasionally warn one another of potentially creepy male speakers.

Since Stephanie called for real harassment policies to be implemented, and over half a dozen conventions started putting a very good template policy into place in response, real progress has been made on the issue. Progress involving building infrastructure that ameliorates the problem and provides harassment victims with real support. People have come forward with their specific complaints about harassment that had not been reported immediately, supporting the need for these infrastructures — and the hyper-skeptics replied in droves, “but where’s your evidence!?”

In the middle of all this, DJ Grothe, president of JREF, wondered aloud whither all the women were going, and why female TAM registration — while they had made such great inroads at TAM9, after implementing a harassment policy of their own — was way down. He wondered further whether all those women reporting harassment and working to try to get conventions to implement real support structures were, in actuality, driving people away from his vaunted convention.

When the conversation was not going his way, DJ made some very pointed remarks about specific women who’ve worked on the problem of harassment before; including some women who had taken him personally to task for attacking feminists as contra the skeptical movement, and defending some rather indefensible folks (including the Epstein/Krauss flap) in the past. The hyper-skeptics repeated their cries of “where’s the evidence!?”, aiming those cries at the women targeted.

They meant of course to ask where the evidence was that there was even any harassment that needed addressing, naturally. That was, after all, the point that DJ was trying to make — that point became especially obvious when he claimed that the complaints sounded like “locker room talk”, “rumors”, or discussion of “sexual exploits” that women thereafter regretted. But there’s a really good question that is raised when these folks ask that one in this context: where is the evidence that DJ Grothe used to make the leap that the problem this whole time has been those damned uppity feminists scaring everyone away?

Consider that Melody Hensley put together the apparently awesome Women In Secularism conference, and that those of us in the skeptical community who are not independently wealthy have to consider travel, expenses and vacation time. Single parents, predominantly but not always women, often also have to consider parenting issues — who to get to babysit the kids for the conference while they go get their skeptic on. This means there are large financial and personal hurdles to going to every conference if you’re not making money on the public speaking circuit or a member of an organization yourself, which limits the number or frequency of conventions you can attend. That has the knock-on effect that, when a new conference springs up with a high draw value for the demographic you’re looking to improve, you might see your own numbers erode. I am shocked that DJ did not consider this as a possibility before he decided to throw several women bloggers under that bus.

To the point the trolls are making, about where the evidence is that there’s even a harassment problem at all considering DJ’s “exit survey” from TAM showing no such thing, is a pretty good one. At least, if you only consider the data he’s providing, and do not question the data collection methods and the greater societal problem of harassment and underreporting. See, there’s a serious problem with that, which we can demonstrate (with scientific evidence, no less!), showing women simply putting up with harassment because it’s easier. We have some numbers specifically from the secular community, though there may be those same reporting biases at work there too. Regardless, the numbers show a significantly larger proportion of women than men experiencing harassment, and a very large amount of that being very serious and actionable harassment. So why isn’t it being reported?

Well, because we haven’t made this space safe yet, partly. Not “unsafe” as in you’ll almost certainly get assaulted, but “not safe” as in it is no better than background levels of harassment. The victims of harassment are not reporting it mostly for the same reasons that harassment in society as a whole is drastically underreported. And the reasons in just about every case are the same: power imbalance, fear of retaliation, belief that nothing will come of the report, embarassment.

Pteryxx proves that underreporting is a major issue in a comment xe left at Ophelia’s (with a minor correction in-line at hir request):

All righty… I did some research into the problems with using surveys to determine the prevalence of sexual harassment. Much of what I found was paywalled research. It’s not something that can be done with a general survey not designed for the purpose.

Basically, surveying sexual harassment is difficult *at all* because of pervasive underreporting. As with sexual assault and rape, only a small percentage of incidents are ever reported, for many reasons: the victims are too embarrassed or ashamed, they assume (often rightly) that nothing will be done to address the problem, or they’ve normalized the harm. Fear of retaliation or escalation, while also major factors, probably don’t have much effect on a truly anonymous survey.

This is from page 32 of a 2005, 72-page report on sexual harassment among US college students (it’s big but quite readable):

Click to access DTLFinal.pdf

Given the strong reactions to sexual harassment,
we would expect students to report incidents, yet
most do not. More than one-third (35 percent)
tell no one. Almost half (49 percent) confide in
a friend, but only about 7 percent report the
incident to a college employee.

Female students are more likely than male
students to tell someone about sexual harassment,
although they, too, have reservations about
discussing their experiences (see Figure 10).
A common theme among female students is a
feeling of nervousness or discomfort at reporting
something that might not be “a big enough deal.”
One young woman describes an incident that
made her feel “horrible” and “helpless,” but
she didn’t report it because “it didn’t seem to
be that important.”

Also, for a victim to report sexual harassment (or sexual assault, or rape), the person has to first admit that what happened to them WAS harassment, assault, or rape.

From a 2004 U of Iowa report:

Click to access 2004Sexual-Harassment-Survey-012306-ExecSummary.pdf

Because research has shown that many people are reluctant or unwilling to label even serious unwelcomed behavior (e.g., physical assault of a sexual nature) as sexual harassment, this survey separated questions about respondents’ experiences with unwelcomed sexual behaviors from the question of whether or not they felt they had experienced sexual harassment. The intent was to capture more accurately the occurrence of behaviors without the stigma of the label.

This survey asked about eight types of unwelcomed behavior which may constitute sexual harassment. A majority–52%–of respondents indicated that they had experienced one or more of the eight categories of unwelcomed behavior. Yet, when these responders were asked explicitly about whether they had experienced sexual harassment in the past 10 years at UI, most responders (62%) indicated that they had not been sexually harassed, whereas 24% (805 individuals)) indicated that they considered the unwelcome behavior to be sexual harassment. This represented 26% of female and 19% of male responders.

It’s not just that DJ Grothe’s survey fails to capture the incidence of sexual harassment. ANY form of self-reporting will fail to do so, as long as sexual aggression combined with victim-blaming is culturally normal, particularly when internalized so that the victims blame themselves. Sexual harassment and violence can only be addressed in a supportive environment – otherwise, the vast majority of harassed persons will simply remain silent.

If a culture exists at DJ Grothe’s organization that is not supportive of victims, as may be indicated by his recent remarks, then that culture could have DIRECTLY contributed to the observed low reporting rate. One instance of a witnessed, publicly reported incident has already been shown to have gone unrecorded within TAM’s harassment reporting system.

Thus, the low reporting rate at TAM may be largely a RESULT, not a cause, of DJ’s (publicly articulated) perception that sexual harassment is not a problem under his purview.

–

*note: I decided (with reservations) to stay with the term “victim” throughout to keep focus on the concept of victim-blaming. Not all recipients of sexual harassment consider themselves victimized by it.

Underreporting is a problem because spaces aren’t safe. Declaring a space safe by fiat won’t work, even if you’ve attempted to enforce the policy really well during certain incidents, and if the data you’ve collected says nobody “felt unwelcome” because you never aggregated in those incidents in the first place — because you’re going to have a major problem with that data when someone comes forward to contradict it. Especially if you thereafter try to gaslight that person and convince them that there was never any such event. The data collection methodology was simply insufficient here, and incidents apparently happened and were dealt with in realtime that were never documented thereafter and thus never showed up in DJ’s numbers.

We have a manifold problem with harassment in the skeptical community, one that won’t be solved by ignoring the fact that they’re plugging their ears every time someone actually proffers evidence to meet the trolls’ demands. The only path forward, as far as I can see, is to steamroll the trolls by moving forward with implementing strong anti-harassment policies at conventions, leaving these trolls to deal with the consequences despite their cries that we’re implementing some sort of Taliban-like puritanism (heh), and doing so in such a way that everyone’s well aware that there will be consequences for violating those policies, and that victims will be protected.

THAT is how you make a space safe. Certainly not by answering every disingenuous call for evidence, despite that being our natural compulsion as a community — we’re skeptics after all — and especially not when you can legitimately say “Objection! Asked and answered!” Preferably with a link back to this post, if you could be so kind.

Of course, you could also take the tactic favoured by Stephanie Zvan — ask the trolls exactly what sort of evidence it would take to convince them that the person they’re trolling experienced what they say they experienced. When they inevitably clam up, THEN point them here.

The post The further hyper-skepticism stalling our conversation appeared first on Lousy Canuck.