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"Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie"
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In 2008 a group of Norwegian researchers ran an experiment to better understand how police investigators come to a judgment about the credibility of rape claims. Sixty-nine investigators were played video-recorded versions of a rape victim's statement, with the role of victim played by an actress. The wording of the statement in each version was exactly the same, but the actress delivered it with varying degrees of emotion. The investigators, who prided themselves on their objectivity, turned out to be heavily influenced in their judgments by assumptions about the victim's demeanour: she was judged most credible when crying or showing despair.
In reality, rape victims react in the immediate aftermath of the event in a variety of ways: some are visibly upset; others are subdued and undemonstrative. There is, unsurprisingly, no universal reaction to being raped. The detectives were relying on their instincts, and their instincts turned out to be constructed from inherited and unreliable notions about women in distress.
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Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, points out that there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way two human beings relate to one another in person. When you meet someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result we tend to judge others on what we see, and ourselves by what we feel. Pronin calls this "the illusion of asymmetric insight".
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"The hypothesis of an "actor–observer asymmetry" was first proposed by social psychologists, Jones and Nisbett in 1971. They hypothesized that “actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor” (Jones & Nisbett, 1971, p. 93)"
"“Do clever people care about the X Factor?” asks Matthew Taylor.
Yes - by definition. The X Factor final got 17 million viewers. Any clever person must be curious about such a significant social phenomenon. "
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But then, wasn’t this always so? The fact is that pop music - be the lies of John Lennon or the truth of Johnny Rotten - never did change the world, and was only ever a commodity surrounded by romantic illusion.
In all this, I suspect, lies the reason why so many affect to dislike the X Factor. They’re shooting the messenger. The X Factor draws attention to some truths we’d rather not know.
So when levies break and a city floods and no one with the authority to help comes to the aid of those trapped by the rising waters, we can't bear the idea that something just like that could happen just as suddenly to us. We decide that they, like Job, must have done something to bring this on themselves. We make up stories about violent looting mobs -- opportunists who chose to stay behind and whose fearsome ruthlessness prevents the sending of aid.
Victim blamers are often also telling a story about how they personally will never be raped, or in this case, arrested unfairly for doing something totally legal. To blame Gates for being stupid is to say, ”I would never get arrested for breaking into my house, because I have the sort of self-preservation instincts that this man is clearly missing.” People enjoy the illusion of having more mastery of the world than they do, because it makes them feel safe, but it also contributes to an atmosphere where victim-blaming can flourish, particularly in situations that are loaded with racial or gender politics.
The problem lies so deep in the fabric of our perception that it has earned an impressively general label: the Fundamental Attribution Error. Originally identified through the work of Ned Jones and Lee Ross in the 1960s, this quirk of human assumption appears robustly in study after study. In outline, it works like this: we assume that other people behave as they do because that is their nature; we ourselves, however, behave as we do because we have assessed the situation and logically chosen a course. We alone respond to changing circumstance; others simply are the way they are.
In not raising this question, he’s perpetuating one of the great hypocrisies of the right. On the one hand, they exaggerate the extent to which people respond to incentives - hence the claim that the 50p tax rate will do huge damage. But on the other hand, when the poor respond to incentives by turning to crime, they demand not that incentives be changed - except, of course, to cut welfare benefits - but moralise about “evil.”
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