Today I Learned a little bit about the psychology of victim-blaming. This is an issue that I’ve thought about quite deeply, especially given that as a social work major in my undergrad, I had the privilege of studying the topic holistically and on an academic level. In some ways this article was a review of the theoretical concepts that I was taught, but also a reminder that these concepts don’t just exist in theory. The culture of victim-blaming is deeply embedded in society and its institutions, and manifests itself throughout our personal and political discourse. While the realist in me doesn’t believe that we can completely expurgate the practice of victim-blaming from society, I do believe that it is an imperative for us to be conscious of it. To acknowledge one’s own implicit biases is the first step toward undoing them.

There were five main points that I believe were the strongest takeaways from this article:

1. Victim-blaming takes many forms, both subtle and overt, and most people have participated in it to a certain degree without realizing.
   

   “Any time someone defaults to questioning what a victim could have done differently to prevent a crime, he or she is participating, to some degree, in the culture of victim-blaming.

   […]

   Not everyone who engages in victim-blaming explicitly accuses someone of failing to prevent what happened to them. In fact, in its more understated forms, people may not always realize they’re doing it. Something as simple as hearing about a crime and thinking you would have been more careful had you been in the victim’s shoes is a mild form of victim-blaming.”
   

2. The practice of victim-blaming may have a lot to do with what’s known as the “just world hypothesis,” which is the idea that the world is an inherently just place, and that whatever happens to us is a consequence of our own doing. This hypothesis tends to be a more pervasive mindset among Americans, given that Americans are inculcated with the mythology of “American Dream” as a Utopian ideal that anyone can attain:
   

   “In other cultures, where sometimes because of war or poverty or maybe sometimes even just because of a strong thread of fatalism in the culture, it’s a lot better recognized that sometimes bad things happen to good people,” she says. “But as a general rule, Americans have a hard time with the idea that bad things happen to good people.”
   

3. According to research done by two psychology scholars, Laura Niemi and Liana Young, a person’s moral and ethical values may be indicative of the degree to which they engage in victim-blaming. The two sets of values they defined were “binding values,” which focus more on preservation of the collective, and “individualizing values,” which focus more on preventing harm to the individual:
   

   Their research, which involved 994 participants and four separate studies, led to several significant findings. First, they noted that moral values play a large role in determining the likelihood that someone will engage in victim-blaming behaviors, such as rating the victim as “contaminated” rather than “injured,” and thus stigmatizing that person more for having been the victim of a crime. Niemi and Young identified two primary sets of moral values: binding values and individualizing values. While everyone has a mix of the two, people who exhibit stronger binding values tend to favor protecting a group or the interests of a team as a whole, whereas people who exhibit stronger individualizing values are more focused on fairness and preventing harm to an individual.

   […]

   Unsurprisingly, participants who exhibited stronger binding values were more likely to assign responsibility for the crime to the victim or suggest actions the victim could have taken to change the outcome. People who exhibited stronger individualizing values tended to do the opposite.

4. Their research also indicated that the likelihood of blaming the victim may increase if the victim is presented as the subject of the sentence. There is a vast difference between saying “Mike was abusive to Lisa” and “Lisa was abused by Mike.” In the former, the perpetrator is the actor targeting the victim, making it clear who is responsible, whereas in the latter, the victim is targeted upon, leaving it open to the question of why. To me, this may be the most practical lesson to take away from the article, as it may very well affect how our listeners perceive us when we share stories involving a perpetrator and a victim:
   

   Niemi and Young manipulated the sentence structure in the vignettes, changing who was the subject of the majority of sentences, the victim or the perpetrator. Some groups were given vignettes with the victim in the subject position (e.g. “Lisa was approached by Dan”) and others were given vignettes with the perpetrator in the subject position (e.g. “Dan approached Lisa”).

   When the perpetrator was the subject of the sentence, participants’ “ratings of victim blame and victim responsibility went down significantly,” Niemi says. “And when we asked them explicitly how could this outcome have been different and then we just gave them an empty text box and they could fill in whatever they wanted, their actual references to victim’s actions—things like, ‘Oh, she could have called a cab’—they decreased. So they actually had a harder time coming up with things that victims could have done and were focusing less on the victim’s behavior in general. That suggests that how we present these cases in text can change how people think about victims.”
   

5. The misguided premise that perpetrators must be abnormal or uniquely eccentric individuals makes it difficult to recognize their normalcy, and that they are everyday people just like us. Good people, even people we love, can do wrong, and it is important to refocus our cognitive framework to accept this is a reality, because it will bring us closer to undoing our own biases about how we perceive perpetrators and victims:
   

   Niemi explains that it can be hard, especially for the loved ones of perpetrators, to reconcile the fact that someone they know so well and see as such a good person could commit a crime that they see as monstrous. In some cases, this might lead to over-empathizing with perpetrators and focusing on their other achievements or attributes, as with coverage of the Stanford rape case, in which Brock Turner was sometimes described as star swimmer instead of as an accused rapist. This is another kind of defense mechanism, one that leads those close to perpetrators to either deny or diminish their crime in order to avoid dealing with the difficult cognitive process of accepting that they were capable of such a thing.

   No matter what we want to believe, the world is not a just place. And it takes some difficult cognitive work to accept both that bad things sometimes happen to good people, and that seemingly normal people sometimes do bad things.

Today I Learned how to respond virtuously upon being made aware of displeasing words that someone may have said about me, thanks to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig (who, unbeknownst to me also ran for president at one point, but that’s a different topic).

In recent weeks, WikiLeaks has been releasing an avalanche of Hillary Clinton’s private emails, including correspondence between her close aides. In one email thread, two political aides named John Podesta and Neera Tanden are expressing their contempt for Lessig, describing him with some unpleasant words, like “pompous” and “smug[ness].” Thanks to WikiLeaks, what was intended as a personal and private exchange between two high-profile individuals was now open to the public for scrutiny.

Now, given the disappointingly low standards of today’s public discourse and the tendency of an otherwise sane media to scrutinize and dramatize every peccadillo of public figures, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that this exchange would be the next new short-lived scandal to take over our headlines. Perhaps Lessig, who is a strong advocate for campaign finance reform, would use it as an opportunity to take a political jab at Clinton?

The news of this exchange eventually reached Lessig’s attention, and to the surprise of many, he responded in such a manner that was so extraordinarily composed and refreshingly professional that it deserved to be recognized as lesson for us all. Here’s a quote of what he said:

I’m a big believer in leaks for the public interest. That’s why I support Snowden, and why I believe the President should pardon him. But I can’t for the life of me see the public good in a leak like this — at least one that reveals no crime or violation of any important public policy.

We all deserve privacy. The burdens of public service are insane enough without the perpetual threat that every thought shared with a friend becomes Twitter fodder.

Neera has only ever served in the public (and public interest) sector. Her work has always and only been devoted to advancing her vision of the public good. It is not right that she should bear the burden of this sort of breach.

To me, not only was this response principled and virtuous, but it also showed a type of class rarely seen in public discourse.  Lessig showed us the importance of overlooking privately expressed personal remarks in favor of prioritizing a commitment to the greater public good, whilst affirming the rights of others to express those remarks, however unpleasant they may be. He begins his statement by proclaiming his support for leaks that benefit public interest, and follows it up by shunning the type of leaks (like this one) that bring no benefit for the public. He then affirms his universal support for the privacy rights of every individual, and reminds us that there is already much at stake for those working in public service for their every private statement to be scrutinized.

Finally, he concludes by doing contrary of what many of us would expect; instead of retaliating against Neera, or even just dismissing her, he praises her for her good work in public service and scorns the notion that she should be attacked for her privately expressed thoughts.

I am not a politician or a public figure, but this definitely led me to reflect upon similar such instances in my life — whether it was with family, friends, or coworkers — and how I responded. How did I respond when I I was made aware of disparaging comments made about me in private? What was my attitude towards the person who made those comments? What was my attitude towards the individual who made me aware it in the first place? I think the lessons imparted from Lessig’s response are definitely worth pondering over and serve as a great reminder for how to manage our everyday relationships with people and the public.

-Asad

(Note: Though technically it is the 15th, I am using 14th as the date because this happened to be a late, unpublished reflection on the night of the 14th).

—

Today I Learned about the subtle – but profound – distinction between “wrongfulness” and “harmfulness,” and I owe it to this piece in The New Yorker. The piece shows a clip of writer Malcolm Gladwell’s speech at The New Yorker Festival, where he shares a story about his childhood to elucidate this distinction: He and his brother sneaked into a neighbor’s cornfield and built a fort, which infuriated his father, not because of any harm that these actions caused the neighbor (he states that the harm was only about $1 in damage), but because it was the wrong thing to do regardless of the harm (or lack thereof).

Wrongfulness in itself, he argues, does not take into account whether actual harm (in the act of wronging) was done. Harmfulness, therefore, is distinct from wrongfulness. To declare something as wrong is to express a definitive ethical and/or moral disapproval about that action; however, to declare something as harmful is to say that it was more than just wrong, but that it also resulted in some form of damage. He says that today, all of our moral judgments (I would take it further to include legal judgments) are made by calculating harmfulness, not wrongfulness.

The original reason that he made this distinction was to share his views on the ongoing debates regarding the name of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He states that he is on the side of student activists who oppose the school being named after after an “unrepentant racist,” but that the premise upon which the students make their arguments, i.e., that the school’s name causes them harm, is simply not plausible. He suggests that a more effective strategy would be to merely state that it is wrong to name the school after Woodrow Wilson, rather than attempt to implicate harm.

I found this argument very intriguing because it goes to the root of a question that college campuses (and perhaps the general public) have been grappling with in recent years — the question of justice: How do we best measure it and practice it?

With a heightened awareness of this country’s troubling history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia, coupled with the democratization of people’s voices thanks (partly) to social media, we’ve been exposed to alternative perspectives from otherwise marginalized groups (women, ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, the LGBTQ community, etc.), thereby forcing us to reexamine issues that we’ve taken for granted. Wilson was a political pioneer in many ways, but he was also an avowed racist. How do we reconcile these two facts? How do we evaluate harm in its historical context in contrast to how we evaluate harm today? Is Gladwell right in his critique of the student activists at Princeton? I do not have the answers to these questions, but I think they are all worth exploring. I think that regardless of the tactical choices of the student activists, and irrespective of the ostensible implausibility of their premise regarding harm, that they deserve to be listened to.

Malcolm Gladwell’s writings have had an enormous impact on me. I’m currently reading his book ‘Outliers,’ which is the third installment of a tripartite series of books (the first two being The Tipping Point and Blink) which looks at how extraordinarily successful people (in various fields) reach their level of success, and how people who exhibit unique idiosyncrasies come to do so. He shows the reader how it has more to do with environment, timing, and circumstance than plain-old practice and hard work. I plan to write a review about it sometime in the future, so I’ll go into detail then. In the meantime, I am glad I was exposed to this particular article which taught me to reexamine the ways in which I view wrongfulness and harmfulness.

– Asad