The NY Times has an interesting article applying social psychology to the present election, the first between a woman and man as President of the Unites States of America.
It illustrates the strength of a bias we have to attribute emotional causes to women’s actions, but more situational causes to men’s. It is sort of a “gendered fundamental attribution error.”
The author’s research has shown this basic effect, and it may be at work when we perceive Hillary Clinton being serious as more “angry” but Donald Trump as more “forceful.” It also may be part of people’s attributions of her as more untrustworthy.
This is a classic example of a psychological phenomenon that my lab has studied: how people perceive emotion differently in men’s and women’s faces. It’s something for Americans to consider as they watch the first debate between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump on Monday.
Later in Abnormal Psychology we will be studying Sexual Disorders. One such disorder is generally known as paraphilias, disorders that are characterized by the preference for atypical sexual practices, but most importantly practices or desires that the person is distressed by or that cause harm to another or involve unwilling partners or those who cannot give consent. One such paraphilia is pedophilic disorder. There’s an interesting article in IFL Science on pedophiles that covers the behaviors, causes, and implications.
One of the points made in the article is that 90% of sexual abuse of minors is by someone known to the victim. This statistic made me think of the current moral panic over transgender individuals using the bathroom of their gender identity. A main argument made by the Texas attorney general is that some pedophile might switch gender identity for a day to gain access to children in bathrooms. Specifically, he claimed non-discrimination would set up a situation that would allow “men to have open access to girls in bathrooms.”
Unfortunately his argument is specious, since it involves public schools, which already have policies in place to prevent people from entering the grounds that do not have legitimate business there. So, a pedophile would not be able to walk off the street and into a girls bathroom without breaking the law.
While I can appreciate the horror that any parent will feel thinking that their child could possibly be abused by a stranger in a bathroom, I believe the resources of the state of Texas and the other states joining the lawsuit would be better spent on identifying children at risk for actual abuse in their own homes or by someone they know, and preventing that abuse, or funding treatment, rather than to propose a lawsuit framed by worry about a hypothetical abuse that is statistically much much less likely.
Furthermore, the health and productivity cost to transgender people caused by discrimination is real, not hypothetical. Rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and substance use are much higher (also see this abstract) in transgender people, compared to non-transgender individuals, and it is exacerbated discrimination, and the identity conflict that discrimination sets up.
Why would we want to create policies and laws that limit the potential of anyone to live a full, happy life, and that might contribute to their depression, substance use, and suicide? Oh right, it’s an election year.
Having worked with police forces in Australia and the United Kingdom identifying those who sexually prey on children, people are always asking me how you can tell a paedophile from everyone else. Well, I can tell you one thing – they don’t have horns and tails. They look and act like you and me. Except for one key difference: they’re sexually attracted to children. What Is A Paedophile?
Watching TED’s podcast on my Apple TV, I saw one of the most rushed talks I’ve ever seen Phil Zimbardo give. A talk about how men are experiencing social change that impairs intimacy development, entitled “The Demise of Guys?” The premise is that there is an arousal addiction impelled by excessive internet, videogame, and pornography use. See what you think:
courtesy flickr user JAS_photo, used under Creative Commons license
There have been several recent examples of powerful people engaging in infidelity. Consider some recent political examples: Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenneger, John Edwards. There are examples from business, but they are less well known. I often hear people ask, “why would such a powerful and successful person do those things?”
Well, it seems that the answer is in the question. Power is directly associated with infidelity. A recent study to be published in Psychological Science helps answer the question of what the relationship is between power and infidelity, and how that relationship might be explained by confidence, risk, and emotional distance.
Power, measured as position within an organizational hierarchy, had a direct effect on both future intentions toward infidelity and past infidelity behaviors. But in both cases, that relationship was fully explained by the person’s confidence in their ability to attract a romantic partner. In the case of intentions, the effect of power was also explained by the distance the person feels from their current relationship partner, but the relationship was weak compared to confidence.
Another question I also hear is “what is it about these powerful men?” Well, there is no statistical difference between men and women in the analysis. As the authors wrote: “Among women who had an independent source of income (as all our female respondents did, because they were working professionals), power had a positive relationship with infidelity, and this relationship was comparable to that found among men.” It appears that we hear about men more because men are simply a much larger proportion of people in powerful positions. As that changes, expect to see more women in such situations.
A common assumption in people’s impressions of these kinds of infidelities is that the person is dispositionally flawed – morally or just having bad judgment. This is an instance of the fundamental attribution error, whereby we attribute people’s behavior more to their personality than the situation. But an interesting implication of this finding is that it is not the person (or gender), but the ways in which the situation—specifically power—has an effect on the person’s confidence that they would be attractive to a romantic partner, which in turn has an effect on infidelity.
An interesting extension to the present research would be to manipulate power to see if it would have a similar effect. That is, place randomly selected individuals either in a powerful position in a group or less powerful position and see if that might affect future intentions to engage in infidelity. I suspect this is something that develops over time, and may not be manipulated in the short term involved in laboratory studies, but it might.
Research Article:
Joris Lammers, Janka I. Stoker, Jennifer Jordan, Monique Pollmann, and Diederik A. Stapel
Power Increases Infidelity Among Men and Women Psychological Science July 2011 , first published on July 19, 2011
doi: 10.1177/0956797611416252
NOTE: this article was cleared of any academic fraud perpetrated by Diederik Stapel.
