Cognitive contagion

Fascinating. From Discredited Sex Assault Research Infects U.S. Legal System by Linda LeFauve & Stuart Taylor Jr.

This is a story of how a theory without merit, derived from highly questionable statistics, imperils the most basic tenets of due process and risks turning every unproved accusation into a verdict of guilt.

The example discussed here began with a small study by an associate professor at a commuter college in Massachusetts. The 12-page paper describing the study barely created a stir when it was published in 2002. Within a few years, however, the paper’s principal author, David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts-Boston psychologist, began making dramatic statements that extrapolated far beyond the study’s conclusions. He created, virtually out of whole cloth, a theory that “undetected” serial rapists are responsible for 90 percent of assaults on college campuses, that they premeditate and plan their attacks, and that they are likely to have committed multiple acts of violence.

When speaking on campuses, to the military, and to law enforcement, Lisak started showing a highly disturbing video that he claimed was based on the transcript of an actual interview with a campus rapist to whom Lisak gave the name "Frank." The authenticity of the video has been seriously questioned, raising grave doubts about Lisak’s contention that it illustrates the typical campus perpetrator—in his view, an unrepentant sociopath who cannot be reached or educated.

A news search for mentions of Lisak finds only a single one prior to 2009, in which he revealingly opined in an urban policy magazine about the Duke lacrosse rape hoax. He was interviewed again by CBS News in November 2009 about non-stranger rapes. He increasingly became the draw at conferences on sexual assault and his calendar filled with campus presentations. The media began to fawn over him, whether due to the drama of the notion of campuses being stalked by serial rapists or to the failure of campus administrators, blinded by the appeal of an identifiable villain, to point out the disconnect between Lisak's portrait and their own observations. (A sociopath responsible for the majority of assaults can be removed from campus. The reality of college drinking and the still-developing adolescent brain, and the relationship of both to behavior fueled by poor judgment and peer pressure, provide no such easy fix.) By the end of 2010, Lisak’s status was on the rise. Within a few years, his was arguably the most high-profile name on the topic of sexual assault.

This plays to my interest in and concern about cognitive pollution, especially as it pollutes public policy and collective decision-making. I recall David Lisak's increasing celebrity as he peddled his ideologically driven twaddle. At some point, though, he seems to have fallen off my radar screen. Had you asked, I would have guessed that the debunking had finally caught up with him.

LeFauve and Taylor go on to document how Lask's notoriety did not undermine him. He merely shifted from widespread media celebrity to commercial peddler of sociological snake oil. Astonishingly, he has made inroads into areas where you would have expected intellectual rigor to have inoculated them from such cognitive contagion: legal, military, academia. Regrettably, Lisak was peddling what they want to buy, facts-be-damned.

We desperately need public debate of the facts rather than this mood affiliation with nonsense with conveys purity and virtue. Let's keep provocative ideas flowing, but also let's winnow the wheat from the chaff. Right now, our abandonment of reason in the face of emotionalism is storing up ugly times for us all.