 Our next speaker, Carol Tavris. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association. Her talk, which is a great title, who's lying, who's self-justifying origins of the he-said, she-said gap in sexual allegations. Carol Tavris. So, first of all, I have an important question. Does this bulletproof jacket make me look fat? I need to know that. I told a friend that I was the topic of this talk. And she said, well, you know, you may want to go with some protection. And I said, no, no, no, I am talking to an audience of skeptics and scientists, the kind of people who are open-minded and welcome evidence that we might be wrong. Sure, she said, and sure we do. So let me start with a question. How many of you know about Dillon Farrow's allegation last February that 21 years ago, when she was seven years old, Woody Allen took her to an attic and sexually molested her? I can't see your hands. Anybody want to? Okay, you know this story. Well, Allen, of course, denied the accusations, and he argued that Dillon was influenced by her mother's continuing and unabated rage at him. Now, most people at the time took a position that one of them was telling the truth and one of them was lying. It was hard not to do that. And as always the case with sensational charges of sexual abuse, people leap to conclusions. Of course he did it. Why would she say such a thing if he didn't do it? Oh, don't be absurd. He couldn't possibly have done it. Why would he molest a child in an attic when he was already having an affair with Sunni and it's coldly preposterous and so forth? So people take a position. They talk with their friends. They come up with what they think, you know, who's right, who's wrong. And that's natural. That's inevitable, but it is also the mechanism that impedes our ability once we have taken a position to think skeptically and scientifically about it. In my previous presentations at TAM, I've talked about cognitive dissonance, the powerful discomfort we feel when two attitudes conflict or when a belief that we are deeply committed to is challenged by disconfirming evidence. In that evidence, we can reduce dissonance in one of two ways. We can accept the evidence and say, thank you for explaining why my lifelong belief in psychic powers is wrong. I believe that Randy is still waiting for the letter that will say that to him. Or we can preserve our view of ourselves as being smart, competent, and wise for having held that belief and tell the person who's telling us that we're wrong where they can go with that evidence. Now it is a counterintuitive finding that it is the people with high self-esteem who have the most difficulty reducing dissonance when they are wrong. People with low self-esteem, of course, it's not dissonant to be told you're wrong, you've just done something stupid or held some foolish belief. I'm just a schlunky person, so of course I would hold a schlunky belief. That's perfectly consistent for me. But the more we pride ourselves on our intelligence and our competence, the stronger our commitment to an ideology or a philosophy of life, even philosophies of justice, equality, and skepticism, the harder it is to accept evidence that we might be wrong, that we made the wrong choice, that we took the wrong side in that allegation, or that we harmed another person. Given those alternatives, it's much easier to justify our beliefs rather than take a dart to our high self-esteem egos. So lately I have been thinking about the way dissonance operates in discussions of sexual allegations. Discussions of sexual allegations by tuperation, rage, invective, threats, and the most loathsome name calling is more like it. But the topic has forced me to confront my own dissonance. I recognize it in the rising feelings of distress that I feel when I'm talking about these issues with someone who disagrees with me. What is the matter with them? Don't they see that I have the answer? Who don't seem to get it, who don't seem to see it the way I do. I find myself getting defensive and testy even more when I hear that annoyed buzz of dissonance in their voice. I am hoping that in the next minutes as I speak to you, you may hear that you begin to feel some of that annoyed buzz of dissonance yourself. If you don't, I'm not doing my job. I feel that as skeptics it is our intellectual obligation to tackle big, complicated, emotionally charged issues as well as the easy ones we all agree on, such as demunking psychic powers or tarot cards or UFO sightings. When an emotionally compelling allegation, especially of rape or child abuse, hits the news, it is tempting for all of us to jump to conclusions that fit our prejudices, our beliefs, our personal experiences, and our politics. But this is precisely when we as skeptics should not be doing that. Skeptical and critical thinking are crucially important when people's lives are at stake, when reputations can be destroyed in a heartbeat by allegations on the internet, where self-righteousness is not the same thing as being right. In 2006, an African-American woman, a professional stripper, claimed that three members of the Duke La Crosse team had raped her. You may remember this story. Two weeks later, 88 members of the Duke faculty, without waiting for an investigation, took out an ad in the school newspaper supporting her allegation and condemning the racism and sexism that induced those athletes to feel entitled to rape her. Way to go Duke faculty in setting an example of the principle of innocent until proven guilty. And to be sure, the faculty had statistics on their side. One black woman who falsely accuses white athletes of rape is rare news of the man bites dog variety, whereas the far greater number of white or black athletes who feel entitled to rape or sexually coerce women is dog bites man. Yet when the men's alibis proved to be unimpeachable, when DNA testing and the accuser's own inconsistent accounts failed to support her claims, even when the district attorney was disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct, the Duke faculty did not publish an ad saying, we were wrong. Their silence is predictable once we understand the pyramid of self-justification. It works like this. As soon as we make a decision or take an action, and especially if it's an impulsive hasty decision, I want to believe Dylan, I want to believe Woody, the brain will see to it that we will justify and solidify that position by seeking only the information that confirms that belief and will help us minimize or ignore information that disconfirms that belief. Have we got a slide? No. Now do we have a slide? We do not have a slide. Blank. That's not the, ah, okay. All right, so here's how it works. You have two people at the top of a pyramid. I would say they're pretty much close together. I don't know who's right or who's wrong in this Woody, Alan, Dylan, Farrell case. I have really no opinion one way or the other. I don't know. So you start talking with friends and you do come up with an opinion. You decide, one side decides Dylan must be right, the other side decides Woody, Alan must be right. Now notice the minute they make a decision, which way to jump down that pyramid, their attitudes will now be, will now change to be consistent with that new evaluation. And they will begin moving further apart from each other. I believe Dylan, I believe Woody. Over time those attitudes will become further and further apart until anyone who disagrees with Dylan is rape-cultured and on the other hand, anybody who thinks Woody, Alan really did it, is just a crazy person. That is how our attitudes can morph from uncertainty or ambiguity into very rigid points of view. Everybody memorize this? Tattoo this on your leg. So now with this preference, let's talk about what we talk about when we talk about rape. Many places are all too clear and everybody would pretty much agree at the top of that pyramid. One way off the pyramid on certain cases. There are men who rape out of a desire to dominate, humiliate or punish their victims. Soldiers who rape captive women during war and then often kill them. Soldiers who rape military women to convey the message, you aren't wanted here. Men who rape other men in gangs or prisons. Men who rape women to keep them in their place as with the horrific gang rapes we've been hearing about in Egypt, Afghanistan and India. Some rapists including a significant percentage of the perpetrators on college campuses are predators, repeat offenders who use force, alcohol or ruffies. Few dispute that these acts of rape are contemptible and criminal. Though once I found myself arguing at a dinner party with a man who said oh please he said everybody gets all upset about rape. It has nothing to do with misogyny or power. It's just an extreme act of sex. At which point one of the women at the dinner party a quite shy, soft-spoken woman who had been listening to this argument said, and if I hit you on the head with a frying pan is that an act of cooking? That ended the debate. But 85% of all reports of rape in this country occur between people who know each other. And it's here in people's intimate lives where sexual encounters can be far more ambiguous. The intersection between consensual and non-consensual sex is usually not marked with flashing lights and traffic signals that say stop, yield, you know, go, stop, walk, pet, right? You don't get these signs. And this is the territory of he said, she said and the polarized interpretations that can send people tumbling down opposite sides of the pyramid. I just want to say with apologies to the gay men and lesbians in this audience, I'm going to be talking about the research with straight couples. So let us consider this recent story that was in the news of two first-year students at Occidental College, ages 17 and 18, who had sex while both were very drunk. According to official reports, the 17-year-old visited a classmate's dorm room, took off her shirt while dancing and made out with a guy. Then she left and texted him to see if he had a condom and returned. Her friends tried several times to take her to her room, but she kept texting him and going back. The next day, she said she couldn't remember what had happened, including whether or not they had had intercourse. A week later, encouraged by a faculty member of Occidental's sexual assault coalition, she filed a sexual misconduct complaint with university officials. The LA County District Attorney's Office declined to file charges, concluding that both parties were willing participants exercising bad judgment. Occidental agreed, noting that the young woman, quote, engaged in conduct and made statements that would indicate that she consented to sexual intercourse, but the college added she did not have the capacity to appreciate the nature and quality of the act because she was too drunk. As for the young man, the report added, he was too drunk to recognize that she was too drunk to consent. He was expelled. She wasn't. What? Is this a story of rape, of sexual misconduct, or of utter stupidity? Is this story extremely rare? Or is it all too common? Sandy Banks, a columnist for the LA Times, wrote this assessment. The problem occurs because of the combustible mix of sex and alcohol when two young people, both drunk and amorous, have sex that neither completely remembers, both belatedly regret, and each sees through a different lens than mourning after. In my day, we called that a lesson. You might cry privately, commiserate with friends, and then life goes on. Today, we call that a crime. Lives unravel, lawyers intervene, and years of therapy ensue. Making sexual stupidity a capital offense doesn't educate men or rescue women. It just turns naive and awkward college students into perpetrators and victims. Do you agree with her? Do you disagree with her? Well, I sure agree with her, but I have found myself recently in many discussions with young college feminists who are outraged at that argument. We are talking about perpetrators and victims, they tell me, and it's anti-feminist to call it anything else. If the guy is expelled and he feels outraged by an accusation he can't defend or outrun, too bad for him. She feels outraged by what he did to her, and she's entitled to be angry. Even if she can't remember exactly what it is that he did. That is not the feminism I signed up for. Now, our beliefs, thank you. Now, our beliefs about blame and responsibility are opinions. Science does not have much to say about them. Our politics, our age, our gender, and as I said, our own sexual experiences will influence them. But scientific research does have something to contribute to some of the assumptions that many people on both sides of the pyramid hold. And perhaps by understanding these, we can bring some light and not just heat to this issue. Many of you, I'm sure, have heard about the White House Task Force to protect students from sexual assault, which reported, research reported to the Department of Justice that 19.1% of college women have experienced rape or attempted rape. Remember this statistic? It was quickly rounded up to 20%, one in five women on college campuses have been subjected to rape or attempted rape. Well, that number, of course, went viral. A more recent report from the Center for Disease Control based on a nationwide phone survey conducted in 2010 reported that 9% of American women have been victims of completed forced penetration or attempted forced penetration in their lifetimes, and an additional 3% have been victims of alcohol or drug-facilitated penetration. But it was the campus study that made the news, although it was seven years old and conducted at only two American universities. That's the one that got everyone's attention, prompting time and everyone else to ask if there's a rape crisis on American campuses. What should skeptics make of these numbers? Well, at one level, it shouldn't matter. Rape is ugly, it's serious, whatever the numbers. But skeptics are entitled to ask questions without being accused of being rape-cultured. Are rates rising? What kinds of experiences are being included as rape? The numbers keep changing with the times, with the population being questioned, college students, homeless people, prisoners, women in the military, with the way questions are phrased with whether rates pertain to experiences during college years or over a woman's lifetime and with the methods used to get the numbers, phone, questionnaire, or interview. That said, we don't get to agree with a percentage or dispute it based on whether it fits our perceptions and politics. Thus, for people on one side of the pyramid, 20% feels like the right number. It supports their argument that misogyny and sexual violence in our hypersexualized society are on the rise. Look how commonly they say, women are described as hoes, bitches, and cunts. Slut-shaming has become so ubiquitous that it's now a term in women's studies. I didn't know that. I thought that was, all right, never mind. The culture today, they point out, encourages men to feel sexually entitled to take advantage of women who are inebriated or otherwise unable to consent. Look how casually young men post videos of themselves doing just that. In fact, on OKCupid, and I don't know this because I've been on OKCupid, I haven't had one to add, but a friend told me this, there is a question. Someone you like is drunkenly flirting with you. You know that with a sober mind, this person would never engage in casual sex, but now it seems they're willing. What do you do? The answers are A, take advantage of the situation, or B, absolutely nothing. What does it say about our culture that choice A is even a possibility? So that's one point of view. For people on the other side of the pyramid, 10% feels like a more accurate number, supporting their argument that claims of rape are exaggerated in a political climate that now supports any allegation a woman makes, including anonymous ones, and that encourages women to transform unpleasant or regretted sexual encounters into charges of harassment and assault. The culture today, they say, encourages women to avoid taking responsibility for their own part in sexual encounters. Today, a young man is accountable for his actions when he's drunk, but a young woman is not. If we warn men that it's unsafe to get drunk and hook up, why do we think it blames the victim? If we warn women that it's unsafe to get drunk and hook up, no one gets huffy if we warn women to protect their purses and wallets if they're visiting Prague, by the way, which is known for its pickpockets. You can go online and find ways to protect yourself from pickpockets in Prague. Go try saying that. Protect yourself from pickpockets in Prague 12 times. So have you taken sides on these two ways of understanding where the problem is and what the problem is? You're allowed to agree with both sides, by the way. A tolerance for holding dissonant attitudes is a sign of high intelligence. Nevertheless, people on both sides of the pyramid tend to make the same mistake that in any he said, she said situation, one of them is lying. In the Woody Allen case, one blogger put it succinctly, quote, Woody Allen cannot be presumed to be innocent of molesting a child unless she is presumed to be lying to us. If you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured, unquote. Another blogger wrote that only one side, the victims, could be the truth. Believe the survivors, she wrote, even if they don't remember everything, believe them, even if they remember almost nothing. Believe them, even if they don't want to share details or press charges or ever talk about it again. Believe them, even if their story sounds implausible to you. If you are skeptical in this view, you are aiding and abetting pedophiles and rapists. Skeptics rightly reject this reasoning when it applies to any of the excuses people give Randy when his experiments failed to support their belief. No one says I must believe dousers, even if their claims sound implausible to me and the evidence against dousing is incontrovertible. Isn't the whole point of skepticism to ask questions and not accept any claim unskeptically if the story sounds implausible? The discounting of evidence means that there are only two ways off the pyramid in allegations of sexual coercion and rape. She is either the innocent victim of a knowing rapist or she is the knowing false accuser of an innocent man. But decades of research on memory, testimony, and self-justification show that there is a third possibility. Each one honestly believes that he or she is telling the truth and one or both of them may be wrong. A lie is an intentional falsehood but a person doesn't have to be lying to be mistaken. One or both parties can be misremembering and confabulating commonplace memory errors as you will learn tomorrow from Elizabeth Loftus. One or both parties can be self-justifying unable to accept evidence of the harm or cruelty that he or she caused the other. The result can lead to what Deborah Davis, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada, calls honest false testimony about sexual consent. She with two colleagues have reviewed the enormous research literature documenting three pathways to honest but false testimony. The first is miscommunication. This is a tough one, so listen up. Just about everyone concurs that as soon as a woman says no, he has to stop, no matter how far along they are and no matter where his penis is at the moment, he's supposed to stop. The repeated message of anti-rape groups, what part of no don't you understand? It's a great slogan. My generation loved that slogan. We thought that was really clear. But to the dismay of feminists of all generations, studies are still finding three problems with that message that remain true today. One, no remains difficult for many women to say clearly and directly. Two, no remains difficult for many men to hear and accept. And three, both sexes often do not, in fact, understand no. It can mean no, but occasionally it means maybe or in a little while. It can mean I want to, but I don't want to appear too easy, because then you'll call me a slut and I'll have to go through all that slut-shaming thing. It can mean persuade me. In one study of high school students, although almost 100% of the males and females agreed that a man should stop his sexual advances as soon as the woman says no, nearly half of those same students of both sexes also believed that when a woman says no, she doesn't always mean it. Both sexes said they play the game of token resistance. A third to half of the females reported that they first respond to a sexual overture with an intentionally token no. In addition, as sexologists know from research and clinical experience, most straight couples, even long-term couples, communicate sexual intentions, including a wish not to have sex indirectly and ambiguously through hints, body language, eye contact, this wonderful term, testing the waters, and appropriately enough for a skeptics convention, mind reading, which is about as accurate as mind reading. People rarely say directly what they mean and they often don't mean what they say. They find it very difficult to say what they dislike. They don't wanna hurt the other person's feelings. They may think they want intercourse and then change their minds. They may think they don't want intercourse and then change their minds. When I was in college, a digression for a story, when I was in college, my much older brother decided it was his obligation as brother to offer me constructive medical, psychological advice for his younger sister. Our conversation went like this. Look, he said, keep in mind that when the guy comes to your place, or you go to his place, or you're in the car going to his place or your place, or for that matter, if you are in any enclosed space whatsoever, it means only one thing. He wants to put his penis in your vagina. What if we just wanna study for midterms? He wants to put his penis in your vagina. Oh, nonsense, Bill, I said, you're so old fashioned. You know, nowadays men and women were egalitarians and none of this stuff, we can be friends. It's not all about sex. You think everything is about sex. We just want a place where we can talk about Hegel. Sure, he said, after he's put his penis in your vagina. But what about Arturo, I said? My comp lit pal who writes me rapturous poems about the sexual purity of women. He wants to put his penis in your vagina, said Bill. Okay, so you get the point, right? It took a while, I will tell you, before I grudgingly got his message. It took a while. In the sense that I eventually came to understand the brilliance of that wonderful story of the man who seeks the secret of wisdom from the great guru and he says, oh, great guru, what is the secret of wisdom? And the guru says, good judgment. But oh, great guru, how do I get good judgment? Bad judgment. Right, so I had a whole lot of experiences with bad judgment and although I finally understood what my brother meant and how right he was, I didn't get his message because any man ever said to me, Carol, I'd like to put my penis in your vagina. Or for that matter, because I was able to say to him directly, just keep it in New Jersey for the moment, bud, okay? Or, actually, that would be nice, but only after you've read me some rapturous love poems. So instead, I made a lot of mistakes. As I learned to play what Deborah Davis calls the dance of ambiguity, which protects both parties and the relationship. By being vague and indirect, each party's ego is protected in case the other says no. She can say yes without having to explicitly admit it's what she wants. Either one can subtly reject the offer without rejecting the suitor. It's a terrific system, really, except for the fact that it gets both parties into so much trouble. As Davis says, there's a price for all of this ego protection. Each one can misinterpret the other's wishes. If one partner's desire to have sex isn't made clear, they can lose a great opportunity. If one's desire not to have sex isn't made clear, unwanted advances proceed unchecked. Indirection saves a lot of hurt feelings and it also causes them. She really thinks he should have known to stop and he really thinks she gave consent. To make matters muddier, studies find that many young women following gender rules that say they should be nice or self-protection rules that say they should not risk offending or angering the man try to convey no without saying no. They do so in nonverbal ways such as by stepping a few inches back or pretending not to notice the man's advances and by not agreeing but not resisting either. As one woman said, if I just freeze here, he'll know what I mean, maybe not. In a series of interviews of men and women ages 18 to 22, one researcher found that the most commonly reported signal to indicate consent used roughly equally by men and women was simply not resisting the sexual advances of the other person. Do you get what this means? The lack of resistance to sexual advances can mean I don't want to and I do want to. So the same action or nonaction has ambiguous and even contradictory meanings. You can see how men who are sexually aggressive or men who are simply sexually aroused would tend to resolve that ambiguity in a way, shall we say, that suits their interests by overinterpreting women's nonverbal actions. How they behave, what they wear, are they flirting, do they hug them, seeing everything as signs of the woman's interest. I remember an adorable study years ago of Latino, African-American and white kids basically asking them, what is a sexual signal? Is it a sexual signal? She's wearing tight jeans. If she runs her fingers through your hair, if she smiles or gives you a hug and so forth. And basically what they found was, to the guys, everything was a sexual signal. If she was wearing tight jeans, it was clearly she was trying to inflame my lust. But if she was wearing a potato sack, why else would she wear a potato sack? If she didn't want me to think about what's under it. The young women are saying things like, I'm wearing the tight jeans because they fit, I lost five pounds. And sometimes because they were flirting and really wanted to express sexual interest. Same activities to entirely different meanings. The fact that guys see everything as a sexual signal is actually known as the over perception bias. Sexual over perception tends to be more prominent among people who enjoy short term and casual hookups, regardless of their gender. They project their own desires for sex onto the other person. If I want you, you must want me. In Davis's analysis, the second pathway to honest false testimony is alcohol, which facilitates having sex, increases miscommunication about sex, and impairs memory about sex. For some women, alcohol is the solution to the sex decision. After all, if they're inebriated, they haven't said yes. And if they haven't explicitly said yes, no one can accuse them of being a slut. Men know this of course, and some play their part, encouraging the woman to drink more so that she will be more inclined to agree. But for both parties, alcohol significantly impairs the cognitive interpretation of the other person's behavior, sexual negotiations, and how they construe the event. As Davis reports, men who are drunk are less likely to interpret non-consent messages accurately, and women who are drunk convey less emphatic signs of refusal. The third pathway to honest false testimony is through the normal errors of memory. In any he-said, she-said debate, each side reports who said and who did what, right? How she felt, how he reacted, their intentions, their perceptions, blah, blah. But these reports, which after all happened the next day, the next week, the next month, sometimes the next year, are contaminated by all the factors that can contaminate any other memory. If the participants were not attending to certain details at the time because they were inebriated or distracted, they would not have encoded those details into long-term memory. As Davis puts it, memory tends to be for the gist of what happened rather than the exact details. So the victim may report such gist characterizations as it was clear I didn't want to, whereas the accused guy may report his own summary as she obviously wanted it or she didn't do anything to tell me to stop. Here's the key. Because memory is reconstructive in nature and susceptible to suggestion, someone in the faculty or your friends as you're telling the story, and because we distort or rewrite dissonant memories to conform to our views of ourselves, people can remember saying things that they only thought about or intended to say at the time. One of my most embarrassing experiences was going to a guy's room where you know what it was that he wanted to do. And it's embarrassing to me to this day because I see myself as the kind of competent woman who would have said, you rude person, I'm leaving you now, but I didn't. All right, nevermind, we go right, moving right ahead. Okay, so anyway, that's another story for Lee. As a result, this is important though. The woman might falsely remember saying things that she thought about, but didn't say to stop the situation because she sees herself as the kind of assertive person who would stand up for herself. The man might falsely remember doing things to verify the woman's consent that he did not do because he sees himself as a decent guy who would never rape a woman. She's not necessarily lying, she's misremembering. He's not necessarily lying, he's self-justifying. An understanding therefore of dissonance can help us also manage the universal temptation to believe a claim made by someone on our side whose story confirms our beliefs, our way of seeing the problem. And to minimize or dismiss or discredit claims made by someone on the other side whose story makes us uncomfortable. That Duke LaCrosse story made a whole lot of women's activists really uncomfortable. People who believe that children never lie about sex abuse will have a hard time hearing Beth Loftus's evidence about how children's memories like adult memories can be shaped and confabulated. People who believe that women never make false allegations of rape will have a hard time hearing Deborah Davis's evidence about how women like men can misremember, misperceive and fail to express their wishes clearly. People who believe that most men would never have sex with a woman without her consent will have a hard time hearing how the overperception bias and feeling entitled to take advantage of the situation can cause them to do just that. It would be nice to believe that regulations and rules and policy guidelines are the best route to reducing the incidence of rape on college campuses or elsewhere. The California State Senate in its infinite wisdom has just passed a bill that would require colleges to adopt a policy instructing students that each partner must provide quote, affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. Way to go California State Senate. How could any couple implement this policy? Which sexual activity? Some activities? All activities? When? Before? During? After? What about threesomes who can't agree? What if two of them agree and one doesn't? And what's conscious by the way? Anyone care to draw the line between a mild buzz, intoxication, an ecstasy high, inebriation and all other possible states of consciousness on the way to passing out? If the California State Senate wants to reduce the incidence of sexual coercion, I think it would be better off trying to find ways to increase empathy, kindness, fun, advanced courses in the art of seduction, an emphasis on reciprocal pleasure and the many benefits of turning the other cheek. Okay, I didn't get that one. All right, moving right along. Okay, while colleges, courts and politicians wrestle with solutions, we will all do well in any given case or allegation to play our part as skeptics, to maintain our skepticism, wait for evidence and avoid reflexively jumping off the pyramid. If we can do this, we will be in a better position to seek ways of achieving justice and safety for women and for men and for turning the dance of ambiguity into a dance of intimacy that is more pleasurable, more honest and more satisfying for each of us in our private lives. Thank you. Carol Tavris, Carol Tavris.