Cinnabar's Den

TW: Rape culture | Psychologists from Middlesex University and the University of Surrey found that when presented with descriptions of women taken from lads’ mags, and comments about women made by convicted rapists, most people who took part in the study could not distinguish the source of the quotes.

Preface: Not really surprised by these findings. Totally willing to buy that this is true.

Question: Someone needs to explain to me (and perhaps this is elaborated on or explained in the article due to appear) some of the logic and reasoning for some of this study. In the video, the guy says that, in one study (or part of a study?), researchers took quotes about women from a. convicted rapists and b. lad’s mags* and then swapped attributions around. He then says that researchers asked participants to indicate which quote they identified more with. He then says that the results were such that the majority if test subjects identified with what were actually quotes/statements from convicted rapists.

Given this same test, and asked to choose, I would choose what I thought were lad mag attributions as well; who’s going to say “nah, this rapist sounds pretty on point.” Am I missing something here? I’m not sure what this proves other than these researchers are tricksters.

*”Lad mags” is a really stupid phrase and a pox upon whoever created it.

The last paragraph of the piece is kind of muddled, but I think the video clarifies a bit. The researchers’ aim in mixing up the attributions or giving no attribution at all was just to show that the subjects themselves could not perceive any qualitative difference in the quotes. Or even that they actually (presumably only when no attribution was given) thought the rapists’ quotes were more reasonable/less extreme. The researchers anticipated that of course the subjects would want to say they identified with the quotes that really came from magazines, and adjust their answers accordingly; they found that the subjects could not consistently do that, because they couldn’t tell which were which. Instead the answers were based on the attribution, if one was given, whether it was correct or not; and when no attribution was given, the subjects answered ‘correctly’ (i.e., picking the ‘socially acceptable’ magazine quotes over the quotes of the rapists) only about the same percentage of the time as you would expect from chance. They had to guess.

Source: absolutefucker