Michael Palamountain | A risky situation

Stranger Than Fiction | Confronting sexual assault on campus

By Michael Palamountain 01/23/17 9:41pm

Year after year, stories reach the news about sexual assault on college campuses across the US. Yet, my response remains different than the narratives I see presented by the media. I’m shocked, but not surprised. I say this, not because I subscribe to a “boys-will-be-boys” ideology, but because I cannot help but consider the ways social forces play a role in creating this epidemic of sexual assault.

Whenever I see a fraternity or a sports team in the news, I begin to think about group polarization. Group polarization is a psychological phenomenon defined as the “tendency for a group to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members.” So, if individuals, who hold morally questionable views on their own, band together, it is likely that these views will become even more polarized.

This phenomenon was initially studied by MIT student James Stoner in 1961. He called the phenomenon “Risky Shift” because he noticed that the decisions of a group were riskier than those of lone individuals. This theory has been empirically demonstrated on multiple other occasions by social psychologists over the last 50 years.

One notable example is known commonly as the “Stanford Prison Experiment.” In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo created an experiment in which students at Stanford University were assigned to be prisoners or guards. The actions the “guards” ended up committing towards the “prisoners” were morally unconscionable and completely unexpected given that, only two days prior, most of the students considered themselves friends. Zimbardo’s take-away was to heed the “power of the situation” through grouping that enabled these malicious behaviors.

When I consider the significance of this phenomenon in relation to sexual assault on campuses, it becomes shockingly unsurprising. If you put a large group of young men in a house and fill them with alcohol, it makes sense that disgusting behaviors will start to show.

According to the theory behind group polarization, the decisions that groups choose to make will become increasingly risky and polarized towards the pre-existing beliefs held by a majority of the group. If separately, members were to consider disrespecting women even somewhat acceptable, then as a group they will likely be even more accepting of such a culture and the actions that it manifests.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Since we continue to see incidents of sexual assault occur on college campuses, it is becoming increasingly clear that this definition could be applied to administrations addressing the problem of sexual asault at their schools.

Part of the reason we continue to see misogynistic acts perpetrated by men in fraternities, as well as acts of cruel punishment commonly referred to as hazing in group organizations, is because of the social structures which bring together these individuals. If they consider these acts even remotely appropriate, they will continue to exist without any consideration of the effects of their unregulated existence.

It is not currently appropriate to expect or call for a full dissolution of fraternities or organizations of like-minded individuals. However, I think it is crucial that the dialogues we have in response to these incidents consider more of the social forces at play.

We should recognize that the situations people are placed in have a vast impact on their actions. Lest we allow these social forces to push us to depths we never considered imaginable as a society, we must be critical of the power the situations we put ourselves in have over us.

One possible solution to counteract the potential for negative social influence would be to surround oneself with people with dissenting views. Integrate this into the membership of organizations. Promote the idea of always having a devil’s advocate in some capacity.

Rather than disbanding fraternities and similar organizations, consider including a diverse range of perspectives when forming them. If all those perspectives are involved in decision-making processes and given the power to dissent, the potential for the social forces like group polarization to manifest negative outcomes can be mitigated.

We may not be able to completely extinguish the threat of sexual assault on college campuses. But if we begin to examine the institutions that affect the actions of the perpetrators, along with efforts such as teaching perpetrators never to act this way in the first place, we may be able to take another step in fully combating it.

MICHAEL PALAMOUNTAIN is a College senior from Philadelphia, studying psychology. His email address is mpal@sas.upenn.edu. “Stranger Than Fiction” usually appears every other Tuesday.