@AustenNut, I also believe that in our cultural context, most men would try to intervene if they saw a sexual assault happening even if they thought sexual assault was an unfortunate fact of life.
I do think cultural context matters, which is what I was saying, probably without enough clarity, to @88jm19. Cultural context does not excuse bad acts and I would never assert that some who commits sexual assault is not a bad man or that they should not be convicted and punished.
My assertion is actually quite different. I think the construct of dividing the world into bad men and not bad men is too simplistic. Men who behave in a manner consistent with our idea of a good men in one context might not do so in another context.
We use the term bad man to describe a trait. Psychologists have shown that people have a bias towards attribute other people’s actions to their character/traits and not to the situation.
One of my favorite social psychology experiments was based on the parable of the Good Samaratin. The authors, Darley and Batson, chose as their subjects students at the Princeton Theological Seminary – people that we would guess would be trying to be good people or good men (this seminar was done in the early 70s in Princeton and I’m guessing that the subjects were all or predominantly male, though that is irrelevant to my broader point). The thought was to pick a population in which the subjects would be thought of as folks trying to do good in the world – good people or good men.
The task they were going to perform was to give a speech on the Parable of the Good Samaratin to a group of undergraduates. In this parable, a man who has been beaten by robbers and is lying on the side of the road was just passed by from a two holy individuals—while a non-holy Samaritan took the time to stop and help the man out. The idea (I assume) is that true holiness comes from taking the time to stop and care for the injured man.
So, the subjects prep for this talk and then are told that it is time to walk over to give the lecture. There were three experimental conditions. Group 1 was told they had plenty of time and were early. Group 2 was told they were on time, but needed to head over so as not to be late. Group 3 was told that they were late and needed to get over as quickly as possible. The route to the talk was a path about four feet in width.
So far so good. On the way, the experimenters had a man lying across the path they would have to take to go to the lecture moaning, sick and clearly in need of help. To avoid helping him, the subjects would have to step over the man.
While 60% of the Group 1 subjects (early) stopped to help the man, only 45% of the Group 2 subjects (on-time) stopped and most remarkably only 10% of Group 3 subjects (late) stopped to help. 90% of the late subjects (seminary students who were thinking about the Parable of the Good Samaratin) stepped directly over a fallen man on the road to deliver a lecture about the meaning of the Parable of the Good Samaratin.
The point is that those things we tend to think of as traits (like good man or bad man or for that matter good woman or bad woman) do not predict behaviors on their own and the social situation or societal context often has more explanatory power. So, unless one has a very politically incorrect view that men raised in Pakistan or India (we could find other countries to fill in here) are more likely to be fundamentally (genetically) evil than men in the US, this would imply that the same men, if raised in Pakistan or India, would be more likely to commit sexual assault than had they been raised in the US. It is social and cultural context that reins in bad behavior.
The culture that Hitler helped establish in Germany enabled people one might otherwise have labeled as good to to turn Jews in or to kill them. People who get all of their information from very restricted channels may feel it is normal not to vaccinate their kids for measles or polio.
Part of what was so interesting Laurie Killingbeck’s article was the very subtle ways that she interpreted behavior in our cultural context and chose actions that worked in that context to deescalate.
If all works well, the virality of the bear v. man meme might reinforce our cultural norms that sexual assault is unacceptable behavior. [I suppose it could backfire as well].
