23: Successful Disasters: Date Rape

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PROFESSOR: There's no new handout today. We're working off the old handout. If you don't have the old handout you'll probably survive without it. The last thing to say before I say something is that between this morning and this afternoon I changed the end of the lecture. I decided I had a new idea and we will discover whether it turns out to be a new idea when I hear it coming out of my mouth. But if it slightly confuses the handout I'm sorry, it's the product of actual thought. All right, it is my belief, somebody remind me if I'm wrong that we had gotten to the incidence part of this story about coercive sexual behavior and we had not gotten to the etyology part. Does that sound about right to people? Yep, OK. Let me see then. What I want to do is to talk about some risk factors then and rather like the eating disorders story, risk factors are risk factors. They're not by themselves causative. And again, most of this is coming off of survey data.

So for example, one of the things that turns out to be a risk factor for some sort of coercive relations taking place is who pays for dinner. And this is not because guys who pay for dinner are rapists, it's because some small fraction of folks who pay for dinner somehow think they paid for something else perhaps. It's not clear what the actual causality is, but if you go and take some giant body of data and you ask, what's correlated with something that looks like date rape as the end product? One of the correlated factors turns out to be things like, who pays? A similarly, not terribly powerful correlation is found with whose car it is or whose room it is or things like-- these are issues of control. That it's more likely that again, as sort of a weak correlative bit of data, his car is more dangerous than her car from that point. Does it mean that everybody with a car is a rapist? No of coure not, doesn't mean anything of the sort. But there's a correlation there. These are smallish effects. If you want a big effect go for alcohol.

If you read this literature-- this somewhat depressing literature-- but if you read this literature you find that at least a majority of cases reported seemed to involve consumption of alcohol. Generally, fairly large amounts of alcohol. In several of the studies it's anywhere between 50% and 75% of cases involve consumption of alcohol. This is alarming if it's taken along with the rise in binge drinking on college campuses. That's something that's risen over the last twenty years and if you assume that a big risk factor for coercive sexual relations is alcohol it's not going to be a good thing if there's a lot of binge drinking around. Some of this appears to be, in a sense, deliberate where some guys pressure some women to drink too much in the interests of promoting sexual activity of some variety. But mostly, this is a case of what Floyd Alexander-- is it Floyd or Lloyd? I can't remember. It says on the handout, right?

AUDIENCE: Floyd.

PROFESSOR: Floyd. Where'd he go? Franz. Well, it's neither Floyd nor Lloyd. No, Lloyd Alexander-- that's a lovely blend. Lloyd Alexander is an author of young adult fantasy novels, which some of you may have read. Franz Alexander is the American Freudian. So if you put Franz and Lloyd together apparently you get Floyd Alexander, who's nobody. But Franz Alexander, this early American Freudian, had the felicitous line that the superego is soluble in alcohol. We might be more inclined today to look at the neuroimaging data that says "Oh look, here's this chunk of the frontal lobe. It seems to monitor errors. Oh look, here's this chunk of the frontal lobe on alcohol. Wow, it's really suppressed." Alcohol has an inhibitory effect on the nervous system. It has a particularly strong inhibitory effect on the chunk of the brain that, to the best of our knowledge, is there for doing things like error monitoring. If your error monitoring device is off all sorts of stupid things happen. If you're error monitoring is off in the context of sexual activity all sorts of stupid sexual activity sorts of things happen. That looks to be the most likely path for the effects of alcohol. It's simply makes people do stupid things. Both the man and the woman. It's an equal opportunity stupidifier.

While it is an equal opportunity stupidifier, suppose that she subsequently thinks or-- well, let's suppose this ends up in court. She charges him with date rape in some fashion or other. If everybody's drunk, what's the chance that there's a conviction? Grr, That's about right. You don't end up getting a conviction typically if there's a lot of alcohol involved and if everybody's drunk, blame tends to migrate to the woman in these sorts of cases. I'm not arguing that that is the right thing or anything, it's just an interesting factoid about responsibility. It turns out, at least in legal settings, to be very difficult to get a conviction for any of this if everybody is apparently drunk. These days in a dubious sort of progress we can improve on alcohol with so called date rape drugs. I put the name of the date rape drug, I mean, one gets sort of labeled that on the handout. But there's a whole class of these out there.

The one on the handout in particular is part of a family of tranquilizers that are like Valium, basically. Their effects are to produce disinhibition, relaxation of voluntary muscles, and great amnesia. They produce an anterograde amnesia. Review time. Anterograde amnesia-- that's amnesia from after the point of the insult. So in this case, getting hit over the head is taking the drug so you have an amnesia for events subsequent to taking the drug. So you're disinhibited, stuff happens, and you don't remember. Here there are repeated reports of cases of drinks being spiked with drugs and things of that sort. So there is more of a sense that these may be being used in a deliberate sort of a sense. The alcohol by the way, potentially aids the effects of these sort of tranquilizers. So a mixture of alcohol and one of these drugs is a really potent way to end up doing things that you don't have any intention of doing and would not to do were all of your neurons functioning in a halfway reasonable fashion. Let's see. Other risk factors that I put on the handout.

What do you do with time a is a risk factor for time b it says on the handout. That just says what your nervous aunt used to say or something like that. If you're holding hands with somebody the next thing you know you're hugging them. And if you're hugging them the next thing you know-- so each progressive act increases the likelihood of the next act. Again, that's just the sort of thing that you're going to pull out of correlative data. The other biggie in risk factors is miscommunication. Did anybody talk to anybody in the process of this interaction? Just as you get in report after report you get reports of alcohol use, you also hear a recurring litany-- she said, he said sorts of reports. She thought she said this, he thought he heard that. So there's some variety of miscommunication there. This raises the issue of consent. That the notion is-- the foundational notion is that you want all sexual relations to be consenual in some fashion. Most people will sign onto that notion in a pretty straightforward kind of manner. But exactly what consent means is rather difficult to make concrete.

If you're in a laboratory situation consent is spectacularly concrete. You have to fill out forms. But nobody fills out forms in sexual relations. Every now and then you get some well- meaning-- Antioch College had a behavior code that boiled down to a consent form for interpersonal relations. But nobody really runs their life that way. Hi, I think our relationship has gotten to a certain point, would you please sign the following sixteen page form? It doesn't quite ring true. Though in fact, it might be a marvel-- most of these efforts sound a little like softcore porn for the academic class. You know, long, written out forms that describe in detail, who's going to do what to whose body? It might be a kind of an interesting exercise, but suffice it to say that communication in intimate relationships doesn't look like that. And the possibilities are ripe for miscommunication and when you ask in survey data about relationships that became coercive in some fashion, what you find out is that there often seems to be a core chunk of miscommunication. So this gives us some sort of an epidemiological look at the problem. It doesn't have any explanatory power in itself. It just says that look, there are these things that are risk factors. It's more likely that if you're drunk in the back of his car that something's going to happen.

How can we understand this from a more theoretical point of view? Well, that's why it says theories on the handout, I see. Again, one of the reasons we're talking about this is that gives me a lovely chance to go back and review the entire course. The theories run the usual run that you should be extremely familiar with at this point. Well, since we're in the chunk of course on abnormal psychology there are psychopathological theories that say that the guys who end up accused of date rape are sick. That they are mentally ill in some fashion. That is not a bad theory for what's known as blitz rape. For the stranger in the bushes kind of rape. Those guys, and again, it's overwhelmingly males who commit stranger-- well, blitz rape is the term for some stranger grabs a person and rapes them. Those guys, those rapists when they are studied don't look psychologically normal, typically, as a population. They look deviant. However, there's nothing in these date rape population that looks like that. The standard description in a court case, I think I mentioned is, oh, just a regular guy. Just the guy next door and that really seems to be the case. There's some evidence for instance, that they might drink more than the population as a whole, but that's not telling you very much. So if it's not an individual pathology there are a class of theories out there that suggest that it's a gender pathology. That it's a problem of guys in general. The name, at least that I most closely associate with this is, Thornhill or Thornhill and Thornhill since there appear to be two of them from the reference on the handout.

I think only one of them wrote the book, two of them wrote the article. There's an MIT Press book that made quite a bit of a stir in the media-- oh, must be five years ago now or so-- that addressed the argument, the evolutionary psych argument that rape is adaptive. Again, to explain is not to condone. This is not that Thornhill was busy saying it's adaptive, so it's good. They're saying that it's got an evolutionary, adaptive function to it and it doesn't take a genius to figure this out if you were following the earlier arguments. If a male's goal is well, let's go propagate our genes-- and because he doesn't get pregnant and she does there's this asymmetry. She wants somebody who's going to have commitment to the whole project. He just wants to impregnate women and get those genes into the next generation. Taken to the extreme, somebody who goes out and just forcibly goes and impregnates people has a chance of getting more of their genes into the next generation and maybe that's adaptive.

One can argue that there is no specific adaptation toward sexual violence, but that it is the combination of a general-- males are on average, more aggressive than females. There's lots of data for this. At the start of the women's movement there was a fairly strenuous effort to argue that the differences in aggression between males and females were all just driven by culture. That little boys were trained to be soldiers and little girls were trained-- they were playing with the dolls and the guys were playing with the guns and so in the 70s, 80s that thing you did if you were a parent of feminist sort of inclinations is you made sure that your little girl had guns and your little boy had dolls and the experience over the course of, I suppose, the generation or so now is that if you're a little boy you can make a gun out of Barbie too, if you hold her just right she looks like a submachine gun.

To recapitulate a large literature in a line or so there is plenty of evidence at this point that human males are bigger and more aggressive than human females. Not true across the entire animal kingdom. I don't think I've told you about the octopus. The greatest case of sexual asymmetry in the animal kingdom as far as I know is some seagoing octopus that I think was actually only discovered as a species within the last decade or so. But this is an octopus where the male is small enough that he could fit into her eye. So this is an asymmetrical species. It's not clear-- and his goal in life-- he's a little octopus harpoon. And his goal in life is to impregnate one of these gigantic [UNINTELLIGIBLE] octopuses swimming around. It's abundantly unclear that she knows what's happened at all, right? [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] Oh look, we've got babies or something. I don't know. Do octopus bear live young or not? I don't remember. Anyway, very dramatic asymmetry running the other direction. There are plenty of species where the female is the more aggressive species-- did I tell you about spiders? Yeah, I told you about spiders. Praying mantises are good too. Praying mantis sexual relations apparently involve her biting off his head, which apparently doesn't impair his functions as a mate at all. One of the great advantages of a distributed nervous system, the head is overrated in praying mantises apparently. Everything is out there, but in humans it's clear that males are more aggressive. Between being more aggressive and being inclined to have more sexual partners again, probably because of evolutionary forces. You could imagine that rather than having sexual aggression as a specific adaptation it ends up being sort of a byproduct of other facts that occur.

The notion that rape is sort of a male pathology, a gender wide pathology doesn't only show up in biological theories it also shows up in very sociological theories of sexual behavior. Notably, in feminist theories. One version of these would be the theory that-- this I'm borrowing from a book by [? Sandais ?] that rape is the means by which men are programmed for violence. A way to induct younger men into masculine roles. That it's somehow a training ground. She argues that in cultures where everybody sort of lives at harmony with nature and the mother child bond is sacred and things like that, that this doesn't happen. That rape happens in cultures where you need guys to go out and deal with the dangerous world. They gotta go out and do in the bears and the lions or something and that rape is in some sense, a training ground for that. It's an odd theory on two grounds actually, this one.

One reason is it's desperately unclear that there are any of these lovely pastoral societies out there. We used to think people like Margaret Mead had told us that down in the South Seas there were-- in Samoa-- there were people without sexual hang-ups, everybody got along marvelously and it was all lovely. The data don't look so good when you go back and look. Subsequently, she saw a little bit of what she wanted to see and if you go and look at-- when you go and look at these nice simple cultures-- you get these reports from time to time of hunter-gatherer cultures that live in harmony with nature and stuff like that. When you actually go look at it it turns out they murder and rape each other at exactly the sort of rates that we murder and rape each other. There is no Garden of Eden out there, at least not anymore where everybody's living in beautiful harmony.

Another problem with the theory that it's got a general role is that the culture as a whole, at least explicitly, says that rape is illegal and says that rape is bad. That makes it hard to argue that the entire male gender is in on some plan to use this as a training ground for going out and killing the bears or something of that sort. A much more interesting, it seems to me, feminist account of what's going on is that rape is a giant protection racket run by males. If you read feminist tracts on this I think they write as though there's some group of guys sitting around somehow deciding explicitly that this is the way things are. But the theory makes more sense if you think of it implicitly. Rather like if you think about it in terms of the cuckoo story. Remember cuckoos? Cuckoos are going and cheating and laying eggs in other bird's nests. But you can't have too many cuckoos. The argument runs-- because if you have too many cuckoos everybody dies, right? The argument runs in a similar kind of way in this argument.

You can't have all males being rapists. That just isn't a recipe for civilization. But if the society condones or spits up or creates a cadre of rapists then the rest of the guys can take on the role of protecting women from those bad guys. The argument is that rape is condoned in the society, perhaps implicitly rather than explicitly. I've got a useful, normal curve here. You know, we'll have a few guys out here who are bad and we, the rest of us, us good guys can now protect women from those bad guys. Well, what's that going to mean? Well, it might mean gee, you shouldn't go out much, for instance. You know, you should stay at home. Or you should not be seen by men, you should not wear this, you should not do this. In any case, feminist argument argues that it can be a tool of control over women even if you only have a very small minority of males engaging in the activity. That strikes me as actually a fairly clever argument. I don't know if it's true, but it's an interesting argument. The feminist arguments often point towards pornography as a culprit here, as a training ground in the sense that if you took the earlier notion that the mind gets to pick its abnormality-- gets to pick how to go insane if you like, from the menu that's provided by the broader culture. So currently, if you want to have a dissociative disorder the way to have it is a multiple personality disorder. Couple hundred years ago it might have been to be possessed by a demon. These are the scripts if you like provided by the culture. Feminist writers argue that pornography and notably, violent pornography provides the script for coercive sex. A number of feminist legal scholars have worked hard-- Catherine MacKinnon is the most famous name here-- have worked hard to make at least some classes of pornography illegal on grounds that they are actually dangerous to women. That it's not a free speech issue, that it's really a health and safety sort of issue.

So you've got levels of explanation that occur at psychological, biological, sociological levels. Well, let me give you a version that's perhaps a version that would fit the general ethos of this course, which is that the answer is never-- it's all biology or it's all sociology or something like that. It's some curious interaction that's taking place. Well, what's going on here? What occurred to me between this morning's version of this lecture and concourse and this afternoon's is that the job may be less to explain coercive sexual relations, which you can see as-- like everything else, sexual relations are going to be distributed along some normal curve. It's going to have multiple dimensions but this one could be on a scale from extremely consenual to extremely not consenual. I suppose the extremely consenual abnormality one is the one where people really do sign forms or something like that and talk to each other in great detail about what's going to happen next. But the job may be not just to explain or to explain this the extreme point on what's after all going to be a normal function, but to explain how the overall behavior gets put in place all together. It's one of those behaviors where high school health class not withstanding, nobody gives you much in the way of lessons and the lessons that you get are stupid lessons that you get from listening to your peers lie their heads off in the locker room. Where is this behavior coming from? People are learning this behavior in some fashion, we're not after all, praying mantises where the whole business is just wired into some ganglion in your spinal cord and if you take off the head everything works just fine anyway. So where is this behavior coming from? The pieces, fortunately, for the handout-- I'm not going to depart wildly from the handout-- the pieces strike me as similar to the pieces I was going to use anyway.

One important piece and it's back to this idea that you get to choose your disorder or just your behavior in some fashion from the set of behaviors that your culture presents to you. Part of that is what we can consider to be the power of narrative thought in these sorts of behaviors. What's narrative thought? To review, I think. So propositional thought is moving symbols around and the sorts of things you might do in problem set land. Narrative thought is storytelling. You got the stuff? She's got the stuff. It's good. This is the evaluation forms for later. So narrative thought is about telling stories to yourself. And it's about telling yourself who you are. If you ask, why did that happen? You know, you don't generally sit down and start writing equations about it. You run through stories in your head. If you ask, what's going to happen next? You very much start running stories in your head. If I ask her out, what's going to happen? That's sort of narrative thought. Well, where did the narratives come from? In the case of relations between the sexes-- well, let me give you a cartoon version of an answer to that. But I think it is illustrative.

If you go to the romance aisle, I mean, if you want to understand the narrative about romance you might as well go to the aisle in Borders that says romance on it. I mean, if you go to the aisle that says engineering you can find something different. So you go to the romance aisle and there's rack after rack of books. Conveniently enough I don't know what's in these books, by and large, because it's not a genre I read extensively, but I look at the covers and the covers seem pretty well illustrative as it were. What's on the cover of your typical romance novel?

All right, we'll start with the basics. How many people are there on the cover of--

AUDIENCE: Twp.

PROFESSOR: Two. That's a good number. OK. I'm sure somewhere that there is a genre of same sex romance novels, but they're not typically what's on the shelf at Borders or Barnes & Noble or something. There what you've got is you got two people. One of them is a male and one of them is a female. I will assert that in case after case it's the same picture more or less. Drawn in some gaudy kind of fashion, but the picture looks like this. Right? Yeah? OK, so we got two people. We got this picture. Do we know which one is the guy?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

PROFESSOR: So one person-- there's this guy. He's the guy-- the pirate, the sailor, sometimes the doctor or something like that. You know, I don't think I've ever seen one where it was the college professor. Doesn't seem to be on the list at all. Then there's the woman who's having clothing issues typically. And she's in this sort of supine position. This is telling you something. By the way, I was doing research on this-- I kid you not-- I thought I'd better check whether it's still true. You know, it could that in this latter day, I mean, if you ask for instance-- actually, I should ask again because these things keep shifting. The standard model when I was, well, when I was in high school whatever the standard model was I was ignoring it and was completely clueless, but in any case, the standard model appeared to be that the male person asked the female person out. Sometime that sort of disappeared, near as I can tell and nobody asked anybody out and people just sort of-- it was kind of like a chemical thing. Numbers of women and men were in the same place and by some mysterious technique they bonded. Let's see. Since all the data here are survey data, let's get some survey data. Is it typical for males to ask out females? How many think that that's typical? How may think it's typical for females to ask out males?

Oh, isn't that interesting? See that's interesting because that's not the answer that I would have gotten from-- I haven't asked that question reliably every year, but it's not the answer I would have gotten ten years ago. Ten years ago the local custom had changed so that everybody was asking everybody or nobody was asking nobody, but there wasn't this sort of notion that males specifically were taking the lead and asking females. And so in a sense, it sounds like it's reverted to the pattern that existed when-- well, I won't say how many years ago, but it was a few years ago. Anyway, so I got to check whether or not the romance novels still look like this. So I went to Borders and went down to the romance aisle and I discovered this cool new thing. The cool new thing, at least it's new to me, is that the romance literature, these sort of series books have become explicitly stratified. That there are now multiple series of these things. They're color coded. It looks like homeland security, it's great because it runs from I think sort of a blue/green line, which has a title something like family values and then it runs over to this red line here-- I can't remember what the title of this is. This is all under the sort of general heading of Harlequin romance or one of those big romance publishers, but it's got some word like torrid in it or something like that. But interestingly, the only difference in covers that I could detect on a brief survey is in the family values thing both parties are still more or less upright, but he's sort of leaning in. By the time you get to the torrid one she's, boom. Anyway, the principle is the same. It is not the case that-- there just are no books out there, there's probably one out there somewhere. The central tendency of the distribution does not have a lot of female pirates overwhelming mild- mannered accountants or something like that. It's just not there. I'm only using this as an example of a narrative that I think is very widely out there. You can pick it up in movies, you can pick it up on TV and so on. Importantly, it is not a narrative with anything like rape written at the top of it. It's a narrative with romance or seduction or something written at the top of it. And the promise in the vast bulk of cases that the ending is going to come out positive. I'd love to know what they just found on the web over there.

AUDIENCE: We're looking up gay romance novels.

PROFESSOR: You're looking up gay romance novels, OK. Thank you for being diligent in your research there. Well, you can tell me who's-- anyway, nevermind.

AUDIENCE: There's no picture.

PROFESSOR: They don't have pictures. Meantime there's several people trying to figure out on their cellphones what's there. Anyway, so the script out there, the sort of script that people are operating from is a script where-- well, it's, urk. That sort of script. Again, importantly not with the idea that it's not going to be consenual or whatever, but the notion here is that it's going to be in effect, the male who's doing the asking and the female who is giving or not giving consent in some fashion. This is presumably tied into evolutionary psych roots that we've talked about already. I think I mentioned earlier that there's evidence that males experience the falling in love part of falling in love more rapidly in a relationship than females. They certainly want more sexual partners and sex more often by all sorts of measures. These sort of pressures are likely to produce a situation in which it is the guy who's asking and the woman who is either giving or not giving consent. Now if it is the case that the male is falling in love more rapidly or falling in lust more rapidly-- it kind of doesn't matter-- it follows that the first answer's going to be no. Typically, there are going to be some no's. If this is this script that the conversation is going to involve a bunch of no's.

Now we should switch gears a little and do a little reviewing of learning theory sorts of things. I think it says something on the handout like the power of conditioning. But let's think a little bit about learning theory. Well, let's think about law of effect kind of stuff for starters. The drive to reproduce is a strong one. There are strong positive reinforcers associated with sex. Nobody spends a lot of time-- I mean, look, if you think about the amount of-- I don't need to explain that. You knew that already. What Thorndike's law of effect tells you is that any of these sort of yes activities here, at any level in the relationship are going to be positively reinforcing. Are going to tend to reinforce whatever happened beforehand. And so one of the things that people are doing and one of the things that they don't appreciate that they're doing even if they're signing fifteen page consent forms, which they're not-- is that people are shaping each other. The activities that couples are engaging in with each other are-- it's your own private Skinner box. And you're busy shaping that pigeon who is the other half of this relationship. The great difference of course is you're both the experimenter and the experimental animal in your study here. But let's just think from the male's point of view.

So the male is hearing a lot of no's. If the relationship is eventually going to progress to let's have fifteen children then eventually there will be some variety of yes in here. That sounds like, what kind of schedule of reinforcement?

AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

PROFESSOR: Broomph. No, somebody needs to raise their hand and nobody's going to raise their hand. They've all gotten shy. You scratch your head you're going to end up getting called on there. So the answer is this is a partial reinforcement schedule or more like a variable ratio schedule. It's not a variable interval schedule unless you have a very weird relationship. No. No. No. Monday, yes. No. No. No. Monday, yes. That's a weird relationship. But more likely it's no. No. No. Yes. Maybe. No. Yes. Yes. No. No. No. No. No. Anyway, what do we know about those sorts of schedules? What do they produce in the way of behavior? High rates-- if this all sounds completely new to you guys you've got work to do between now and next Thursday, let me tell you. But these sort of schedules of reinforcement if it's in a rat trying to get fed produced very high rates of bar pressing. If it's in a guy, it presumably produces very high rates of bar pressing, too. So he's going to emit a lot of behavior there. And it's also very hard to extinguish. So if you decide at some point to say, no forever it may be a long time before the guy gets the hint. At least the pigeon aspect of the guy.

One other thing tying into this-- we ought to say one more thing based on the sort of romance novel example, which is that the dialog doesn't tend to be great in those things. Guys doing manly things, pounding on their chests and females swooning or something like that. But there's just not a lot of conversation. So in the absence you're this giant committee-- another theme from the whole course-- your brain, your mind is this committee of semi-independent operators. Well, there's one operator there that's doing the verbal consent thing and thinking deep thoughts, but it's in a script that does not have much in the way of good dialog in it. That leaves this other chunk of your brain. The chunk that has an awful lot in common with rats pressing bars for food in Skinner boxes. A lot of realm to govern behavior. If you're not going to govern behavior with what you might want to call higher cognitive powers, well, these nice associative learning mechanisms will do a perfectly fine job for you. Hmm, got reinforced. Let's do that again or something of that sort. So you end up with a situation where you've got multiple forces acting on you. And you've systematically disabled some of the more intellectual parts of you. It reminds me, how many people have been to the Science Museum? Another place you should go sometimes if you haven't been. I think you get in free, right? Do you get in free?

AUDIENCE: Yep. PROFESSOR: Yep. Get in free, go to the science museum. What you'll discover if you go to the-- I don't think, I don't know if you'll still discover it-- remember my spiral? Somebody from 900 went and was a volunteer at the Science Museum and said, oh you got to build this cool-- they still have a great motion after effect spiral, which I believe is patterned on having seen it in this class years ago. And then when they would do the little show they were using my lines. I didn't even get residuals. But one of the demos they have there in the math section is this wonderful thing with an endless collection of pins arranged into sort of triangular way-- one, two, three-- is that Pascal's triangle?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PROFESSOR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's a version of that. Anyway, the cool version of the demo is that you drop a ball at the top and it bounces from pin to pin and in effect at each pin it's got a fifty-fifty crack of going one way or the other. And if you have enough layers of pins what you end up with is essentially-- well, is exactly in the limit, a nice normal distribution. From a ball that just completely neutral, dropped at the top, most of the time it's going to end up here, some time it's going to end up at one extreme or the other. I suspect that this is not a bad model for a wide range of behaviors. I'll argue in closing that it's a good model-- that it's at least, a model worth thinking about for something like coercive sexual behavior. That we know or at least we think we know that the population of guys engaging in that behavior are not sitting out here in some separate distribution. They seem to be the distribution of regular guys that just ended up in an odd part of the distribution. And it may well be that this collection-- if you want you can think of it in terms of shaping.

That the collection of positive reinforcers that they got just balanced randomly off into this direction and produced what boils down to a very maladaptive behavior where the same guy starting from the same point might well have ended up in-- would most guys starting up from the same point would've ended up in the same, in this vast bulk of the normal end of the distribution or the middle of the distribution. That you don't need to posit that there's anything specifically wrong and that you might have a very difficult time, the perhaps disturbing piece of this if you were trying to set public policy is that you might have a very difficult time trying to say, gee, what can we do that would prevent this tale from happening? Because it might really be the result of a succession of random events. One thing that you might guess is that the degree to which you let cognition back into the game and let it run less on the rat pushing the bar kind of thought, the less chance that you have of ending up in some maladaptive corner of this particular distribution, but that's not desperately clear. Can I prove this? No. And so does that mean that the right answer on the final will be where does coercive sex come from? Apparently it comes from bouncing down the pin. No. This is clearly marked as Wolf's theory and not only that it's Wolf theory since this morning. I may decide by this evening that it was really dumb and feel deeply humiliated that I ever got up and said it in public, but at the moment I don't. But what I do feel is that what I want to do-- well, I want to do a couple of things.

Thing one is to say, thank you for listening all term. It's kind of a privilege to be able to yack for a whole term and have people listen. It doesn't happen at home much. The second, there are two different forms floating around. Well actually they're not--