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What makes some men sexual harassers? Science tries to explain the creeps of the world.
The list of alleged sexual harassers keeps getting longer and the details of sexual assault and harassment ever more disturbing. The torrent of cases pouring out in news reports and Twitter — tales of men grabbing women, emerging naked from showers uninvited, threatening women's careers, or worse — raises a horrified question: What makes these men behave this way? Sure, some of the behavior can be chalked up to boorish personalities or outright misogyny. But how much of the behavior is driven by the man himself and how much by the culture around him? What exactly makes one man more likely to harass than another? And what is going on inside their heads when they make unwanted advances?
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Educationism: The hidden bias we often ignore
The first time Lance Fusarelli set foot on a university campus, he felt surrounded by people who seemed to know more than him – about society, social graces and “everything that was different”. He attributes these differences to his upbringing. While he didn’t grow up poor, it was in a working-class town in a small rural area in Avella, Pennsylvania. He was the first in his family to go to university – his mother got pregnant and had to drop out of school, while his father went to work in a coal mine in his mid-teens. He lived in an environment where few stayed in education beyond high school. It worked out well for him.
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Unlike Humans, Bonobos Shun Helpers And Befriend The Bullies
Even very young babies can tell the difference between someone who's helpful and someone who's mean — and lab studies show that babies consistently prefer the helpers. But one of humans' closest relatives — the bonobo — makes a different choice, preferring to cozy up to the meanies. That's according to experiments described Thursday in the journal Current Biology, by scientists who wanted to explore the evolutionary origins of humans' unusually cooperative behavior. "In the animal kingdom, there are all kinds of acts of cooperation.
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Can Kindness Be Taught?
Thanks to a challenge from the Dalai Lama, a number of preschools are trying to teach something that has not always been considered an academic subject: kindness. “Can you look inside yourself and tell me what you’re feeling?” Danielle Mahoney-Kertes asked a class of prekindergarten students at P.S. 212 in Queens recently. “Happy,” one girl offered. “Sick,” said another. A boy in a blue T-shirt gave a shy thumbs down. “That happens too,” Ms. Mahoney-Kertes, a literacy coach, reassured him.
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To Change Your Life, Consider the Easy Route
Change is hard. Everybody knows that. So we head into our New Year’s resolutions with our teeth gritted, determined to battle our way to success. Sure, we know that most of us are doomed to fail, and that the yoga studios that are packed on January 2 will be back to their Zenlike calm by February. With enough willpower, though, we hope that we can beat the odds and bull our way through. But what if this attitude has it exactly backwards? What if the key to success isn’t trying hard but not trying very hard at all? The idea sounds crazy, because it runs contrary to how most people, and even most psychologists, view the process of self-control.
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We Asked 615 Men About How They Conduct Themselves at Work
The victims of sexual harassment who have recently come forward are far from alone: Nearly half of women say they have experienced some form of it at work at least once in their careers. But there has been little research about those responsible. In a new survey, about a third of men said they had done something at work within the past year that would qualify as objectionable behavior or sexual harassment.
