COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVUE: …But the question remains: Why should [reporter Sabrina Rubin] Erdely have tried to speak with the alleged rapists? After all, as several people wrote me, it’s not as if the men would have actually talked to her. The obvious reply is that one of them might have been stupid enough to try to give his side. What’s more, if she’d dug up some names, she could have run a Web search and started calling around about the men. She could have tried to find out whether any of them had a history of sexual misconduct. She could have located some of their friends and asked them what they might know. She could have determined whether there indeed was a party at the fraternity that night…
But there’s another argument that needs making. It comes from the philosopher Karl Popper. In a famous 1963 paper called “Science as Falsification,” Popper set out to estimate the scientific value of popular theories—Freudianism, Marxism—that huge numbers of his peers held to be true, because these theories had the power to explain almost everything. Their truths “appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions.”.
What Popper had stumbled on was what psychologists would later call “confirmation bias”—our innate urge to see only evidence that confirms beliefs we hold to be self-evident, and dismiss facts that challenge those convictions. Erdely told Rosin that she’d gone all around the country looking for rape survivors and was delighted when she stumbled on Jackie. She was obviously traumatized, and her story illustrated everything Erdely knew to be true—that frat boys rape girls and universities are indifferent to rape survivors… (more)
