The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [35]
But here is why this case is important for our discussion of the role of culture: according to a fascinating study by Yale professor Dan Kahan, the most important determinant in whether someone thinks what Berkowitz did was rape is not the statutory definition of the crime. It is not even the gender of the person making the determination.
The most important correlate in whether a person believes “no” means “no” is his or her cultural beliefs about the role of women in society. The group most likely to think Berkowitz did not commit rape is women who hold traditional, hierarchical views of gender roles.
As Kahan reports, “Individuals who adhere to a largely traditional cultural style, one that prescribes highly differentiated gender roles and features a commitment to hierarchical forms of authority and social organization more generally, are highly likely to believe that ‘no’ did not mean ‘no’ in Berkowitz.” Surprisingly, these cultural predispositions affect traditionally minded women more than traditionally minded men. Kahan theorizes that this is because, in the traditional view, women say “no” when they mean “yes” in order to avoid the social stigma traditional norms would otherwise impose on women who engage in casual sex. Norms offer “scripts of sexual behavior, conformity to which apportions status within the cultural groups that adhere to them.” So traditionally minded women “who have earned high group status by conspicuously conforming to these norms are the ones most threatened by the prospect” that women who use the no-means-yes strategy will get away with it without suffering reputational harm.16
In other words, traditionally minded women who abide by the rules are the ones most likely to want to punish those women who do not. In the Berkowitz case, that means that a jury of traditionally minded women would almost certainly have voted to acquit.
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Kahan has done important work in describing the mechanism by which cultural predispositions and “formative identities” affect individuals’ views, not only on issues of sexual violence but on other legal and political questions, such as the decriminalization of drugs, the regulation of handguns, and gay marriage.17 He argues that a person’s core values affect what facts the person infers about the world based on his or her perceptions. Values also affect whose opinions and arguments we tend to listen to, acknowledge, and appreciate. All in all, deep cultural values and assumptions create “strong psychological pressure” on us to perceive the world in ways that fit our views of how the world should work.
All this sounds accurate to me. Kahan analyzes culture at a high level of generality and along only two axes—egalitarian norms versus hierarchical norms, and communitarian norms versus individualistic norms.18 But he is persuasive in showing that “egalitarians” perceive the world—and thus law and politics—quite differently from those who fall into the hierarchical camp, and that “communitarians” view the world quite differently from “individualists.”
At one level, this is unsurprising. We know that traditionalists greet their surroundings differently from those who subscribe to more progressive, egalitarian norms, and we can easily understand that those who consider themselves individualists (a group that includes people who cite the free market as their guide) usually reach different conclusions about political and legal questions from those reached by people who promote communitarian values. Culture affects people’s viewpoints, and