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% Mastery Mailing 1
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\shorttitle{Article Review III}
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\begin{document}
\centerline{\textbf{Article Review III: Who's the ``Real'' Victim?
Victim Framing and Sexual Assault}}
Public opinion on rape cases continues to affect high-profile
allegations like those in the \#MeToo movement or Brett Kavanaugh's
case.
Therefore, it's very important for public communicators (like reporters)
to understand the effect from implicitly biased wording on their
readers.
This study, ``Who's the `Real' Victim,'' studies a rhetorical device
called ``victim framing'' and how people's opinions differ over a case
depending on the news they read.
The researchers ran the study from several samples of Amazon's
Mechanical Turk service, obtaining a ``sample of convenience.''
About 2400 people participated in the study across four experiments.
The first three of these experiments asked participants about a
fictional rape case on a college campus, framed either neutrally (to
create a baseline metric for opinions on sexual assault), framed with
the accused as the victim, or framed with the assaulted as the victim.
The framing were transparently anecdotal quotes attributed to friends of
the protagonists, saying ``[he/she] is the real victim here''
\autocite{assault}.
The article samples presented to participants also vary on the amount of
detail included (sparse vs rich descriptions of the case and campus
opinions).
This examines how important the level of elaboration is on persuading
participants from their originally-held beliefs.
The second experiment asked participants to cite the part of the text
that affected their opinions of the case most.
There was an observed significant interaction between people citing the
quote describing victimhood and being swayed by the argument.
The third experiment used very sparse language to frame its protagonist
as a victim.
The expansive victimhood arguments more consistently persuaded
participants to lean on their beliefs, but even the very sparse
descriptions mentioning one protagonist or the other as a victim biased
readers.
The fourth experiment was the true example of Brett Kavanaugh's hearing
using the same text as the fictional case observed in previous trials.
This trial was conducted about 10 months after his hearings.
Victimhood language was less impactful to readers in the real case, but
some significant effects appeared.
The independent variables measured were level of detail in the story,
level of detail in the victimhood statement, and the truth of the story.
The dependent variable measured was Likert-scale self-report sympathy to
the assaulted protagonist or to the accused protagonist, and (in some
experiments) whether the reader cited language about victimhood as
impactful in their decision.
The study relates itself to existing theory about how arguments convince
people called social-pragmatic reasoning.
This is where biased language (like saying a basketball player ``misses
60\%'' or ``makes 40\%'' of their shots) causes a reader to assume the
author has a good reason to write that way.
This inference-forming method means calling a protagonist a victim may
activate a ``dyadic account of moral reasoning'' \autocite{assault}.
Judging a person as a ``moral agent or patient'' in a situation causes
observers to reduce blame for a protagonist seen as a passive actor (in
contrast to the increased responsibility for a protagonist perceived as
an agent).
The authors controlled for demand characteristics in this study by
portraying themselves as trying to learn public opinion on a report.
This study was the first to confirm ``victim framing'' as a potent way
to affect public opinion, but the results from the real case show it may
not be so reliable.
People who did not cite the victimhood statement as cementing their
opinion had less sympathy for Kavanaugh when he was treated as the
victim.
This is probably a backfire effect against deeply-held beliefs because
this population was much more likely to hold liberal beliefs, and
therefore already have little sympathy towards Kavanaugh.
Despite the issues this study has for generalization---it was
conducted on Mechanical Turk, so it doesn't have a very representative
sample---this study has implications for real-world reporting.
Victim-framing appears, for example, when the {\it Washington Times}
published the article ``Christine Blasey Ford is not the victim
here---Brett Kavanaugh is.''
Further research is still required on how exactly victim framing
convinces people, but since it does have an impact, we need to decide on
policy to handle this issue.
\iffalse
- Hypothesis
- IV/DV
- Controls
- Results
- Conclusions
\fi
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