The last two months, I’ve spent many extra hours walking and biking. Encountering other people outdoors – and watching all parties avoid each other like lepers – is an eerie experience. Few human societies have ever made severe social anxiety so blatant. Viewing strangers with fear is the new normal.
How would you react, though, if someone got angry at you for avoiding them? The conversation might go like this:
Angry: Why on Earth are you avoiding me?
Anxious: I’m scared of getting sick.
Angry: I don’t have any symptoms.
Anxious: Great, but I’m still scared.
Angry: Of what?!
Anxious: Of what might happen.
Angry: The risk is very low!
Anxious: But the damage is severe, and the list of potential risks is endless.
Most people today would probably strongly side with Anxious over Angry. If Angry grew despondent, however, you might (remotely) offer some constructive advice. Starting with: If you want someone to interact with you despite the risk, strive to put their mind at ease. Empathize with their fear even if you don’t agree with it. Humor them. Adjust your behavior to make them feel safe – and be friendly about it. It may not seem fair, but you’re the person who seeks more social interaction.
Which reminds me: Before the coronavirus crisis, anger was building against “#MeToo backlash.” First-hand experience suggested, and research confirmed, that many men were avoiding close contact with female co-workers. In particular, men were reluctant to socialize with or mentor women. Why? Because they were afraid of being accused of sexual harassment. The conversation went much like this… or would have, if the Anxious felt free to speak:
Angry: Why on Earth are you avoiding me?
Anxious: I’m scared of getting #MeToo’d.
Angry: I haven’t #MeToo’d anyone.
Anxious: Great, but I’m still scared.
Angry: Of what?!
Anxious: Of what might happen.
Angry: The risk is very low!
Anxious: But the damage is severe, and the list of potential risks is endless.
This time around, though, most people would vocally side with Angry over Anxious.
Am I really comparing the risk of contracting coronavirus with the risk of being accused of sexual harassment? Verily, because the parallels are loud and strong.
In both cases, people use social distancing for risk reduction. In both cases, the risk of most specific interactions is low. At the same time, however, people encounter an endless succession of risky situations – and the bad outcomes are very bad. Many (most?) men would rather endure sickness than public accusation.
While you can protest that, “the rate of false accusations is low,” that’s a lot like saying, “the rate of deliberate infection is low.” In both cases, the main danger is not intentional harm. The main danger is that social proximity allows unintentional harm. People don’t just infect others without meaning to. They also offend others without meaning to. If your motto is “safety first,” you naturally keep your distance to avoid both contracting disease and giving offense.
I grasp that #MeToo was partly motivated by the desire to reduce social anxiety of women. Unfortunately, instead of reaffirming universal good manners, #MeToo fought social anxiety with social anxiety, all but heedless of collateral damage.
As you can gather, I was disturbed by the rise of social anxiety years before the virus. Now social anxiety has reached pandemic proportions. What is to be done? Rather than counter-productively condemn others for their paranoia, my goal is to deescalate the tensions. “Safety first” is a tempting but dangerous motto. Instead, let us all try to “Make risk reasonable again.” Use moderate caution yourself- and kindly invite others to do the same. Listen to both Anxious and Angry. Side with neither.
READER COMMENTS
Steve Fritzinger
May 26 2020 at 10:18am
First thing, stop calling it “social distancing”.
The virus only cares about physical distance. We should be working hard to build social connections now. Not increasing our social distance from others.
I’m posting this so often these days, I’m going to program a hot key for it.
JFA
May 26 2020 at 10:46am
I’m also programming a hot key but for the problem of people writing “First thing” to preface their comment without an actual subsequent “second thing”.
Also, I’m thinking about programming a hot key to award pedantry prizes.
To add a substantive response, while we should be building stronger social ties, physically distancing does actually lead to social distancing. My family used to get together regularly for dinner with another family, but because 6 feet is the suggested physical distance, we have just decided to not get together as family units until risks are lower. Getting together with a group larger than 3 or 4 when physical distancing is also hard as it makes communication without raising one’s voice much harder. So while you are technically correct that the guidelines are for physical distancing, this does lead to de facto (in person) social distancing. You can always hang out online, but I don’t think anyone was taking the term “social distancing” to exclude virtual meetings (or appropriately physical distanced in person meetings). Better to make a hot key for correcting “then” and “than” or “who” and “whom” mistakes.
Tyler Wells
May 26 2020 at 11:56am
My son is 12 and “social distancing” and “physical distancing” are synonymous for boys up through high school. He doesn’t want to talk to his friends, he wants to interact with them in a more physical way (primarily sports or play). As JFA mentions, at the very least social distancing limits social activities. For my son, it is limited to 0 for social interaction outside of the immediate family.
As I see it, 3 months of quality of life have been taken from my son through involuntary social distancing.
David Henderson
May 27 2020 at 9:52am
I think that’s a really good point, Steve. I’ve been using the wrong term myself and I’ll start using yours. Why? Because talking to people on Facebook and on the phone (and on Zoom), I’m seeing that some people are taking social distancing to mean that they should stay home, rather than that, when they go out they should keep their distance. I always understood social distancing to mean physical distancing, but I’ve seen numerous instances in the past of people taking it to mean staying home.
Steve Fritzinger
May 27 2020 at 9:58am
It’s not actually my term. A friend on Facebook made the point first, but I don’t remember who it was.
Liam R
May 26 2020 at 11:01am
I’ll say that even in Oakland, a fairly antisocial city, this hasn’t been the case for the last month or so. People are really starting to open up.
Brian
May 26 2020 at 11:46am
“Side with neither” presumes there was an appropriate balance of risk between being “falsely accused” and actually being assaulted. With this presumption, MeToo upset that balance by shifting the risk in favor the accuser at the expense of the accused.
If, however, we understand that the pre-existing state of the world massively favored the accused over the accuser, then we also understand that MeToo pushed the balance of risk toward a more equitable distribution.
“Viewing strangers with fear is the new normal” laments the person who never before feared being assaulted.
Thomas Hutcheson
May 26 2020 at 12:13pm
Maybe Caplan should have recorded a different conversation:
Surprised: Are you avoiding me?
Encountered: Yes. It’s the thing to do.
Surprised: But I’m not infectious.
Encountered: I’m glad to hear it, but I was not trying to prevent becoming infected. I don’t THINK I am infected either, but I don’t want to incur even a small risk of infecting you. Avoiding you and wearing this mask is a small inconvenience to reduce the risk of my harming you and to reassure you that I mean no harm.
Surprised: But I’m not that concerned.
Encountered: That’s great. The risks are small, but I prefer to model the behavior I wish others to exhibit. It’s like voting.
Mark Z
May 26 2020 at 2:11pm
One obvious difference between the scenarios: avoiding someone because you’re worried about being ‘me-too’d’ can be taken as imputing something about the other person’s character; it says you think they may be a pathological liar (or otherwise prone to dangerous dishonesty or overreaction), which is more insulting than telling someone you’re worried they might have an infectious disease, which says nothing about a person’s character. I don’t think this really justifies the difference in reaction; rationally, one shouldn’t expect strangers (or co-workers or acquaintances) to be reasonably certain one is not a bad person, since they know little about you, but I think most people would sooner expect others to work from the assumption that they’re morally good until proven otherwise than they would expect them to assume that they are non-infectious until proven otherwise.
Also, I suspect much of the offense really comes from implied belief on the part of men anxious about being ‘me-too’d’ that a significant fraction of ‘me-too’-related allegations are spurious or frivolous, which the offended view as a bad and dangerous belief, and is highly politically charged. Whereas the implied belief that the virus is very very infectious does not seem as dangerous even if one thinks it’s wrong, and not as politically charged as the question of false allegations of sexual misconduct.
Noah Blaylock
May 26 2020 at 6:04pm
“Safety first” is a tempting but dangerous motto. Instead, let us all try to “Make risk reasonable again.”
May I propose the phrase “Gotta Risk it for the Biscuit” instead?
Phil H
May 27 2020 at 2:28am
This is complete nonsense. The place it goes off the rails is here:
“The main danger is that social proximity allows unintentional harm. People don’t just infect others without meaning to. They also offend others without meaning to.” It’s the old lie that sexual harassment is all a misunderstanding. For someone who claims to be morally puritanical, this is just inexcusable blindness to the fact that sexual harassment is serious misconduct.
I quite liked the provocative setup of this post. I don’t mind a bit of unexpected comparison. But two things: (1) The epidemiological approach to crime isn’t actually new and unexpected. It’s a very well-trodden area of research. (2) If you have to deny the reality of sexual harassment to make your point, you’ve gone wrong.
JdL
May 27 2020 at 1:01pm
Where does the author “deny the reality of sexual harassment”? If any denial of reality is taking place, it seems to be you denying that many men accused of harassment are innocent, but their lives are ruined anyway.
KevinDC
May 28 2020 at 11:05am
I’m really confused by your reaction here.
What Caplan said was that people can “offend others without meaning to.” And you took that to indicate what he was really saying was that “sexual harassment is all a misunderstanding” and this amounts to “deny[ing] the reality of sexual harassment”? Seriously? Does this genuinely represent your best, good faith effort to understand and engage what was actually being said?
Caplan’s argument was an explicitly probabilistic one. Nothing he said entails that all sexual harassment is due entirely to people misunderstanding each other. All his argument needs is that there are at least some occasions where people offend each other unintentionally. (Note, this doesn’t even entail believing that the offended party was unjustified in taking offense!) Maybe that’s 30% of cases or maybe it’s 2% or 0.01%. All his argument needs in order to work is that the percentage of unintentional offense which exists is greater than zero.
The rest of the argument is just a standard application of probability and severity regarding risk. If something carries a risk of severely negative consequences, it can be perfectly rational to avoid it completely, even if the probability of entailing those consequences is very low. This is especially true when the activity in question provides you with very little offsetting benefit, such as being a mentor – which is beneficial to the mentee at the expense of the mentor’s time and energy.
Phil H
May 30 2020 at 9:18am
Hi, Kevin.
“Nothing he said entails that all sexual harassment is due entirely to people misunderstanding each other.”
Yes, he did:
“People don’t just infect others without meaning to. They also offend others without meaning to.”
That’s the point of this comparison. The number of deliberate infections is vanishingly small. By comparing the two, Caplan is implying that the number of accidental harassment cases is comparable to the number of accidental infection casts (99.9%). It’s not in the 2, 3, 30% range you mention.
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