Jennifer Freyd, a CASBS fellow in 1989-90 & 2018-19, is a professor of psychology at the Univ. of Oregon and a renowned expert on interpersonal and institutional trauma caused by sexual violence and discrimination. Host John Markoff speaks with Dr. Freyd about her career of groundbreaking research, from developing betrayal trauma theory to current work supporting institutional courage.
Institutional Betrayal Research Homepage
Learn about DARVO
Watch the CASBS Symposium: “Betrayal and Courage in the Age of #MeToo”
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
John Markoff: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. I'm John Markoff. Today we speak with two-time CASBS fellow, Dr. Jennifer Freyd, a nationally renowned expert on interpersonal and institutional trauma caused by sexual violence and discrimination. We'll hear about the history of her research, which led to her theory on betrayal trauma. We'll also get her thoughts on institutional courage, mandatory reporting, and the issue of activism and advocacy in academia and social science. I saw that you had begun studying anthropology and then you became a psychologist. I was just wondering about the path from anthropology to psychology.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, I didn't even start with anthropology. My first major was philosophy, and then I majored— I changed to fine arts, and then I changed to anthropology, and then I discovered psychology in my senior year in college, and it was way too late to change majors. When I applied to graduate school, I was at the University of Penn. They still had me listed as a fine arts major, and so my essay explaining why an anthropology degree was good for psychology must have been kind of confusing.
John Markoff: And was there a moment or a professor or something that pulled you towards psychology?
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, it started really when I was at the library studying and I saw somebody's introductory psychology textbook open and there was a diagram of how the ear worked. And I thought, "That would be cool to know about." So just on a lark, I signed up for introductory psychology, but it was a really good introductory psychology course. Rochelle Gelman was the professor, and I fell in love with cognitive psychology. And then I took a cognitive psychology course with Jonathan Baron, and he hired me as his research assistant. And I guess it was my ju— end of my junior year that this all happened. And then I took a year off from college and traveled around the world and spent a lot of the time in Japan teaching English. And during that time, I pursued on my own both anthropology and psychology, and came to see all sorts of connections, and came back and decided I had to go to graduate school in psychology.
John Markoff: And then what was your focus as a graduate student?
Jennifer Freyd: It was, it was cognitive psychology. And at the time, it was really before neuroscience had entered the field. And at the time, there were divisions that don't exist anymore. But there was a big division between perception as a field and cognition as a field. And I bridged the two, which caused consternation when I went on the job market and people would ask me, "Are you a perception psychologist or a cognitive psychologist?" And I'd be like, "Um, both." And it's sort of ironic that then I started to study trauma, which was even more far afield, I guess, and again caused lots of consternation when people wanted me to stay in my box.
John Markoff: And I know the name Dynamics Lab, but tell me the history and What are the roots of the Dynamics Lab?
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, so the first domain that I really delved into in an empirical way, in a sustained way, was what I came to call dynamic mental representations. And it was— I developed a theory of the way we understand and store information that involves having time be an integral part of the information that we we encode. And I had a series of empirical papers on a phenomenon I called representational momentum, which is about information changing in the mind over time. So imagine you saw a ball flying through the air, and then suddenly the ball went out of sight. According to my theory and my research, you will continue to represent that ball moving forward. And even if you try to remember the last position, you can't perfectly. It'll continue to move forward, and that's the kind of momentum. And so at the time that I started my lab, my focus was on that meaning of the word dynamic. It struck me as later an actually good term as well for what I'd come to study, which was so different. Regarding how people respond to trauma, which is all about various kinds of dynamics too.
John Markoff: And you use dynamics in the sense of motion, but you can also use it in the sense of human interaction.
Jennifer Freyd: Exactly.
John Markoff: Is that sort of where you were?
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, I mean, when I started it was about motion, but I kept the name because I realized, yeah, it captured human interaction.
John Markoff: It's very compelling to me for two reasons. I mean, one's from philosophy, sort of Martin Buber's work, I and Thou. And that came back to me fairly recently in doing reporting on the AI world. There was a cyberneticist by the name of Gordon Pask, not very well known, but he had this, I guess he had also a background as a psychologist. He had this notion as intelligence emerging from the interaction of two people, which was always very compelling to me. I mean, not as a scientist, it just seems like it makes sense from language reasons and otherwise.
Jennifer Freyd: [Speaker] Yeah, well, that's interesting you said that because Another theory I developed in graduate school is called shareability, and it's about the way communication creates shared knowledge that is different from what anyone can have individually. And that there's a system of categorization in particular that occurs through the sharing of information. And it, it can change how individuals represent and understand the world. In fact, it does. It shapes language, and once you communicate about something, it will be different after you've communicated about it than before. But there's also a sense in which information exists in the sharing as well. And that's another one which I developed initially with a very cognitive perspective, but came to see it as relevant to understanding people's memory for trauma, which is often not spoken about initially, maybe ever at all, and may be spoken about at some time in a person's life. And in the act of speaking about it, due to some of these shareability mechanisms, can really change.
John Markoff: So you explored shareability before you explored trauma?
Jennifer Freyd: Yes.
John Markoff: But it informed your model?
Jennifer Freyd: Right, yeah.
John Markoff: You mentioned John Tooby was here during your first term at CASBS.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah.
John Markoff: He and Leda Cosmides were pretty big figures in the field of evolutionary psychology. One of the foundational tests in the field came out of their time here at CASBS. Did you take anything away from your time around them?
Jennifer Freyd: It was hugely influential to me. So I talked to them a lot, and they had a weekly seminar kind of thing, and I attended it. And I learned so much, but it was very central to my thinking thinking about that led to Betrayal Trauma Theory. So Betrayal Trauma Theory has its core that we are highly sensitive to betrayal because we are a social species and we need to be sensitive to betrayal because it protects us from future betrayals. And also that we are highly dependent on one another and have this very developed attachment system. And it's when those two things collide that we get a betrayal trauma. And the sensitivity to betrayal was something that was really— I don't know that I would have come to without conversations, particularly with Leda Cosmides, because she was already doing research on what she was calling "cheater detectors." And the idea that we have this evolved mechanism to detect cheating. So she wasn't using the word betrayal, but it was a very similar concept that we need to be paying attention when people are taking advantage. Of us. And yeah, it played such a crucial role there.
John Markoff: What are the roots of the idea of institutional courage? Trace the history or where did it emerge from?
Jennifer Freyd: Back in the early 1990s, I started to develop a theory of trauma response and I called it Betrayal Trauma Theory. And Betrayal Trauma Theory focuses on initially focused on individual one-on-one traumas that had a big element of betrayal. And I developed a theory about why those traumas were particularly important to understand and powerful in our lives. And I did a lot of research testing predictions from that theory. And somewhere in there began to really think more and more about the possibility that traumas can be perpetrated not just by one individual on another, but by larger social groups. And one form of that is when an institution does something that harms an individual that is dependent upon that institution, which makes it potentially a betrayal. And we came to— my students and I came to call that institutional betrayal. And that set off a decade of research on institutional betrayal, asking the question, Can institutions harm people in a way that looks like individual betrayals? And what's the nature of that harm? What kind of actions are involved? Somewhere in there, I began to think about, "Okay, the answer is yes. Institutional betrayal is a thing, and it's a powerful thing, and it's all around us. So can we do something about it?" And it's interesting because, of course, I'd always been also interested in what can we do to prevent individual betrayals, like child abuse and domestic violence, the worst ones. And that's a really hard problem. I do think they're preventable, but primarily through the way we raise our children. And it's really hard to figure out how to change the way the world raises its kids. But the interesting thing about institutional betrayal is it's actually a much more tractable problem. A problem because institutions are composed of adults and they're almost always defined by something that gives them resources and that they're contained. Like an institution, like a university, it's a thing, it's contained. So that led me to question what can we do to prevent or address institutional betrayal? The term courage came to me pretty early in thinking about that because I'd had enough experience by then trying to change institutions to realize there was tremendous resistance and that every time I managed to make the smallest dent in the behavior of an institution, it came from a lot of courage, that I had to go up against forces that were really resistant and that tended to punish me. So yeah, that's why I call it institutional courage. All along in my career, people have told me on and off I've used the wrong terms, which I always think is funny that I've named my theories incorrectly. It's funny, nobody really complained when I called it betrayal trauma, but institutional betrayal, oh, a lot of people didn't like that. And I was told it was too What do you mean? I was told that on multiple occasions that I should call it something more neutral, like institutional behavior, that it hurt people's feelings. And I remember one time I was told this by an administrator at a meeting, a group of administrators and faculty, and we were talking about the problem of campus sexual assault, and we were talking explicitly about rates of rape, and we were using that word. Rates of rape, which is hard to say, and I also talked about institutional betrayal. And then they said that institutional betrayal hurt their feelings. And I'm like, so I can talk about rape, but not— I just was amazed.
John Markoff: So there's some sort of institutional resistance or something, or immune system, I guess, is probably the better—
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, yeah. So, and then the courage one, I haven't had as many Many people come up with what I'm supposed to say, but one person said, "Well, you should call it institutional integrity." And of course, institutional courage would involve integrity and would lead to more integrity, but I think it misses the fact that there is so much resistance.
John Markoff: You mentioned child rearing, and that really struck a chord with me because of my own personal experience. I don't have children, but I worked as a summer camp counselor. There was one year when I had— we called them tribes— a tribe of 13 13-year-old girls. And I realized fairly quickly that probably all of them came from what I would have considered broken homes, homes where the parents were quarreling and the kids were parked with the summer camp as a result of that. And I could see the emotional damage in every one of them. It was really striking. I don't know what to take away from that. I mean, at the same time, my own upbringing, I had what I refer to as like a Leave It to Beaver kind of— if there were problems in my family upbringing, I didn't see it. I was really sort of sheltered from all that. And I think it did have a good impact. So I can see how if you have to live through that, that it would have an effect. Esther Wojcicki has just written a book called I think it's called How to Raise Good People or something, and it's sort of about her philosophy of parenting. You said it was difficult. Do you have theories on how to reverse that problem? Because I actually, when I look around at what's going on in society, sometimes I feel it all comes down to the fact that we raise so many damaged children.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, I actually—
John Markoff: Without having any data.
Jennifer Freyd: I think that is the biggest piece. Is how we raise our kids. And one of the things, the thought experiments I do is the reverse engineering question. If I wanted to create a monster, what would I do to a child to create a monster? And I think it's pretty obvious. I think we know exactly how to create a monster. We know how to abuse a person in certain ways that they're going to end up being— if they survive it, if they don't actually die, they're going to end up being cruel and violent and malicious. And given that, I think it's fair to say probably the reverse is true, that if we want to raise a very pro-social, kind, generous, and happy person, that we also know what to do. The problem is it's this cyclic intergenerational thing that happens, and that's what really makes it hard to break the cycle, because when people have a childhood full of the bad stuff, they learn parenting skills as children and it's deeply in there. So even if they intellectually want to behave in a different way, it's very deeply rooted behavior. So it's difficult to break a cycle. And that's where I think as a society the only way we're really going to do that is have more communal kinds of child rearing than we have. The American nuclear family is left to its own. And we don't have a system for intervention. I mean, there are certain things that we know for certain kinds of parenting problems we can help. When there's lack of resources and people can come into the home and help with basic knowledge of skills, like how to change diapers. There are certain things that can be done. But some of the more insidious dysfunctional dynamics We don't really have a good system right now, and it's deeply sad. But one way to try to break the cycle is— it will take some generations— but is much more intensive work with young people before they become parents. So doing more in schools. And one of the things I'm struck by, having had 3 kids go through very good schools, is how many missed opportunities there were for for the children to be learning more about healthy relationships, for instance. And they don't even learn how to have conversations about difficult things. I mean, it's— so we're missing those educational opportunities too.
John Markoff: [Speaker:CASBS] Yeah, you know, my mother, who's a special education teacher, spent 3 decades in East Palo Alto schools. And at one point she said to me that by the time she saw the kids at 5, in terms of language skills, it was already too late in terms of class. And I've thought a lot about that. I mean, that's the first 5 years where, outside of the nuclear family, there's almost no contact, or there hasn't been in the past. So if you're not from a middle-class family, you lose the opportunity to gain those skills at that point. There are a couple directions I'd love to go from here. One is that I'm new to the framework that you've created, And of course, DARVO is now part of the common discourse. And when I was looking at it just this morning, I began to think that if you used it to analyze what Donald Trump does, it works in a non-gender context. And is that been, one, is that accurate? And two, has that been brought up before? And maybe, wait, first maybe give us a tutorial on DARVO. 'Cause I'm using a—
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, an acronym. So yeah, it is an acronym and it stands for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. And the idea is that it's a response one can have to being held accountable or accused of some wrongdoing. And you could do it for yourself, but you could do it on behalf of somebody else. So you start with a denial and you say, "No, I didn't do that," or "Somebody didn't do that." And then you attack Specifically, really, you attack the credibility of the person. So you say, "You are doing it for some ulterior motive. You are impaired in some way. Maybe you're crazy. Maybe your memory's malfunctioning." In some way, you depict the person who's making this accusation as not credible. And then the really important insidious part is to reverse the roles of victim and offender. So the person being accused says, "I'm the victim in this situation. You falsely accused me. You're ruining my reputation. You're damaging my family," and so on, and paints the person making the accusation as an offender. And I think that we see this happen in many, many contexts that include contexts in which gender's not a particularly salient factor. And I think Donald Trump is a person who's particularly skilled at using DARPA to his advantage.
John Markoff: But when you look at it in that framework, all of a sudden everything he does seems to— I mean, to me, it's just like it's the playbook almost, isn't it?
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, it is. It is. He's very good at it, and he does it all the time. And he actually has used the phrase "I am the victim." I mean, the first time I noticed it, I had this horrible feeling that he had read one of my research papers.
John Markoff: Way too much confidence.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, I know. But there was this horrible feeling of guilt, like, "Oh no, I told them what to do." But, you know, obviously not. In the research we've done— so DARPA was a concept that I came up with long ago. And a main source of inspiration for me was watching the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, which gives you some sense of when I thought of it. And I remember at the time having the thought that Clarence Thomas had been head of the EEOC. If there was anyone who would be in a position to understand why it is so important to be able to talk about sexual harassment and to hear people out, it would be the head of the EEOC. And so I imagined what I thought a response to the accusations would have been from a person who, who either didn't do the things being accused of or honestly believed they didn't do them. So a person who was in an innocent mindset, I imagine that response would be something of the form of, "Oh my God, I don't know why you're saying I did these things. I don't think I did. I'm horrified that you think I did these things. We need to get to the bottom of it. I need to understand what led you to believe these things." "But I do know how important it is that we have an open discussion. I know how difficult it is to raise issues of sexual harassment and how our society needs to make that possible." That, to me, would have been the response that I would have expected. And that he had such an opposite response is what really made me start to really think about it. That was a long go, and it sort of sat there. For a couple decades until I had a student, Sarah Harsey, come into my lab. And she was very motivated to develop empirical tests of this idea. And so together we did a number of research projects. And one of the things that fell out of our first big project was that when people described being Darbo'd, it went along with them blaming themselves for the event they had experienced with that person. And that was really alarming to see because other research, not ours, but other research has documented that when people blame themselves, they're more likely to stay silent about something. So it suggests that one of the benefits of DARVO as a tactic is that it leads to self-blame, which leads to silence.
John Markoff: [Speaker] The other thing that I wanted to sort of get your sense of is Can you separate social science from activism? And just, I'm asking you this personally because I struggled with it as going from science to journalism, or actually from activism to journalism, not from science. I was social science, but I mean, I was an anti-war activist and then I became a journalist and sort of went through this period where I consciously tried to put down not my critique, but at least my taking sides. And so I'm just wondering what it looks like in the social sciences?
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's interesting how different words evoke different images. So if you say activism, that creates somewhat of a different image than advocacy, for instance. But often the very same behaviors can be called activism and advocacy. And there's certain goals in science for neutrality and objectivity that are very important. Because what we're trying to do is collect information that will hold up and won't be biased and will be replicable. And so the more neutral and objective we can be, the better we are to get at it in that way. But then, first of all, we know all humans are biased. And does it make it more objective or neutral to claim objectivity? Or is it possibly it's just the opposite, to say, here are my biases and here's what I did. Now you, with different biases, you try this study. There's that, and then there's another thing, which is there are certain topics I think a real ethical issue comes out about what it means to be, to try to even try to maintain neutrality. What does it mean to be, quote, neutral about sexual violence? And neutrality almost always is in one way or another aligning with the status quo. So one could argue you're not really ever neutral. It's kind of, are you voicing dissent from the status quo and that's looking like you're an advocate or an activist, or are you going along? So I think these are deep and complicated issues. One of the things that a person— actually, my first time as a fellow here, this was something one of the other fellows said to me, John Tooby. We were talking about this problem of objectivity and whether science is possible at all even, because we are biased creatures. And he said, "Well, you know, you can't have pure sterility in the surgery room, but it doesn't mean you do surgery in the gutter." I really like that idea that we do take steps to study things in ways that will remove and control for some of the bias. I believe in that strongly, but it doesn't come from denying.
John Markoff: I can take that and place it in the journalistic context and I feel the same way. I mean, I still— as under assault as the mainstream journalism world is today, there was an original intent that you you tried to be an independent observer and not ally with any set. And that's sort of what I, you know, why I came to mainstream journalism with that sort of, that it was valuable to society to try to be a fair witness.
Jennifer Freyd: That's what I love about investigative reporting and what saddens me that it's gotten rare. And I find myself sometimes in talking to reporters about things where they want me to tell them about certain certain things, and I say, "I'm going to give you links to documents. Can you go to these documents? Because I don't want you to take my word.
John Markoff: I want you to go to what's public and verifiable." Interesting in the context of you recently wrote an op-ed about the plaque controversy at Stanford and Channel Miller and I—
Jennifer Freyd: This week.
John Markoff: Yeah, this week. Have you gotten reaction, or where did it— Where did you place it? Was it in the Daily?
Jennifer Freyd: Well, the way that came about was some students contacted me on— at the end of last week, very end of last week, and asked me if I would write a statement that they could pass out at this Faculty Senate meeting that's happening this afternoon. Oh, I see. So my understanding is that the students, their student government, or some student group has passed a resolution asking the university to put up a plaque. And they have taken it to the faculty in some way and it's now on the— now on the agenda for the Faculty Senate that maybe they endorse that resolution or pass their own. And they wanted this statement and they wanted a statement in particular to address the issue of the concern that's been expressed that a plaque would be triggering. And this concern was expressed in a blog post by the Provost text that I had read. So I knew it really had been expressed. And not only that, in conversations I'd had with people about why isn't there— what's the problem here? People would always bring up the triggering concern. And triggering is something I've been thinking about for years. I mean, that's something that comes up all the time, both in popular discussion and in classrooms. So it wasn't the first time I'd thought about triggering. So then I wrote the statement, and then I ran it by a faculty colleague here, and he He said, "Why don't you send it to the Daily?" And I was like, "Okay." So I sent it to them and they published it. That's how that came about.
John Markoff: And so it's still a live issue. I know about the controversy about statues in public places. Are there plaques? Is there precedent here that you could sort of play on in terms of other things?
Jennifer Freyd: There have been so few memorials for sexual violence survivors, but there are memorials for other kinds of victims of violence. So there are memorials for people who have been in wars, and then there usually are quotes and plaques. So in that way, it's actually very normal. It's just that there's not many models of sexual violence memorials.
John Markoff: It's an institutional courage question, isn't it?
Jennifer Freyd: It is. I think it is. And this is a case where actually I believe that there's plenty of social science research that can be applied to this situation, and that all pretty much pushes in the direction of putting up the plaque. And so part of what I feel is a step in institutional courage, actually a crucial step, is educating people about what's known about difficult topics like sexual violence, because there are many reasons people do harmful things around this, but at least one big reason is ignorance. So people will say to somebody, you know, "If that happened to you, why didn't you tell anyone?" And that's a terrible thing to say to a person. We know that from research. But it's also not something you would say if you understood what happens when somebody's been harmed in this way. So it comes from ignorance, and it doesn't mean the person who asked the question means to cause harm. But they do cause harm. So one of the steps of institutional courage I advocate is educating people, particularly leadership. So, you know, I think this is a case where Stanford administration doesn't have sufficient knowledge, and they've been making the wrong decision, and I believe it's not from ill intent but from ignorance.
John Markoff: In February of this year, CASBS had a public symposium on the #MeToo era where you and Vanessa Tyson, who at that time was going through a rather public experience with these issues herself. I'm just wondering, what was that experience like?
Jennifer Freyd: I mean, I have a very positive feeling about that event, and I think it was because it was so dignified and authentic. I felt like there was not a denial about what the situation Vanessa was in at that moment. That was very much felt in the room. But I also— it also seemed that that we went much more deeply into things than anybody else was at that time. And I'm so grateful to how CASBS pulled that one off. Yeah, it felt very calm and grounding in a time of crazy turmoil.
John Markoff: One of the issues you raised in the symposium was that the conversations around these issues can feel heavily focused on the adjudication and punishment facets and less on the experience of those involved and healing. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, I mean, this is something I have a lot more questions and worries about than answers for, but years back I was already worrying about this issue of what do you do when you have a perpetrator? How do you resolve it in our world? I have very, very great doubts about the benefit of punishment in general and specifically in this domain. So in general, we know from decades of research in psychology that the best way to shape behavior is reward, not punishment. Punishment is a poor way to shape behavior. And so it's unlikely to change people.
John Markoff: Punishment.
Jennifer Freyd: There's an argument that it serves as a deterrent, and there's, you know, for certain behaviors like speeding tickets and certain things, there is a deterrent factor. But the punishments that we use currently tend to be ones that are very destructive and damaging to the individuals who are getting punished. So there's a heavy emphasis if it's social punishment on shaming, and if it's formal punishment, it's prison. And we know that these are very damaging things. People tend to be worse off and more dangerous after they've experienced these punishments. So again, it's like this engineering question. Doesn't it seem like we're doing the things that are going to make people more dangerous? And while that's going on, Lots of people kind of know that the reaction is very damaging, and so it then becomes a reason to not hold people accountable. It then becomes a reason to not say anything because the consequences are going to be so bad for the person who's been accused. So lots of survivors, for instance, will not report sexual violence act for, well, a host of reasons, but one of them is they don't want to destroy the person who's hurt them. If we lived in a world where the response to accusations was one that was less damaging, I think there'd be a lot more opportunity for people to talk about it and a lot more opportunity for the perpetrators to become better people. And contribute. So what's very appealing is a restorative justice kind of answer, which is a whole movement in justice. The problem is— and this is what I learned from offering this graduate seminar which was going to answer the question— because the way I— what I do when I don't know the answer to some question is I have a graduate seminar and get a room full of smart graduate students to read and tell me what the answer is. Essentially, we figure it out. I gave this whole graduate seminar on this issue, walked away with no more answer than I walked in with, because the problem with restorative justice is that for sexual violence, it may not work in a lot of cases because it requires that somebody kind of take responsibility. It's hard to implement when you have a vast power asymmetry. So I don't really know— and that's, you know, really more the formal response. For the informal response, I wish we had a way to hold people accountable, yeah, to have consequences, yes, but not to destroy. And we don't— because I don't know the answers to that, then I think, well, what is the domain— what can we do? Well, we can prevent these things from happening in the first place. We can put our efforts there. And we can have at least constructive— try to teach people to have constructive conversations.
John Markoff: You know, you're speaking generally, but that speaks directly to the events around Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, Epstein himself was an absolute monster.
Jennifer Freyd: But everyone else caught up.
John Markoff: The shaming. Yeah, it's remarkable. And I've watched it, and I've watched people get caught in it, you know, people I know very well who made mistakes, but I don't think they were collaborators. In that sense, you know, been destroyed, actually. I mean, particularly the story of the MIT Media Lab guy, Joi Ito, who clearly made a mistake. He violated his first principle, which was transparency. And then through this set of events— and then he did what you sort of suggested. He was trying to make institutional amends within that framework. And then through this set of events, he ended up sort of taking a fall. And then it became clear that the institution was at fault, perhaps even more than he was. And it was just really—
Jennifer Freyd: Well, that reminds me too of another piece of the problem here, which is the scapegoating problem. So if you focus all of your energy on a small set of individuals, it's missing the fact that this is a systemic problem. And so it takes the responsibility away from us collectively. Tries to put it all on a small number of people. So what you said about, you know, the institutions behaving in a certain way, and I mean, the good thing about it, I suppose, is raising awareness that you can be bought. And we know people can be bought, but I think we tend to think other people can be bought, I can't be bought, right? But each person can be bought, and we're really all susceptible to these forces and corruption. And so we need stronger mechanisms to really vet people. I mean, 'cause it is obviously in the interest of somebody like Jeffrey Epstein to have credible people, you know, in his friendship group and so on. And so, and it's important that credible people not do that because they're just enabling really terrible behavior. But how do, you know, the answer there, is to look at the whole system and fix it at a systemic level. That, you know.
John Markoff: Sort of along these lines of adjudication and institutionalization of what are incredibly personal experiences, how does Title IX and mandatory reporting fit into this? Both with regard to institutional betrayal as well as from a researcher's point of view.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, mandatory reporting is a whole topic we didn't really get to. Right. Yeah. And I'm really passionate about it. Yeah. Well, and you, but you touched on it. You touched on something else there too, really important, which is the separation of research from all these other things, because there is no way we are going to research behaviors that people are reluctant to talk about without promising them confidentiality. So fortunately, most universities do draw a line, and they will allow people to do research without imposing mandatory reporting. On those researchers. So that's one thing. I mean, and you could never study perpetration. You never could. You could never ask somebody, even never take outside of sexual violence, look into fraud or anything else, unless they have confidence of confidentiality or anonymity, depending on which study it is. But mandatory reporting in other contexts, such as the more popular situation in American universities right now, which is a facility a student tells a professor about a sexual violence experience, the professor has to turn that information over to some official source. That's the more prototypical mandatory reporting policy. That I consider a very unfortunate, very unfortunate policy, and have put quite a bit of effort into trying to explain to the world why, and did manage at the University of Oregon to help create an alternative policy that's been in place a couple years. Seems to be working well that reflects what I think is the most important— the most important sort of constructs here, which is to respect the control and privacy of the survivor of the violence, number one, and let them retain control over their information, as well as to provide other kinds of resources and good responses.
John Markoff: This fits right into the whistleblower discussion that's going on at a national level right now.
Jennifer Freyd: Right. Well, it's so obvious to me that if you don't do this, you chill future reports. And so mandatory reporting— so there's not been sufficient research in the university context to say this definitively, but there's pieces of evidence from all sorts of things for which this makes it very likely true that mandatory reporting chills reporting from other people. We know this in some contexts, like when there's mandatory reporting in a setting where people have to report domestic violence, say in a medical setting or something, that people will just not tell because they don't want the consequences. So, but even separate from that, it's also potentially very damaging to the individual who has been victimized, because their options are either they don't get to tell the person they want to tell because of the information loss, or they tell and that information gets taken away from them, out of their control, and then that can be deeply harmful to people. Or there's one other variant, which is they go into somebody's office and start the conversation and the person's like, "Oh, I need to tell you, anything you tell me I might have to tell the Title IX coordinator," or whatever. Which is like, "Ah, what a terrible thing to do to somebody who's just about to share." And we don't do this to any other topic. If somebody comes and tells you that their laptop was stolen or whatever, we have no rules like this. And I think it's interesting we do have rules around a case where, you know, where there is a gender element here because we've got most— the most predominant victims of sexual violence are women. They're not the only victims, but they're on average more likely. The people they tell are more likely to be women. And here we've got a set of rules imposed on individuals that in essence treat them like children. Because the other domain where we do have mandatory reporting laws is for minors. And there we do, and probably, you know, there's a much more justifiable reason. We have all sorts of laws for minors that are different for adults, including consent laws. But here we're taking young adults, essentially, and treating them like children. And on average, they're female young adults that are being treated like children, so. Doesn't sound good to me.
John Markoff: So are you at the point where you'd like to transform from a project on institutional courage to a center on institutional courage? Is that where you're headed?
Jennifer Freyd: Yes, I am. And I know I want to do it, and I don't entirely know exactly how to do it. So that's my next task, is figuring out how exactly I do that.
John Markoff: And there's probably academic and and sort of philanthropic or political paths to take.
Jennifer Freyd: Right.
John Markoff: And you're still exploring that at this point.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah.
John Markoff: Is that what the meeting that it's about?
Jennifer Freyd: Well, that's what we'll discuss near the end. I mean, first we'll have some research presentations. But yeah, I mean, I really haven't wavered much from a vision of the center being roughly equal parts a research center that can nurture new knowledge generation and an outreach part that applies that knowledge to the world. That seems to me the right way to go. And I'm imagining a medium-sized center where there's, you know, small enough everybody can gather in one room, but there's room for having postdocs and fellows on both sides coming and going. And I think it would be extremely beneficial and the time is right for it.
John Markoff: So then what would some of the first initiatives or the direction of the center be?
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, you mean, well, there's the research side, which is just there's so much research we need to do to figure out. We've started to do research on institutional courage. It's a good beginning, but there's so much we need to figure out about which acts are Which institutional behaviors are effective? And what's the resistance? I mean, there's a whole line of research that needs to happen around apology, because we know apology can be very, very effective, and we know there's enormous resistance, like figuring that out, for example. But in terms of given what we do know, the application side, the 3 things that I most feel like— I don't know if I can limit it to 3, but 3 of the things that I think would makes such a difference would be the education to just do a better job educating people. And this is totally— this is not rocket science. I mean, we have a lot of knowledge. We could educate people. Number 2 is anonymous surveys. It's started to happen in universities that there are these climate surveys or victimization surveys. Stanford just released the results of one with incredibly alarming rates of victimization revealed. But they're very rare in other domains. So one of the things my students and I have studied is how often does it happen in corporate America? Almost not at all. So that means that the whole organization has no clue what's going on. And without knowing what's going on, it's really hard to address the problem. And then those are the first two. And then the third one, which I just recently have been feeling so strongly about, is what I call cherish the whistleblower, cherish the truth-teller, that until we start to do things that reward that behavior, it's going to be really hard for people to come forward. And I'm always asked, "What do we do about retaliation?" And my answer is, "I haven't a clue," because you cannot stop retaliation. You can't. I mean, maybe you can have a law that you're not allowed to fire somebody, but there's a zillion ways you can retaliate against somebody. And it's really hard to stop it, and we know it happens over and over and over again. What you can do is reward, and here I think it's like the ruby slippers. It is so easy, because what is the reward that is really powerful? It's public acknowledgement and thanks. The individuals who whistle-blow and truth-tell tend to be the most loyal. They're doing it out of a sense of duty, and so it's very rewarding to them when that's acknowledged and they're thanked. So that's what I would start with.
John Markoff: Thanks very much for spending time with us this morning.
Jennifer Freyd: Thanks for talking with me.
John Markoff: Sure, and maybe when you're a project you can come back and we can talk again.
Jennifer Freyd: Yeah, that sounds good.
John Markoff: To learn more about the topics in this episode, check out the show notes. There you'll find links to works from our guests and relevant articles. Human Centered is a show from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. I'm John Markoff. Thanks for listening.