Do "Geeks" have a stronger moral core?

[KOSLOX]

God no. Nothing about this theory is correct.

[Turn the Page]

Even pirates and ninjas have moral codes. What a strange topic, you really can't paint any group of people with the same brush.

[csdemel]

While there are moral insights to be gained from stories with heroes and villains, I think it would depend entirely on a person's disposition. How easily influenced they are by external sources and how prone they are to imitation. And just because a person is exposed to stories with heroes and villains, who's to say they will associate themselves with the hero's perspective? Maybe they will be drawn to aspects of the villain, whether it be motives, goals, or even appearance. Who wouldn't want to have Lex Luthor's shiny bald head?

[Mister Mets]

Are you serious? If those were what it took to stop crime there wouldn't be a corrupt government in the world. And, cocaine sales would probably go down.

(Just for the US: Colleges are chock full of education, and there's still what, twenty percent of the women involved in campuses being sexually assaulted every year?)

There's a leap from my educated guess "crime is lower among the better educated/ less desperate" to what you seem to infer "there is no crime among the better educated/ less desperate." I haven't made the latter point.

The 1 in 5 statistic on sexual assaults on campuses is also flawed.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a numerical handle on a crime that is usually committed in private and the victims of which—all the studies agree—frequently decline to report. A further complication is that because researchers are asking about intimate subjects, there is no consensus on the best way to phrase sensitive questions in order to get the most accurate answers. A 2008 National Institute of Justice paper on campus sexual assault explained some of the challenges: “Unfortunately, researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.” Take the National Crime Victimization Survey, the nationally representative sample conducted by the federal government to find rates of reported and unreported crime. For the years 1995 to 2011, as the University of Colorado Denver’s Rennison explained to me, it found that an estimated 0.8 percent of noncollege females age 18-24 revealed that they were victims of threatened, attempted, or completed rape/sexual assault. Of the college females that age during that same time period, approximately 0.6 percent reported they experienced such attempted or completed crime.

That finding diverges wildly from the notion that one in five college women will be sexually assaulted by the time they graduate. That’s the number most often used to suggest there is overwhelming sexual violence on America’s college campuses. It comes from a 2007 study funded by the National Institute of Justice, called the Campus Sexual Assault Study, or CSA. (I cited it last year in a story on campus drinking and sexual assault.) The study asked 5,466 female college students at two public universities, one in the Midwest and one in the South, to answer an online survey about their experiences with sexual assault. The survey defined sexual assault as everything from nonconsensual sexual intercourse to such unwanted activities as “forced kissing,” “fondling,” and “rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes.”

There are approximately 12 million female college students in the U.S. (There are about 9 million males.) I asked the lead author of the study, Christopher Krebs, whether the CSA represents the experience of those millions of female students. His answer was unequivocal: “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “In no way does that make our results nationally representative,” Krebs said. And yet President Obama used this number to make the case for his sweeping changes in national policy.

The Sexual Victimization of College Women, a 2000 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, is the basis for another widely cited statistic, even grimmer than the finding of CSA: that one in four college women will be raped. (An activist organization, One in Four, takes its name from the finding.) The study itself, however, found a completed rape rate among its respondents of 1.7 percent. How does a study that finds less than 2 percent of college women in a given year are raped become a 25 percent likelihood? In addition to the 1.7 percent of victims of completed rape, the survey found that another 1.1 percent experienced attempted rape. As the authors wrote, “[O]ne might conclude that the risk of rape victimization for college women is not high; ‘only’ about 1 in 36 college women (2.8 percent) experience a completed rape or attempted rape in an academic year.”

But the authors go on to make several assumptions that ratchet up the risk. The study was carried out during the spring and asked women to describe any assaults experienced during that academic year. The researchers decided to double the numbers they received from their subjects, in order to extrapolate their findings over an entire calendar year, even as they acknowledged that this was “problematic,” as students rarely attend school for 12 months. That calculation brought the incidence figure to nearly 5 percent. Although college is designed to be a four-year experience, the authors note that it takes students “an average” of five years, so they then multiplied their newly-arrived-at 5 percent of student victims by five years, and thus they conclude: “The percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter.”

The numbers are also worse for women who are not college educated.

But the truth is, young women who don’t go to college are more likely to be raped. Lynn A. Addington at American University and I recently published a study based on the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1995 to 2011. We found that the estimated rate of sexual assault and rape of female college students, ages 18 to 24, was 6.1 per 1,000 students. This is nothing to be proud of, but it is significantly lower than the rate experienced by women that age who don’t attend college — eight per 1,000. In other words, these women are victims of sexual violence at a rate around 30 percent greater than their more educated counterparts.

The focus on sexual violence against some of our most privileged young people has distracted us from the victimization of those enjoying less social and economic advantage.

Surprisingly, we don’t know much about the latter group. After an exhaustive search, colleagues and I could find no major study that focuses on the relationship between social and economic disadvantage and rape and sexual assault risk in the United States. But existing research does show that disadvantaged women are more likely to experience violence generally, as well as violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Does this hold true for sexual assault?

[byrd156]

Not gonna lie I read the title of this thread and I thought it said Greeks........

[Speed Force League Unlimited]

I wanted to believe this, I really did.
But as to the reason these message boards went to a complete overhaul, I have to drop any attempt I had at believing geeks have a stronger sense of morals.

[toysoldier]

No. Quite often people who assume they have higher moral standards behave contrary to those standards. One need only look at progressive, identity politics crowd.

[Michael P]

Can someone get me a new irony meter? Mine just exploded.

[John Ossie]

God no. Nothing about this theory is correct.

Quoted in agreement.

[AstroWolfboy]

I think this is under the perception that stereotypical Geeks don't do bad things like Drink Beer, watch porn , smoke , play violent video games , therefor they would be less likely to inflict any negativity on to the world since they don't possess such vices. That would be a bunch of crap.

[kalorama]

I think this is under the perception that stereotypical Geeks don't do bad things like Drink Beer, watch porn , smoke , play violent video games , therefor they would be less likely to inflict any negativity on to the world since they don't possess such vices. That would be a bunch of crap.

Watching porn and playing violent video games are two of the foundation stones in the most common geek stereotypes.

[Kirby101]

No. As Dr. Wertham showed, 70% of juvenile delinquents read comic books. And this was a time when only 70% of young people read comics.

[saul_on_the_road_to_damascus]

Watching porn and playing violent video games are two of the foundation stones in the most common geek stereotypes.

I resent that. I do not play video games.

[Kieran_Frost]

Disagree. There are a lot of geeks with bad morals too

THIS!!!! Geeks might often think, because they are often smarter (i.e. more informed) means they are more moral. Not true. They can often be arrogant and not willing to truly debate issues; nor will they debate civilly or hide their contempt for views they think are "less intellectual". I find (as a general rule) more enlightenment talking to my coworkers at the gym than my sister's friends at Cambridge.

[MyriVerse]

Fewer criminals, perhaps.

But that does not translate to stronger morals.

And I'm not convinced that the average Comic con crowd are geeks anymore. It's sold out and become Hollywood.