HAVE THE PROTESTS & RIOTS FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF GEORGE FLOYD LED TO HYPERVIGILANCE & A MORAL PANIC?
INTRODUCTION:
In this meetup, we'll look at several viral rumors that emerged on social media during the protests & riots in the aftermath of George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis Police, as well as over the following month or so. We'll assess their veracity, and to the extent that they involve exaggeration and/or fabrication we'll ask if this may constitute a sign that we're falling prey to "hypervigilance" - a state of increased alertness marked by perpetual scanning of our environment for threats.
Much of the general public appear to be caught in a "moral panic" - a type of mass hysteria where threats appear magnified. This could be dangerous for the cause of policing reform, since it could distort the general public's ability to think carefully about the conflicting threats of over-policing vs under-policing (i.e. police brutality vs breakdown of law & order).
The emerging "moral panic" has also led to the proliferation of a host of conspiracy theories which could negatively affect the public's willingness to trust in both our news media and our government. Unfortunately, as we'll see, while there's been some excellent investigate journalism lately and government crime statistics are still often one of our best sources for understanding the big picture, there's also been enough sensationalistic reporting and dishonest rhetoric from politicians that the general public would probably be justified in trusting them less -- that is, if only the average person wasn't so bad at reasoning through complex social issues on their own.
I briefly considered using a recent episode of a skeptic podcast called "Squaring the Strange" for this meetup, since the hosts (Ben Radford, Pascual Romero & Celestia Ward) addressed several topics I wanted to discuss, namely rumors of "bait bricks" at protests, the alleged "noose" in Nascar driver Bubba Wallace's garage, and the dueling media narratives of Antifa & Boogaloo being the cause of most of the serious violence at protests. Unfortunately, it's rather long (1 hour, 20 minutes) and doesn't mention some of the related topics I'd like to cover, so I won't ask you to listen to it prior to our meetup. Instead, I've linked a bunch of short video clips below that come to around 36 minutes total. However, if you want to check out the podcast, you can find it here: https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/14974460/tdest_id/607796
In the first section of this discussion, we'll look at the circumstances surrounding George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police and how what should've been a fairly clear-cut case of police brutality led to a host of misconceptions and several conspiracy theories. We'll see how attempts to blame Floyd for his own death relate to the "just-world hypothesis" and we'll see how conflicting views of the same event relate to the "Rashomon effect". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect
In the second section, we'll look at the violence & looting that broke out during the protests in Minneapolis & other cities following Floyd's death and the way the news media struggle to assign blame - was it angry locals, outside agitators, police acting as agent provocateurs, Antifa anarchists, Boogaloo Boys, all of the above? We'll see the politicization of this issues has led to "whatboutism" and blame-shifting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
In the third section, we'll look at how hypervigilance led to viral rumors about "bait bricks" at protests, "bleach milkshakes" being served to the NYPD, "Antifa buses" being deployed to small towns, and the widespread fireworks displays that as part of a government "psy-op". Once these rumors are started, they are often magnified by "confirmation bias". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
In the fourth section, we'll look at several allegations of nooses hung in public places and black men found hanged which are allegedly part of a wave of lynchings, and we'll discuss why these might also be false alarms caused by hypervigilance. We'll also see how the psychological effects of the current tensions between urban black communities and police can be partly explained by "intergroup threat theory". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_threat_theory
RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:
To get a better understanding of urban legends, false sightings & moral panics, it might be a good idea to review a meetup we had back in February of 2019 entitled "Social Contagion and Irrational Fears". https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/ffkqkqyzdbwb/
Back in June of 2020, we had a meetup entitled "Racial Bias in the Police Use of Force". We examined the data on racial bias in police use of force incidents in the U.S. Two of the basic takeaways was that the data collection & aggregation on police use of force isn't very comprehensive, and as with the statistics on gun violence there is a lot of dishonest "massaging" of statistics in both the liberal & conservative news media -- in this case, to either support or counter the charges of systematic racism by police. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/249125196/
The Philly Political Agnostics looked at the statistics on hate crimes & domestic terrorism in 2 meetups back in May of 2017. The general takeaway was that crimes officially classified as "hate crimes" are about 2 orders of magnitude less common than routine forms of violent crime that occur between members of different races/ethnic groups. (Total hate crimes in the early 2000s varied between 7-8K/yr whereas total interracial violent crimes in 2010 were about 380K.) The most common forms of hate crimes are not violent attacks but rather verbal/online harassment or defacement of property. It may be hard to get an accurate count of hate crimes, since watchdog groups claim they often go under-reported or dismissed by local law enforcement. However, the news media often gives certain hate crimes a disproportionate amount of coverage compared to routine street crime, and watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League have been accused of framing or “massaging” the statistics to make hate crimes & hate groups appear more pervasive. Nevertheless, hate crimes (like terrorist attacks) tend to play upon human psychology in such a way that they provoke far more anger & fear than normal crimes and strengthen in-group/out-group suspicions in a way that tears at the social fabric, so this is the rationale for pursuing them more vigorously & punishing them more severely.
A similar dynamic holds true for riots, where politically motivated riots, while relatively rare, garner lots of media attention and are often strongly condemned, whereas riots after sports games get less media attention and are often met with shrugs and comments about "crazy sports fans." The rationale for this disparity is similar to that for hate crimes - political protests that devolve into riots & lead to widespread vandalism & looting threaten to break down our social norms around using the courts & the ballot box rather than violence to resolve our political differences, whereas sports riots can cause a lot of property damage but don't generally intimidate anyone or risk leading to a civil war. You can find the material on hate crimes & riots, at the following links: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/wxsktmywgbnc/ https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/239785704/
