In response to the critiques of Nathaniel Haas's "The Cost of Sexual Assault at USC" series, the researcher Haas references speaks out. Here is what the Sexual Economist has to say:
No one would be surprised that studying Sexual Economics can teach you a lot about people. For one, we humans have amazing capabilities to form groups for innumerable reasons. My favorite economics Podcast, EconTalk, recently interviewed Cesar Hidalgo of MIT, who explained how the ability to form groups is one of our most important traits because it enables us to create greater and greater projects by assembling ourselves into efficient organizations to achieve certain goals. Whether the group is a political faction, guild, club, firm, army, or fraternity or sorority, human intelligence and sociability come together to make things happen.
In pursuing the research and acting as its number one advocate to get it done, I have only become more convinced that both women and men's best interests are served by trying to explain as clearly as possible the sexual economy as a living process.
On second thought, clearly explaining it to everyone would competitively disadvantage those who already knew! Therefore, I advise you to share it with your best interest in mind.
Ever since Nathaniel Haas's initial The Price of Sex article, both Nathaniel and I have taken to heart many insights from commentators and used the opportunity to develop new ground in university's' "sexual policy-making."
More specifically, the online communities at TotalSororityMove.com (TSM) and TotalFratMove.com (TFM) have demonstrated keen interest and have been a great help in communicating preliminary Sexual Economics findings. Commentators at Total Sorority Move objected to Sexual Economics on the grounds that women should not be modeled as the "supply of sex." Without side-tracking into mountains of evidence that show women do supply sex to men in exchange for resources (especially in the Greek System), I direct them to this short video by Dr. Wendy Walsh. Due to the Greek System's significant stake in the matter, I will use this article to respond to some of the questions brought up by Harrison Lee in his TotalFratMove.com response to Nathaniel's sexual assault investigation. You will see original research findings that demonstrate the link between fraternity parties and sexual assault indicators. Finally, policies will be recommended. But can policy influence culture?
Let's Define Creepiness
My interdisciplinary committee and I created a four-point metric for a frat's "creepiness." How can I describe what creepiness actually means? It tended to be something women — who have had bad experiences at parties — mentioned. Whether we are dealing with house parties or frat parties, when I was in college, a woman who felt uncomfortable sexual advances would refer to the guy as "creepy" whether he was hot or not. Therefore we asked women in my survey to evaluate each frat's creepiness by:
First looking at a picture of their house with the letters blurred off.
Second, asking them to move a radio button from "Never" to "Always," with "Rarely," "Sometimes," and "Most of the time" intervening.
The four statements they evaluated for each house were:
1. During this semester, I have personally witnessed my friends receiving threatening sexual advances at this fraternity.
2. During this semester, I have left this fraternity because I felt vulnerable.
3. During this semester, I have been concerned that drinks from this fraternity contained substances other than alcohol.
4. During this semester, I have asked my friends to reconsider which fraternities we go out to because I was concerned it was uncomfortable.
Because the frats were anonymous in the study, my research purpose was not to identify which exact frat got "reports," but instead to show the differences among "Top," "Good," "Middle-Lower," and "Bottom" houses. Nathaniel reproduced two graphs from my paper in The Cost of Sexual Assault at USC. These show that more creepy houses tend to have more hookups AND a higher social ranking.
To respond to TFM's criticisms I have created new analysis based on the number of reports of each type: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Most of the time, Always. Below, you can see that the individual components of average creepiness individually confirm the association between frat status and creepiness.
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In my original paper, I used the theory of Sexual Economics, Armstrong and Hamilton's anthropology research on college women, and additional empirical results to conclude that fraternities and sororities play a role in stratifying men and women into groups along Sexual Economics lines. For example, fraternities and sororities had different average attractiveness (self-reported 1-10) and also different "acceptable attractiveness ranges" for sexual partners. This is something that commenters for Harrison Lee's article — and probably everyone in the Greek System — take for granted.
These inter-group differences describe the Sexual Economic structure discussed in The Price of Sex at USC. In addition to the findings discussed there, today I am showing that the more popular or highly ranked frats succeed at securing more sex even though they are associated with being more sexually threatening and drink contaminating. In addition, higher ranked frats had a higher probability of being owned by the University, more total members, more relationships with women, and more hookup partners reported by women (meaning that not only did the frat have more hookups but those hookups were also more widely distributed among members of Top frats).
Incredibly, the only variable I tested that did not significantly vary between "Top" and "Bottom" frats was "Preempt threat" reports (Hernandez, 2014, Appendix G).
Even frat apologists like TFM's Harrison Lee must admit these findings are damn amazing; they say that even though women are witnessing "threatening sexual advances," leaving from feeling vulnerable, and suspecting their drinks are spiked, they don't preempt the threat by reconsidering where they go out to party.
Since alcohol is given out at zero price in fraternity parties (zero-price for women only, that is), women are often willing to accept certain risks of sexual assault at ragers. Alcohol and ragers are both fun and expensive, after all. This is not a tradeoff that the University or Greek System should be comfortable fostering. Even Harrison Lee agrees that alcohol distribution is a primary driver of a fraternity's success, saying:
"If you have a wet house, you have an advantage in recruiting because you have a place where you can get drunk knowing that you can pass out on the couch if need be."
Another advantage follows; if you have a wet house, you have an advantage in recruiting because it's easier to get women into your bed. This isn't the most complex, science-y part of the research. But Harrison Lee is skeptical:
One troubling example in Armstrong and Hamilton's research was the process of transporting women to fraternity parties at "Midwest University." They observed fraternity men's cars lining up at freshman dorms to transport women to their parties. But at the end of the night, the absence of return services left many women alone and intoxicated facing long walks back (because taking women out of the house would not be in the fraternity men's interests). The effect will be that on the margin more women will "sleep over" at the men's house (not to mention this was the clear motive for the transport line up in the first place). If this doesn't meet some technical definition for "exploitation," it at least qualifies as manipulation.
Harrison Lee does not think that bigger parties at more popular houses are associated with sexual assault. The results show he is wrong because the more popular houses do have more resources (because they have more members and probably higher fees), they have more hookups (the definition of which was addressed in Nathaniel's Price of Sex at USC), and they have more reports of threatening sexual advances, proactive female responses to aggression (leaving the frat), and more suspected usage of date-rape drugs.
Some fraternity men — including Harrison Lee — criticize these conclusions as unfair scrutiny of the Greek System. The response is completely tone deaf to the sexual assault conversation. In my view, it is a type of response that undermines the Greek System's overall credibility and intensifies the future extent of that scrutiny.
A fraternity man is not obligated to defend problematic practices like engineered party sex ratios and zero price alcohol. The men of the Greek System should establish credibility regarding sexual assault, by incorporating the current state of knowledge. In contrast, Harrison Lee attempted to smear the Greek System's higher sexual assault rate as "skewed statistics." In his opinion, it is more important that there are fewer people in the Greek System.
If you applied his logic to the country as a whole, you could conclude that sexual assault among college students is no problem because there is a lower total number of college sexual assaults than U.S. sexual assaults.
The troubling part is that Harrison Lee's response, along with responses we received to The Price of Sex, revealed that many Greek System commentators have very little interest in the sexual assault issue besides their own. Harrison Lee especially displays no concern for sexual assault victims and repeatedly fails to stretch his mind in any non-self-serving way. He says, "Obviously sexual assaults do take place at fraternity houses," but he opposes, "throwing out screwed stats like 'sorority girls are two times more likely to be raped than non-sorority girls."
The petty contestation over relative probabilities versus total sexual assault numbers shows an unfortunate fact that fraternity men sometimes respond to the sexual assault conversation in defensive and non-productive ways. For example, Harrison Lee's first response to Nathaniel is:
… as though the exhaustion level of fraternity men is anywhere in the list of priorities at issue.
Harrison Lee seems quite defensive in his article, taking Nathaniel's investigation as a personal attack (like when he starts with saying, "We hear it everyday…'Fraternities are bad!' 'Frat guys rape more often than non-frat guys.'). This statement implies that the critique from Sexual Economics is about the fraternities' "bad apples." But it actually has little to do with specific individuals and everything to do with group-based factors like frat parties, zero-price alcohol to women, engineered sex ratios, and home turf advantage. These contribute to turning even good apples bad sometimes. For example, it would be less likely that Harrison Lee would believe in such tone-deaf apologetic arguments if he were not enjoying the benefits of being a fraternity member.
Many commenters to Harrison Lee's article criticized the research on the legitimate grounds that "correlation does not imply causation." Yet the statement alone is an incomplete rebuttal. The gap between correlation and causation is filled with confounding variables. Some example hypotheses would be:
1. "Top frats" recruit more "alpha" males who tend to be more sexually aggressive and thus get more creepiness reports.
2. "Top frats" tend to have more members so they have more money so they have more parties, which trigger more creepiness reports.
3. "Top frats" tend to have more members and therefore the probability that they admit a "bad apple" is higher.
4. "Top frats" tend to recruit less-educated males who tend to know less about the "dangers of sexual assault" which causes their members to commit more sexual assaults.
5. "Top frats" tend to have creepier-looking houses, which causes women to report them as more creepy.
6. For reasons that have nothing to do with frat size, parties, or sexual aggressiveness, women hold "Top frats" to a higher standard and therefore report them as creepy more often.
To me, #1, 2, & 3 seem like potentially reasonable conclusions and #4, 5, & 6 are statistical possibilities that show where "correlation not causation" could cause us to go wrong.
We can rule out #3 because the number of creepiness reports per fraternity member is also increasing significantly in status. This is what could be called a robustness check. Note especially that there are statistically significantly fewer "Never" reports per capita for all four indicators at the 99 percent significance level.
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So unless I've inadvertently convinced anyone of my fake hypotheses #4-6, we're left wondering whether more parties leads to more creepiness or more status means more alpha-ness means more creepiness.
Therefore, universities and Greek governors have a responsibility to manage either "Top frats'" sexual aggression or parties. Regardless, Sexual-Economic policies are in order. Unfortunately, because the university Interfraternity Council (IFC) did not maintain any data on fraternity parties, I could not determine conclusively whether #1 or #2 is a bigger contribution to sexual assault. When I performed a mail survey of fraternity treasurers, the research met similarly disappointing results.
Sexual Policy-Making
What should a reasonable, university or national-chapter level decision maker do with this information? My research makes it obvious for them to acknowledge the role that Greek houses play in both consensual hooking up and sexual assault. This highly evidenced position is a huge no-brainer. It is already taken for granted by Greek System members and the entire public. This shows that the reply to Nathaniel from USC's Dr. Carry regarding Greek-community scrutiny is an act of denial. Dr. Carry gave Nathaniel a completely fake response, saying:
My experience with Nathaniel on the Trojan Debate Squad makes me confident that he was smarter than to ask, "Is the Greek System the only community you need to dive into?" Confronting the obvious takes a back seat to defending established institutions.
I made the following recommendations in my paper:
1. Sororities should host their own parties.
2. The University and/or Greek System should actively monitor, compare, and adjust the ratio of men to women in the Greek System in light of the overall ratio within the University.
3. Universities should re-evaluate their influence over fraternities' ability to exclude non-member male students from parties.
4. Sororities could take steps to increase sex prices through supply restriction.
As Harrison Lee astutely pointed out, sororities do not have the incentive to allow their own parties because they would experience higher homeowner's insurance costs, direct damage to their houses, and various other liabilities inherent to college parties. But then how to explain the economic phenomenon of "free" fraternity parties for women? What calculation are men making to incur those costs? SEX.
Sadly for Greek students and non-Greek men all over the United States, the National Panhellenic Council sororities unanimously rejected sorority parties last year in response to Nathaniel's exposition of my research in The Price of Sex. And yet as though by the invisible hand Americans all over the country will be given a look at sorority parties in 2016's newest Zac Efron movie.
This demonstrates what economists call a principal-agent problem wherein an agent (institution) hired by the principal (individual) fails to reflect the interests of the principal in its decision-making.
Sorority parties would increase the price of sex by allowing women to be more selective over when and where they partied and whom they invited to their parties. Therefore sororities do not have women's sexual profit as their own objective.
At the institutional level, sororities are interested in getting members to keep the organization running, maintaining their capital for sustained rent income, and minimizing the impact of reputational damage from one year to the next. The same can be said of fraternities.
As further evidence, I analyzed articles on what Greeks can do to prevent sexual assault from Oracle: The Research Journal of the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors. The Journal hasn't published a single article related to sexual assault in 10 years! Most of the times I found the term "sexual assault" in the journal at all, an author was saying something like, 'The problem my paper will investigate is among the list of other bad things the Greek System is accused of like sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and hazing' (Fraternity As "Enabling Environment:" Does Membership Lead to Gambling Problems?, Fall 2008).
One notable exception is where a study looks into fraternity or sorority members views of negative stereotypes. This does nothing to prevent sexual assault but serves the organizations' interests as they take the temperature to evaluate the extent of bad PR. The research sterility is not surprising because the National Panhellenic Council asserts the right to prevent any unwanted research on sororities.
Harrison Lee, the USC administrators, and the national Greek chapter governors agree that my solutions are politically impossible and therefore, "Let's find some solutions that are actually realistic, like better educating sororities, and fraternities, on the dangers of sexual assault." I think I know what he meant, but it sounds like he's implying they don't already know sexual assault is dangerous.
In my opinion, Harrison Lee's suggestion is equivalent to doing nothing because he provides no criteria, analysis, or critical interpretation of what "education on the dangers of sexual assault" means. It's no different than how environmentalists try to solve global warming by "creating awareness" as though there's a ton of people who have just never heard of the thing before.
"Education," "awareness," and especially "reforming culture" are buzzwords designed to take heat off of responsible institutions, like universities, houses, and the national Greek System as a whole. It's easy to propose something that sounds nice without upsetting existing structures, like how fraternities use private property to manipulate in-kind sex prices downward.
The fake policies that Harrison Lee and the USC administration agree on are hopeless. The "awareness" or "education" approaches, which are routinely advocated by social justice warriors ("liberals"), are an excuse for achieving nothing because they attempt to "reform culture" without any theory that culture is subject to policy influence.
Discussion of "culture," whether it's "hookup culture" or "rape culture," is a reflection that there are no good options out there. Culture can be defined as "a way of life of a group of people" and by saying "we need to change such and such people's way of life" you don't explicitly lay out anything to be done. You merely assert that someone (typically someone other than oneself) has to change.
This has little hope for fostering collaboration between sexes, administrators, and the Greek and non-Greek student segments. Instead, I suggest we view culture as the result of repeated processes fostered within institutions.
By scrutinizing the Sexual Economics role of fraternities in this article and sororities in my original paper, I've demonstrated how social exchange, demographic transitions, and houses work together to lower the resource price that women receive in exchange for hooking up. In this way, it can be shown that there are numerous institutional factors contributing to specific cultural formations, like frat ragers and the concept of house topness. Yet, those institutional factors should be the ultimate focus of policy because culture is too intangible both theoretically and empirically.
So if we're going to be effective by looking at institutions instead of waiting for a change in "the prevailing culture," what can be done about political impossibility?
Economists face this dilemma frequently because we get called in to address all kinds of messed up situations, whether it's a financial system in free fall, a regulatory environment that makes no sense, or a cartel of sex demand like fraternities. W.H. Hutt proposed that economists get around this by writing in two ways; first setting down what would be done ideally, and second stating what might be achievable "realistically."
What is a policy maker to do if fraternities have perverse incentives to exploit in their parties (and I mean "exploit" in the technical sense meant by John Bates Clark in his contestation of Marx's "surplus value"), sororities refused to have their own parties, and they do little to balance the market structure in the first place (as I showed in the supply of sex model discussed in The Price of Sex at USC)? Based on economic theory, the existing literature, and significant empirical evidence, my judgment is that the second-best policies for reducing sexual assault are for universities to ban fraternity alcohol or parties (if possible to do so in proportion to a fraternity's "topness") or to ban the whole Greek System.
We should either improve the sexual market structure or go back to frats that have other uses besides boozing or just let them die. For example, back when John Maynard Keynes was in a frat, they were more like debate clubs. Furthermore, the two commonly cited benefits of Greek life, philanthropy and student leadership, are inadequate to justify its existence for three reasons:
1. No one is willing to trade more sexual assault for more philanthropy and student leadership.
2. The Greek System is not a unique source of philanthropy and leadership even if it effectively promoted them. In its absence students would allocate their involvement to the next best opportunity.
3. Harrison Lee and I agree that recruiting advantages stem from getting drunk and hooking up. Therefore philanthropy and leadership are not the primary purposes of the Greek System, no matter what websites or pamphlets say.
If the public and policy makers accept my conclusions in dual form, by creating a forced choice between reform and shutdown, both fraternities and sororities will have greater incentives to do the first-best reforms anyway.
The hard part about achieving significant reform is that universities are relatively disorganized at the national level, whereas Greek organizations are highly organized and have been for years. Until universities can take concerted action to curtail the wanton hedonism and debauchery in the Greek System (that is, sex at an artificially low resource price), the PHC and IFC will continue to drum up the disempowering discourse that "culture" needs to be addressed to reduce sexual assaults.
In the meantime, more Sexual Economics research, especially a national, multi-university study, as well as communication of the current status of research can convince more policy makers, more parents, more students, and more university and Greek System administrators that lip-service, "awareness," and "education," are buzzwords and not real Sexual-Economic reform.
Reach Contributor Sean Hernandez here.
You can read the whole "Cost of Sexual Assault at USC" here.
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