Hayek, Porn and Irrationality

Violent pornography is the latest target in New Labour's war on freedom. This seems another example of how New Labour responds to emotional bribery more than to  rationality.
The Daily Mail reports:

The proposals were welcomed by the family of 31-year-old Jane Longhurst who was murdered in 2003 by a male friend obsessed with violent sexual pornography. Her mother, Liz, from Reading, Berkshire, said: "Over the last 18 months I have worked hard to change the climate of public opinion through the Jane Longhurst Campaign by raising public awareness of the issue....[MP Martin Salter] said he "couldn't be more thrilled" with the news that 18 months of "hard work" was paying off. He said he was proud of Mrs Longhurst's courage and motivation, adding that she was motivated "by the desire to ensure that other patients did not experience her dreadful loss when her lovely daughter Jane was murdered by a sick, self-confessed addict of extreme internet porn".
"Now at last the loophole in the law caused by the creation of the internet will finally be closed when legislation is introduced, as I am sure it will be, to make it illegal to possess computer images which contravene the Obscene Publications Act," he continued.

It is grossly illogical - an example of the representativeness heuristic - to infer from this one terrible case that violent pornography causes violent sexual crime. To know the true link, we need to know how many viewers of such pornography did not commit crimes, and how many such criminals did not view such pornography. Such data are hard to get. As the Home Office itself says:

As to evidence of harm, conducting research in this area is complex. We do not yet have sufficient evidence from which to draw any definite conclusions as to the likely long-term impact of this kind of material on individuals generally, or on those who may be already predisposed to violent or aberrant sexual behaviour.

The representative heuristic is not the only cognitive bias underpinning the desire to ban violent porn. Another bias is our tendency to be over-confident about identifying beneficial effects of our actions, whilst under-estimating possible, but less foreseeable, costs. Hayek was clear that this bias was a cause of many infringements on our freedom. In Law Legislation and Liberty (Vol I, p56-57) he wrote:

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known....And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction.

An unnecessary disclaimer: Despite the abbreviation of this blog, I have no personal interest in violent porn. My tastes are plain vanilla.

Comments

[John East]

Do the sub-humans commit their sex crimes because they get roused by porn, does porn satisfy their needs to some extent thus reducing sex crime, or does porn have no overall effect at all, or to summarise is porn good, bad, or neutral?

No one knows because anthropologists and sociologists are far more interested in formulating PC theories than carrying out unbiased research to get at the truth. There is no shortage of strongly held belief, but a total absence of experimental knowledge.

The Home Office statement quoted above is pathetic. “We don’t have sufficient evidence……” Well, dingbats, why not commission some research, you’ve got more than enough of my taxes to pay for it.

Might I suggest a study to look at 4 variables, sex offenders who view and don’t view porn, and non-sex offenders who view and don’t view porn. The sex offenders would be the easiest to study because we have access to them prisons. Allow a certain number free access to porn and deny this to a control group. Then compare the re-offending rates of the two groups. A similar study could be done with two groups of volunteer “non-sex offenders.” Maybe half could be given a lifetime subscription to Playboy magazine, and the other half a lifetime subscription to Gardeners World.

Come on, Home Office, where’s my £million research grant?

[dsquared]

Something like this study has been done a couple of times and the uncomfortable conclusion was that it is not a good idea to give sex offenders pornography because it makes them much more difficult to treat. I seem to remember that they didn't quite follow through with your experiment because they regarded them as too dangerous to release at this time, but the fact remains that if you offer to donate a load of hardcore pornography to your local sex offenders' secure unit they will politely decline.

[dsquared]

btw, I am not sure that this is the correct interpretation of the statistics:

To know the true link, we need to know how many viewers of such pornography did not commit crimes, and how many such criminals did not view such pornography

If it turned out that pornography reliably had the effect of encouraging sex offenders to offend, but that the population of sex offenders was small relative to the total population, then you would get a negative result from this analysis whatever the facts. You might still conclude that the risk was small relative to the pleasure that non-sex-offenders got from pornography but that's a different decision problem - for example, you might take the route of banning pornography from secure units treating sex offenders, which is what is in fact done.

[Rob Read]

Surely "real" violent porn would be illegal because it is profitting from a crime?

or do we mean simulated violence porn?

[Knut Albert]

There is another key word her, in addition to porn:
Jane was murdered by a sick, self-confessed addict of extreme internet porn
The obvious thing to do is, like in China, to regulate the access to the internet alltogether. If it's not porn, it might be something else we don't like.

[Mukkinese]

The government will not commission research because they know what the result would be.
It would be the same as the last British government inquirey into whether porn causes crime (the Williams report 1979), which said 'there is no evidence to support that argument'.

Add 60 years of research and inquires and the only reports upholding the idea that porn causes crime have been shown to be biased and giving the result required of them.

Not even the FBI, reknowned for it's criminal profiling, can supply evidence that porn causes crime. Yet now 'policing porn' is one of it's highest priorities (under orders from the executive).

Looks like we are heading for the same waste of resources here in the U.K.

[Mukkinese]

In an International Investigative Psychology Conference held on December 12th 2005, Dr Stuart Kirby, Detective Chief Superintendent with Lancashire Police (who himself holds a PhD in Psychology), said "When you look at all the research that has been done nationally, the consensus is that there has not proven to be a link between the viewing of pornography and the committing of hands-on offences.”

[mikle]

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