For Socrates there are no bad people, only ignorant people. The criminal is just a poor fool.
Evil as ignorance already indicates a solution. If the problem is that certain people do not know, our task is to show them the truth, the good, to make them go from ignorance to knowledge.
(Our penitentiary centers follow this doctrine. We can see it in their official names: social rehabilitation centers. The offender is not bad, just someone who, for some reason, has deviated from the path, and now has to be re-adapted.)
Entering knowledge -according to the Socratic idea- implies teaching, conversation. Diva Dhar of the University of Oxford (and colleagues) investigated whether conversation can empower women.
Until now, research has focused on indirect methods: public policies to equalize opportunities between different genders, from legislative reforms and gender quotas to subsidies to encourage investment in women. The Dhar experiment tries to change the mentality of men and women directly.
14,000 Indian students from junior high school to junior high school participated in their experiment. They were randomly divided, and for two and a half years, the treatment group attended (every three weeks) a 45-minute session on gender equality.
Those in charge of the sessions showed some data and spoke explicitly in favor of gender equality, but the main objective was to motivate the students to discuss among themselves gender stereotypes, typical gender roles in the home, the education of women, women’s jobs and harassment. The idea of the experiment is simple: young people (men and women) are not born macho, they simply ignore a freer way of life. To solve it, Dhar proposed a fully Socratic practice: conversing. Talking as a method of transforming thought and society.
They conducted interviews to test participants’ ideas before and following the experiment. In the end, they analyzed the data: 16 percent of the young people who at the beginning of the experiment had clearly macho ideas now supported gender equality.
To see if the responses weren’t due to the students saying what the researchers wanted to hear, they repeated the experiment two years later. The results were maintained. The conversation managed to change more than 15 percent of retrograde mindsets.
There are two other relevant findings. They found that the change in mentality is practically the same between men and women, which suggests that it is just as important to combat macho ideas among men as it is among women. (It is not the black thread: we know that a woman can be sexist, but the Dhar study gives evidence with a considerable sample.)
The students were not only asked regarding their ideas, but regarding their daily behavior. It is useless for people to swear to love their neighbor if he insults the neighbor on a daily basis. Here there is a difference in results for men and women. In the short and medium term, men changed their behavior significantly more than women. Men reported doing more housework and putting more pressure on their older sisters to get into college. However, women did not say they motivated their sisters more to go to college, and said they did the same amount of chores.
A hasty idea is that the talks failed. If the goal was to change the preferences of the students to bring them closer to gender equality, and women continue to do the same amount of cleaning at home, then it seems that there was not much change. But this interpretation ignores the difference between willing and able.
The equitable distribution of tasks requires that all parties, in this case men and women, fulfill their task. In a macho society, power is held by men (I must say we do). If the woman wants to tell her sister to go to college, or she wants to stop doing laundry for her brother, but she knows there will be retaliation, she has the desire to act differently, but not the ability to do so . The man -because he holds the power- does not have to ask for permission to say what he wants.
The moral is that empowering women is not only a matter of educating them from a young age, but of changing their environment so that, once girls understand that they have the same rights as boys, they do not run into someone who prevent development. (The moral extends to any other gender.) You also have to educate men to empower women.
The road is long and the changes are slow. In high school kids, a 16 percent change took more than two years. In adults, the metamorphosis might last much longer (or never occur). However, the change did not take much, just one session a month, less than an hour. No exams, no scolding. To converse. Argue. Let’s bring it to the table at the next meal. Socrates, say the data, is right.]]>
