In this video, Dr. Marc Gafni addresses three reasons why false complaints against a powerful man are  so easy to make and so easy to have stick. One of the reasons we have come to call confirmation bias.

The first reason is a good reason: because powerful men often weren’t held accountable and they sexually harassed, and so now we’re holding powerful men accountable. That’s fantastic. That’s a good reason.

The second reason, Marc Gafni addresses is that “it’s no longer the powerful man and the powerless woman.”

Marc Gafni: "It’s actually the powerful man and the powerful woman who meet. Now, I’ve just pointed to one form of power, but actually in virtually all contemporary relationships of this nature, power is distributed in fascinating, interesting and important ways."

He then elaborates on the third reason, which is called confirmation bias.

“Confirmation bias means we have a bias to confirm what we think is already true, because we’ve heard about it a lot in culture.”

Marc Gafni continues:

“We’ve exposed in the last 25, 30 years a number of spiritual teachers who have actually been sexually harassing in significant ways. We’ve called them out on that in many important ways. The worst example was probably the Roman Catholic Church when it was worse than sexual harassment where we’re talking about abuse of four-year-olds and five-year-olds and six-year-olds and seven-year-old boys. It’s a tragedy. So we recoil correctly against that phenomenon. But then what happens is we’ve got natural confirmation bias, oh, spiritual teachers harass, spiritual teachers abuse, and that’s not necessarily true. That’s called a confirmation bias. So when a woman makes a complaint against a spiritual teacher who’s a man, there’s a confirmation basis, that is to say a tendency to believe it.

Now, that’s why we need fair process of information gathering. Fair process of information gathering says we don’t get misled or deceived by confirmation bias. We cultivate discernment. That’s not a minor issue. That’s the American way. That’s what human rights are about. That’s what the integrity of every human life is about. That’s what we stand for. That’s why we’re proud to be American. That’s why we’re proud to live in a democracy. It’s everything that our way of life is based on. So we need to stand for it and evolve the public culture around these critical issues.”

View more distinctions on Truth, Abuse & Malice in the Marc Gafni Story>>>