DC. I think the Marvel character you may be thinking of is BrownEye, but we don’t want to go into his superpowers.
Gym goers who give the stink eye? Guys with no sense of personal space? Let’s throw in a wheelchair bound guy doing pull ups and popping wheelies and make it into a gym themed reality show.
Fair enough. I know the issue is probably on my end, and I’m being annoyingly nit picky.
(But having stink eye powers AND spidey-sense would make you powerful indeed!)
Ha! This was actually the image that I had of him . ‘I’m being glared at by some woman all the time AND complained about when I try to be friendly? This gym sucks!’ (Disclaimer - not that I’m saying he’s not a creep, I really don’t know.)
Actually, “spidey sense” has entered the vocabulary of people who would never DREAM of reading a comic book/graphic novel. It’s sort of like a lot of science fiction memes that have entered the mundane vocabulary. The purist will insist on the strict definition, while everyone else is rolling their eyes. I’ve been reading science fiction for some decades now, and I have to clench my teeth and bite my tongue when I hear something like “mental telepathy” or light years used as a measure of time.
At any rate, while we’re talking about people having or not having rights, I declare that nobody else has a right to say what behavior I’m comfortable or not comfortable with. This means, if I think a behavior is creepy, then I think it’s creepy. This doesn’t mean that I get to point at someone and yell “CREEP!” at the top of my lungs, but it DOES mean that I can tell someone on the staff of an establishment that a certain person seems to be acting rather oddly.
The gym manager is unlikely to kick the guy out, or even talk to him about his behavior, based on ONE person’s complaint. The manager will probably keep an eye on him and decide for him/herself whether or not the guy is actually making other patrons uncomfortable. Mr. Bumpy is very unlikely to experience any inconvenience from his behavior, unless he is truly making others uncomfortable.
I’ve never read a single comic book in my entire life nor have I ever seen a Spiderman movie. I use the term because most people get what you mean, as it’s a popular allusion to make. Let me be clear: I in NO WAY think I have super powers. At all.
Probably involves a case of pinkeye.
This bumping business seems pretty bizarre to me and I’ve been to a lot of gyms. To me it sounds like more of a brush like when people pass a little too close on a busy sidewalk. There’s really no reason someone should be doing that to strangers in a gym. Even if it is crowded, have some fucking courtesy and let the other person pass first. If some sweaty asshole kept brushing or bumping into me I’d definitely call him on it and if it didn’t stop I’d report him. But if it was something I just witnessed, I’d probably let it go, unless I saw it happening a lot and then I’d ask one of the people he’s bumping what the hell’s up with him and based on what they say recommend that they report him. It’s definitely not normal gym behavior.
If cognitive biasses are going to be mentioned than its only fair to point out issues like the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility.
People often talk themselves out of reporting, and one way they do this is by overfocussing on the worst possible outcomes ie dichotomous thinking, or by talking themselves into viewing the scenario as being more benign than it was.
Theres also the unintended reinforcement of norms, ie if no reporting is made, then both the person being bothered and the person bothering can think that the behaviour in question is more acceptable than it is, because no-one is saying anything.
Which is why I tend to lean towards ‘if in doubt’ report, because in my view these issues are far more likely to be under rather than overreported for the reasons above. In my view many of them have been replicated in this thread.
Otara
Woven threads:
“Those of you who trust intuition to protect yourselves from harm: what is your opinion of those who employ positive visualization to obtain the things they want?”
“this Black guy was pestering much younger white women at the gym. Am I a racist for being concerned?”
“Anne Rule experts: when Ted Bundy wore a fake cast to abduct women at Lake Sammamish, did he also shoulder-bump males as part of his MO, or do serial killers pretty much just zero-in on the prey?”
“What is the penalty for pepper-spraying a guy who’s waiting behind me to use the newspaper machine (need answer fast).”
I see no point in further debating this. The thread has been hijacked beyond repair, it seems. This isn’t even a worthwhile debate anymore. People that believe that their instincts are flawless are continuing to not make sense.
Please, please, please, do show us where anyone, anywhere, in this thread, said or implied they felt their instincts are flawless.
As this question has been repeatedly addressed your username is exceedingly apt!
I also do not believe that ANYONE said that their instincts are flawless. They aren’t. But listening to instincts is usually a good idea. I know that if I don’t pay attention to my intuition, I’m usually sorry that I didn’t.
As much as I’m fed up with the hysteria about pedophilia, I’m going to agree here. The responsibility of the walmart employee is insignificant when compared with the responsibility of the authorities. He just reported something that he thought was suspicious (and he might have been told by the company employing him to report any dubious pictures, and not had mush choice in the matter anyway).
He probably thought that anyway, authorities would be able to assess properly the situation. They turned out to be unable to handle it properly, even though it was their job to do so, and wreaked havoc on the family. Their incompetence isn’t in anyway the employee’s fault.
These are social psychological processes rather than cognitive processes, but my real problem with bringing them up in this circumstance is that they pertain to decision-making processes when something wrong has happened. I know that you all keep saying that nobody here is asserting that spidey-senses are infallible, but you also keep presuming that something wrong has happened in the incident described in the OP. Here, Otara says that if no reporting is made, then both the person bothered and doing the bothering will think that the behavior was acceptable.
What happened here was that a man approached a woman and she rebuffed him, so he withdrew. In fact, that behavior is acceptable.
The typical example given when discussing diffusion of responsibility is the murder of Kitty Genovese, who was attacked and lay dying, calling out for help in earshot of an apartment building full of people. Surely, the matter at hand is not akin to the murder of Kitty Genovese, is it?
So, diffusion of responsibility is applicable to one end of the distribution of severity of incidents. At the other end of the spectrum is overinvolvement in things that are not your business. The clinical term for this is Kravitz’ Syndrome.
This never happened. In fact, several people called the police; their initial reports of a woman being “beat up” were ignored. After stabbing her initially, her attacker ran off, and Kitty walked under her own power the the back entrance of her building, where, out of sight or hearing, her attacker found her a second time and stabbed and raped her. Within a few minutes of that, the police were called again and arrived within minutes.
The Kitty Genovese murder and the social psychology of helping: the parable of the 38 witnesses. American Psychologist, 2007
This.
It’s an urban legend. Maybe intended to make people feel more guilty and to get them motivated to be involved? I don’t know. But just about everyone who was in that neighborhood got involved in some way or other (hanging out the windows and yelling at the guy, calling police, walking into the alley to look for whatever the disturbance was, etc). Yes, it was a tragedy that she died, but no one ignored her - they just didn’t get to her in time. There’s a big difference there.
Thanks for the corrective update!
Listening to instincts is like having a hypothesis without knowing anything about what it is your actually studying or what it is you are searching. It is a hunch without doing any legitimate background research.
For further clarification, listening to instincts is assuming and we are always supposed to avoid assumptions. Why? Assumptions are usually wrong because they aren’t backed up by anything. It’s a strong claim that is not supported by any evidence at all. Having a weird vibe about someone is an assumption. Individuals cannot go around reporting people because of bad vibes. They just can’t. When an individual reports someone, they want facts. If individuals go around reporting everyone that they have a weird vibe about, they are going to get a bad reputation and people will not want to associate with them. Why? Because, if they start thinking that people they are associating with are acting strange, they are going to think that they will report them and rightly so.
But the behavior is what sets off the “bad vibes”. The guy in the original thread was invading other people’s personal space in an odd manner, and was also not willing to quit talking to at least one woman/girl when she left the station she had just started working in. So, it’s not just looking at someone that sets off the vibes, for the most part, it’s the looks AND the behavior.
I have my own style of dress, too. I wear a decorated cowboy hat and I carry a walking stick. This doesn’t seem to set off most people’s spidey sense, though. Instead, I get people coming up to me and telling me what a cool hat and stick I have. I’ll smile and talk to strangers (yes, I know, that’s not the image I project on the SDMB), but I can also tell when someone doesn’t want to talk…or at least, doesn’t want to talk to ME.
And I think that if someone has reached his 30s, he should know that if he starts talking to someone, and she moves to another area, that means that she DOESN’T want him following her, and continuing to talk to her.
And he didn’t.