Morality Quiz

Instructions: Read the following story. Rank the characters within it according to most morally reprehensible to least morally reprehensible.

Eve lives in a village on one side of a river. Her boyfriend Joe lives on the other side. There is one bridge across. One day, the bridge gets washed out. Eve needs to get across the river, and doesn't know what to do. Bob is the only person in the village with a boat. So Eve goes to see Bob and asks him to give her a ride across the river to get to her boyfriend.

Bob says, "Sure, I'll get you across the river if you sleep with me."

Eve goes to see her friend Frank and tells him what happened.

Frank says, "I don't want to get involved."

So Eve goes back to Bob and sleeps with him. He gets her across the river. Eve is thrilled to see Joe and explains what happened and how she managed to get across the river.

Joe is disgusted and says, "I don't want to see you ever again, you slut."

Eve goes to see their mutual friend, Fred. She tells Fred the whole story. Fred goes and beats the shit out of Joe. When Eve finds out about Fred has done, she laughs.

What do you think?

This just made me laugh.

University Study of Homophobia
A study that appears to reveal a major cause of homophobia was completed at the University of Georgia in 1996. (1) It involved 64 white men, none of whom had engaged in homosexual acts during their lifetime. Their sexual fantasies involved only women. 35 of them were rated homophobic; 29 non-homophobic. For the purpose of this study, "homophobia" was defined as a negative emotional reaction (e.g., fear, anxiety, anger, discomfort) to homosexuality. It was measured by a questionnaire called the Index of Homophobia. Each was shown three types of X rated videotapes: heterosexual, lesbian and gay. A plethysmograph measuring device (affectionately called a "peter meter") measured the circumference of their penis as a gauge of sexual arousal.

The two groups exhibited similar arousal when they viewed 4 minute samples taken from one heterosexual and one lesbian movie. But they responded differently to the male homosexual clip:

Degree of Tumescence	Insignificant	Moderate	Definite
Homophobic men	20%	26%	54%
Non-homophobic men`	66%	10%	24%

The researchers concluded that these data are consistent with the belief that homophobic men have repressed homosexual desires. An alternate, but much less likely, explanation is that the homophobic men's erections were caused by anxiety during the experiment. [Entire article.]

Morality Quiz

Yesterday I posted a morality quiz which yielded interesting results. I did not write this little story. I was once involved in a workplace training that involved this story, and because I found it so interesting it stuck with me. I know I've left out a few details; I think originally it Eve and Joe were engaged, and I think the river was full of flesh-eating fish or something. But the general gist is the same, though I made up new names for them.

The exercise as I did it involved us all ranking the characters on our own and then getting into random groups and trying to come up with a compromise lis we all agreed on. Apparently my boss cringed when she saw the group I ended up in; it was the most stubborn, most argumentative and religiously diverse people she hired. I took one look at everyone's lists and said, "Nope, sorry. This isn't going to work. I'm not moving any of the names on my list."

The point of the exercise was to point out that everyone has their own reasons for believing as they do and we can't all agree. That we needed to just respect our differences.

Oddly we never did that particular form of training again in the following years. :)

( My answers. )