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[Max White]

I would hazard a guess that it relates to empathy.
Too little and your society falls apart, but too much and they become unwilling to attack the tribe next door and benefit as a result. The ideal level is where you care about people you know, but will demonize people in general... We are still hard wired for a time when communities worked on a local scale and you knew everybody that could benefit you, rather than the global mesh we have today where we depend on strangers that we will never meet to live our lives. Most people don't care about these strangers, but they should, it works better these days.

[Owlbread]

In the UK we are polarised in an unpleasant way - on one end you've got people demanding that we bring back the hangman's noose (honestly) and on the other you've got people who want to give prisoners the vote. Personally I am in favour of giving prisoners the vote because... well, you know. What happens when political prisoners end up in prison?

[lorb]

That last bit's actually a known phenomena in the field of sociology (and probably psych, too), though I forget exactly what it's called. Or if it has a particular name or something... probably, but eh.

I am a sociologist so I should know but I am not sure what you refer to. Maybe In-group favoritism ?

[SalmonGod]

Oh, justice.  You so crazy.

[Ogdibus]

.

[RedKing]

Oh, justice.  You so crazy.

"Ooh baby, I love it when you tamper with my evidence."

[Frumple]

Who doesn't love a little report falsification on the low-down? No one, that's who. Barring everyone worth a shit, anyway.

[Devling]

Don't know if this has been brought up but people bringing up crime rings rather hollow on statistics.
Which show that crime has been going steadily down.
For 20+ years.

[Reelya]

As far as the pornography => rape crimes link goes, i read that since ~1995 when the net was effectively launched for the general public, rape reports in the United States have dropped 44%, and it's also probable that the reporting rate for rape has actually improved in the last 20 years, so the true rape amounts are probably down by quite a bit more than the 44%

And that's all since pornography basically became universally free and accessible.

[Frumple]

Izzat counting the prison ones that were basically lied about for a while, too? From what I remember, while there has been gains in that area in the states, it's not nearly as large as people were crowing about for a while, because the rape statistics in relation to the penal system were being ignored/massively underreported.

[Sheb]

Also, there has been a general decrease in crime rate for some more or less unknown reason. If rape fell by less than other crime (I don't know if it did), maybe it's because while some unknown cause were bringing all the crimes down, porn gave a bump to rape.

[lorb]

While there is no proof that access to pornography can decrease rape metaanalyses have shown that most studies that tried to link consumption of pornography with a sex-violence-supportive attitude failed. So science can at least confidently say that pornography does not directly increase rapes.

[Sheb]

With p<0.05

[Reelya]

A single data point or study might have 95% confidence, but a meta-study would have much more certainty (much greater sample size)

Anyway, you have no more evidence linking rapes to porn than to eating burgers made of pink slime, for instance.

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/

The most reliable measure of violent crime is the homicide rate. Americans kill one another at a much higher rate – double, quadruple, or more – than do residents of comparable western European nations. This gap persists despite a roughly 40 percent drop in our homicide rate in the last 15 years or so.

Which would have the reported rape statistics decreasing as fast or faster than homicides in the same period. Again, i'd note that reporting rates for rape have most likely improved in the 20 years, whereas homicides are always fairly steadily reported (a missing person or dead body makes it clear something happened that needs to be investigated).

Anyway people have crunched the numbers, for each of the 50 states of the USA:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2006/10/how_the_web_prevents_rape.html

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that's a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It's hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

[alway]

A single data point or study might have 95% confidence, but a meta-study would have much more certainty (much greater sample size)

That's just not true. Publication bias features very heavily in any meta analysis of high-stakes research. It's something which comes up frequently in things like ESP meta-analysis. Journals don't want to waste everyone's time with 'and this month, 19 new studies found no evidence for ESP.' The 1 new study which does show evidence for ESP (95% confidence = 1 in 20 are false positives) is the one people want to read about/publish. And so if 99% of these false-positives are published while only 2% of the 'no data found' studies are published, you end up with meta-analyses stating things to the effect of 'using a random sample of 30 papers on ESP research, we aggregated the data from each paper and can now say with a very high confidence that ESP exists.'

For things like new, basic research, this is less of a problem because A: the topic is relatively unknown/new and B: finding no evidence may itself be a highly important event in a relatively obscure/unknown problem. But for things where there is a large body of research about which there is a certain expected conclusion, the publication bias will strongly favor certain outcomes.