It’s doubly unfair in the context of an assignment. I wrote an incredibly gory horror story when I was in elementary school; I would probably have been sent to see the principle if it had happened today. It had nothing to do with me being a violent person and everything to do with me thinking that it was how one wrote an effective horror story.
More generally, deviant writing and fantasies tend to be way, way more common than you’d think (simply since people do a decent job of concealing them), so just because someone writes something unusual or has unusual fantasies, that does not strongly suggest that they actually engage in such behaviour.
As a simple example, people who run over hookers and take their money in Grand Theft Auto are probably much more likely to do so in real life than those who do not. However, the number of them who actually do so is so small that even this significant increase in probability is not very useful. Even if they are a hundred times as likely to do this, going from .0001% to .01% is not as big of an increase as, “They’re a hundred times more likely!” sounds.
It’s doubly unfair in the context of an assignment. I wrote an incredibly gory horror story when I was in elementary school; I would probably have been sent to see the principle if it had happened today. It had nothing to do with me being a violent person and everything to do with me thinking that it was how one wrote an effective horror story.
More generally, deviant writing and fantasies tend to be way, way more common than you’d think (simply since people do a decent job of concealing them), so just because someone writes something unusual or has unusual fantasies, that does not strongly suggest that they actually engage in such behaviour.
As a simple example, people who run over hookers and take their money in Grand Theft Auto are probably much more likely to do so in real life than those who do not. However, the number of them who actually do so is so small that even this significant increase in probability is not very useful. Even if they are a hundred times as likely to do this, going from .0001% to .01% is not as big of an increase as, “They’re a hundred times more likely!” sounds.